Sonate

Item details

• Description +

  • Duration: 10 min.
    Performing artists: Otto Himmer (clarinet) & Karl Lewkovitch (flute)
    
    Gunnar Berg (1909-1989) was a unique figure in contemporary Danish music, even in the first decisive period of his professional life. In late 1948 he went to Paris to study at École Normale de Musique with Arthur Honegger, whose Sept pièces brèves for piano Berg had played at concerts in refugee camps in Denmark after the end of World War II. The studies with Honegger lasted one year only, but quite fast Berg gained access to the circle around Olivier Messiaen and thus became part of the international modernist environment in post-war Europe. 
    
    The encounter with new expressions and ways of musical thinking made Berg revise his earlier works, among these the three 1940s sonatas that had seen him taking on the classical formal structures. The Sonata for flute and clarinet, begun in 1942 and premiered 1945 in Copenhagen as Sonatine, found its final form in 1951 in Paris; the Sonata for piano (1945-1947), with which Berg had presented himself to Honegger, underwent small changes only, while the Sonata for solo violin from 1945 was tucked away until 1982, when it was revised and premiered in Switzerland. 
    
    The Sonata for flute and clarinet is one of most distinctive Danish compositions for winds in the first half of the 20th century after Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet (1922). Berg follows the classical sonata form with two lively outer movements and a quiet middle movement. The overall articulation and development are precise and structurally worked out to the smallest detail with clear thematic profiles and characteristic neoclassical features such as a concertante treatment of the instruments, asymmetrical periods, polyrhythms, changing metres, syncopes and irregular accents. Berg retains the thematic dualism of the sonata form, but repetitions are subject to shifts and displacements through constant changes of notes, phrase lengths and accentuation: repeating a figure in a constantly changing light is a prominent compositional principle with Berg.
    
    The publication has been subsidized by Sonningfonden

• Instrumentation +

  • Flute and Clarinet

• About the composer +

  • In 2009, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gunnar Berg (1909-1989) sparked a rediscovery and reassessment of the Danish composer as one of the most important Danish representatives of musical modernism on the international scene. More than 50 performances and events were held in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Ukraine, USA, China, France, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Berg’s music was played, discussed and written about to an extent never experienced by Berg, himself, in his lifetime. His drawings were also exhibited and his music was released both in print and on CD.
    
    Gunnar Berg was born in St. Gallen in Switzerland on 11 January 1909, the oldest of four siblings. From 1890 his Danish father Sigvard Berg worked on the railway construction in Switzerland, but he died of a heart attack in 1914, only 60 years old. Consequently Berg’s youth in Switzerland and in Denmark was difficult, marked as it was by illness and frequent moves, and without much contact with music. 
        In 1934 Berg graduated from a business school in Copenhagen, despite having been so  deeply affected by a 1931 performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Royal Theatre that he vowed to devote his life to music. In the summer of 1932 Berg bicycled from Copenhagen to Salzburg, and during the music festival he attended a course given by Austrian music critic Paul Stefan at the Mozarteum. The course opened doors for Berg; he attended rehearsals, concerts and other courses as well as experienced decisive first encounters with the music of composers such as Debussy, Schönberg and Stravinsky. Berg returned to Salzburg in 1935, where he was granted  access to rehearsals and concerts led by Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter, and where he attended the conductor course by Herbert von Karajan, with whom he had private meetings.
    
    Berg’s time in Salzburg was of landmark importance to his musical orientation, for thereafter he was positioned closer to the music culture of Europe rather than to one that embodied a Danish-Nordic aesthetic. His stays in Salzburg certainly contrasted with his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen in 1936 where his idea of establishing a study group for new music was met with blank refusal from the conservatory. He left at the end of the year, but  continued to study piano with the pianist and composer Herman D. Koppel until 1943. From 1944 on Berg studied with Elizabeth Jürgens, an unusually gifted piano teacher of Swedish birth  who had lived in Copenhagen for decades.
        During the German occupation, Berg actively took part in the rescue of Danish Jews - transporting them to Sweden - and in the Danish resistance movement. After the liberation he  was involved in music teaching projects at numerous refugee camps in Denmark and gave concerts featuring his own compositions, classics, and new music including works by Stravinsky, Satie and Honegger.
    
