Ruders: Viola Concerto & Handel Variations

Album review

‘I have a mantra’, says the Danish composer Poul Ruders: ‘To entertain, to enrich and to disturb’. But… Mischievousness, darkly-inflected playfulness, the Mephistophelean twinkle in the eye – are as much characteristics of the man as they are of his remarkable music. At any rate, this is a composer who does take a lively interest in how his music affects people. And there could be no finer example of how his music can entertain, enrich and, ultimately, disturb, than the Handel Variations, composed in 2009. The theme Ruders chose for his variations is the engagingly brief ‘Bourrée’ from Handel’s Water Music – the first eight bars of the Bourrée that Ruders then, as he puts it, ‘hauls through the wringer’. It was the realisation that this persistent and very simple ‘ear-worm’ could be the perfect basis for a set of variations that really set his mind working. The consequence is that Ruders is able to put Handel’s tiny theme through no less than 90 variations, transforming it into ever richer and stranger forms, without the listener feeling that Handel’s basic pattern has ever been entirely lost. Why 90 variations? Originally, Ruders wanted to compose 74, one for each year of Handel’s life, but the impetus just kept carrying him forward until, as he puts it, ‘the tube was squeezed absolutely flat.’ While it is clearly Handel’s theme that carries the music through to its conclusion, there is at the same time a kind of process of ‘erosion’ – of deconstruction and reconstruction – at work in Handel Variations.

This is the world – the aching, desolate sadness that underlies Mephistopheles’s wicked teasing and mockery – where the Viola Concerto (1993-4) makes its home. Yet paradoxically there is also a strange kind of peace present, or at least suggested, in this music. It is, Ruders wrote at the time, ‘a musical tribute to serenity and patience, rare qualities in a day and age, where the mind is never allowed to rest, being constantly bombarded by short-lived, flashy “zaps”; it is a piece devoted to the right and ability of music to stay aloof, maintaining its emotional integrity, detached from the tyranny of fashion and trend.’ His Concerto makes use of a technique he has developed to which he gave the title ‘minimorphosis’. Everything derives, he tells us, from the viola’s melodic line that opens the work, from which are evolved ‘independent, simultaneous layers employing the ancient virtues of augmentation and diminution (broadening or shortening of the rhythmic patterns)’. The listener can hear – or at the very least feel – this process at work right at the start. After the first performance at the BBC Proms Ruders decided that, for all its sustained logic, the Viola Concerto was simply too long. The Largo sonore section at the heart of the work was reduced in length, and the second solo cadenza was also cut, but listening to this recording with the new version, it would be hard to guess where the surgeon’s scalpel had been utilised. © SM/Qobuz