GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
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About 'Anyente'
from 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII) for solo viola (2019-2024) My solo viola piece Anyente, originally conceived for the 2020 Bonn Beethoven Festival upon violist Tabea Zimmermann's request, was initially intended as a short response to that year's Beethoven celebrations, and in particular as a little essay upon the composer's deafness and loneliness in his later years. After the contemporary part of that festival was cancelled due to the outbreak of COVID, I put the piece away and only picked it up again to take it on a trip to the Australian Outback in 2021. On that great journey, I was yet again overwhelmed by the country's silence and radiant night skies, and my viola piece moved beyond its original Beethoven references to become more generally a meditation on our human fragility and loneliness (Anyente is a word from one of the languages of the people of Eastern Arrernte and means one or alone.) Rhythmically, Anyente became something of a trial run for my new violin concerto, which I was also working on at the same time. Anyente is above all a continuation of my viola and orchestra piece Monh, also written for Tabea, and it literally picks up where Monh left off. A glittering night sky is pierced again and again by deep blackness, as if all matter was sucked out of the music. This ethereal music then progressively turns into its obsessive rhythmical opposite, a hammering of fortissimo chords, before the staccato music is eventually counterbalanced by a long and lonely cantabile line full of sadness. The work struggles to find a reconciliation between these sharply opposing characters, with the music ultimately being taken over by its almost brutal rhythmic drive before suddenly crashing into the depths, then disappearing progressively into nothing (a niente!) - further highlighting the irreconcilability of the work's elements and its ultimate sense of resignation, solitude and isolation. The premiere of the final version was given by Tabea Zimmermann at Pierre-Boulez-Saal in Berlin on December 1, 2024.
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