    Berg’s first works date from the mid-1930s; Zehn japanische Holzschnitte (Ten Japanese  Woodcuts) for voice and piano from 1938 is considered his first major work, and the three sonatas - for flute and clarinet (1942), for violin (1945) and for piano (1945-47) - with which  Berg in the 1940s finally left classical formal structures behind, are significant contributions to this genre within the neoclassical style.
        In January 1945 the autodidact composer debuted in Copenhagen, but Berg won no  recognition for his music so he began to prepare to go abroad, and in autumn 1948 he went to  Paris in order to study with Arthur Honegger at École normale. Berg quickly gained access to the  circle around Olivier Messiaen and thus became part of the international modernist environment  in post-war Europe. In 1950, at the invitation of Darius Milhaud, he attended the Salzburg  Seminar in American Studies, and in 1952 he married the French pianist Béatrice Duffour. They  spent their honeymoon at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where  Berg’s meeting with Karlheinz Stockhausen served to confirm the validity and contemporaneity  of Berg’s own musical experiments. The couple made a number of concert tours around Europe  featuring music of the leading composers of the time. In 1957 and 1958, funded by the French  Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they toured Germany and Scandinavia, and then settled in Denmark.  For a number of years thereafter the Berg couple embarked on a unique project with residences,  lectures and concerts at the Danish Folk High Schools. In 1965 they established their first own  home in the old school in Lindved, a very small village located between Horsens and Juelsminde  in Jutland. There they created an unusual cultural venue where the people of the region were  often invited to memorable concerts with contemporary and classical music. Béatrice Berg died  1976, and in 1979 Gunnar Berg returned to Europe and finally settled in Switzerland, where he  experienced a significant surge of interest in his music. Gunnar Berg died in Bern, Switzerland,  on 28 August 1989, and he and Béatrice Berg are both buried at the Rårup churchyard, close to  their home in Lindved.
    
    The 10-year stay in Paris proved crucial to Berg, and from 1950 he uncompromisingly, yet in his  very own fashion, remained faithful to the complex expressive mode of musical modernism within the theoretical and aesthetic framework of serialism, and, it should be noted, without  turning dogmatic.
    
    Only very rarely did Gunnar Berg add analytical or explanatory comments to his music: “My works must stand on their own feet, and they must answer for themselves,” he asserted. However, among his posthumous papers there is a wealth of slips of paper with columns of figures and letters, note names, volumes and durations, which provide us some insight into his composition workshop. They also confirm the limited number of analyses of Gunnar Berg’s works that have attempted to map out his working method. Berg’s point of departure was Olivier Messiaen’s division of the twelve chromatic notes of the tempered scale into groups, the so-called “modes with restricted transpositions,” but expanded to apply to all the parameters of the music. The result is a meticulously calculated structuring of durations, pitches, volumes and  instrumentation, which was a major theme in Darmstadt in 1952. Berg described his method as  “static”, and he spoke of ground rules where, by means of techniques such as mirroring, reversal  and transposition, he established a basic body of material to be ordered in his own, personal way. 
    
    Gunnar Berg came too late to his study of piano to attain a professional career as a pianist.  However, his experiences at the piano decisively influenced his compositional thinking as reflected in his piano compositions – from the numerous small educational pieces to the four virtuoso concertos for piano and symphony orchestra: Essai acoustique (1954), Pour piano et  orchestra (1959), Frise (1961) and Uculang (1967). The two major works for solo piano - Eclatements (1954-88) and Gaffky’s (1958-59) - both large compositions, are among the most  important contributions to Danish piano literature in the second half of the twentieth century.
        This is also the case with his contributions to Danish guitar literature after his meeting  with Maria Kämmerling in 1976 which resulted in Fresque I-IV (1978), Hyperion (1978) for guitar, soprano and 9 instruments, Melos (1979) for solo guitar and Ar-Goat (1984) for guitar-duo.

• Reviews +

  • Reviews from the magazin ”The Clarinet” September 2016

    Gunnar Berg, four Aspects and Three Movements for solo Clarinet (1958-61)

    Gunnar Berg, Sonata for Flute and Clarinet (1942/1951 final edition)
    
    

        These two works are a fascinating introduction to the world of this important Danish modernist composer. Berg (1909-1989) studied with Honegger and was part of an influential musical circle in Paris during the 1950s that included Messiaen and Varesé. While his influences were broad, including Webern and Stockhausen, he stayed faitful to the musical world of expressive modernism. Exploring these pieces reminded me of the nuanced sensitivity of Webern, although on a more expansive scale.

       The Sonata for Flute and Clarinet is a three-movement neoclassical work with fine detailing of gestures and a structure that is well balaced. Berg uses repetition to great effect with shifts and changes of phrase length and accentuation. The repetition of figures and the balance of various compositional features, including asymmetry, polyrhythms, changing meters and syncopation, show Berg to be an accomplished composer. This work would make an ideal companion piece to Elliott Carter’s duo for the same combination of instruments.

      Four Aspects and Three Movments for Solo Clarinet is in fact the common titlefor two separate versions, 1 and 2. Thetwo pieces use the same pattern of fourshort and slow ”aspects” between whichthere are three longer movements. Thereis much contrast here between the aspectsand the movements, with the former beingmore contemplative and the latter morerapsodic. These pieces would be a veryuseful entrée into the modernist aestheticfor graduate students and perhaps forecollege recital settings.

    - Paul Roe

• Credits +

  • Foreword: Jens Rossel
    Gunnar Berg: Photo by unknown photographer, app. 1935.
    Engraving: Johan Svitzer
    Front cover: Drawing by Gunnar Berg
    Front cover graphics and layout: Ronni Kot Wenzell
    Printed in Copenhagen, Denmark
    Copyright © Edition Svitzer
    Published in cooperation with Working Group Gunnar Berg www.gunnarberg.dk
    www.editionsvitzer.com

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