After his Violin and Piano Concertos Dieter Ammann has turned his attention to the viola and its soloistic possibilities. Two things are striking: undisguised tonality and political influences.

With some breaks, Dieter Ammann has been working for four years on a new concerto. After the Violin Concerto “unbalanced instability” (2012/13) and the Piano Concerto “Gran Toccata” (2016–19) Ammann has devoted himself to a commission for viola from the Sinfonieorchester Basel, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival, Tongyeong Music Festival and Esprit Orchestra Toronto. It is the deep tessitura of the instrument’s lowest string which attracted him, “because this has the range which I didn’t have in my Violin Concerto, and I love hearing the viola at the bottom of its range”. The concerto begins with an ironic examination of the genre: the instrument is intended to “imitate the process of tuning up”, according to the performance instructions in the first bar of the solo part. First of all the open C string is heard, but a minor second too high, followed by a fifth. Finally, after a diminished fifth, two further perfect fifths are heard above this. It is not only the two lowest strings of the instrument which appear to be “out of tune”, but the instrument also has an additional “imaginary” fifth string. But this “joke” at the beginning is the only jolly thing about the work. What starts out as fun soon becomes serious, and a “struggle” between solo instrument and orchestra begins: “The viola has to make its voice heard as an individual pitted against the tutti” (Ammann). The confrontation of the individual and the collective, the different degrees of “convergence and divergence” are themes explored by the composer in all his concertante works.

After the opening, with its frequent pauses, events intensify and the music reaches a high level of density. The fifth at the beginning is now the structurally important interval; it appears both melodically in the horizontal, but also harmonically in the vertical – here certainly ‘tonal’. In his quest for beauty, in this work the composer completes a further step towards undisguised tonality. “Undisguised, but not unthinking”, as Ammann explains, “for these zones of tonality are exposed on the one hand to various states of (in)stability and in addition, are confronted by completely different tonal atmospheres”.
Dieter Ammann is a highly political human being. The “change of order”, perceived and taking place on various levels, leads to the fact that “in its process of taking shape” his music will “also be contaminated by external events beyond itself”. The sound becomes the story, without this necessarily being understood through hearing, for his music is “not the means, but the purpose. The sound is not a vehicle for any kind of information transfer. It IS the information. It does not speak of itself, but from itself, indeed ‘for itself’ in the literal sense of the word.” Furthermore, for the first time there is the processing of a personal loss, the death of a close friend and colleague, reflected in sound textures. This “lament abounding in quotes” (Ammann) is largely left to the solo instrument.

It was in fact the Piano Concerto which was to be entitled “no templates”, which primarily meant “an openness of thought in the approach to this genre”, but also “an openness in relation to the variety of means used”. Now Ammann has given this title to his Viola Concerto. His music, says the composer, “combines a great variety of different textures”. In the course of a piece, everything can happen at any point in time. The sole constant is the continuous transformation “from a flowing transition to the point of rupture”. Thus the music finds itself in constant communication outwards, but at the same time also inwards, by examining itself, and from time to time even questioning itself.” The result, in this concerto too, is always exciting music “dramaturgically strongly portrayed in detail”, but above all a music which speaks, which communicates with and carries the audience.     

Robert Krampe
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)