Busy ... doing what?

It's been a busy month so far! Am trying to recapitulate what has happened since the Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award. ............................................................................................................................................... Immediately after the competition finished I at last managed to work with Willy Haryadi, my sound engineer, in editing & mixing my orchestral work ERSTWHILE. It was the first recording of my orchestra, the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, and I must say it doesn't sound bad. The orchestra consists of young but very enthusiastic and technically accomplished musicians. The recording is still now in a studio for its mastering process. ................................................................................................................................................ We also did an audition, through youtube, for violinists who I'd like to be the soloist for the premiere of my Violin Concerto. The winner is a very talented 17-year-old Amadeus Giovani Biga ; he played my solo violin piece Relationships which is a set of variations, done for a violin with scordatura on the G-string. Check his playing here, and I am sure you'd be as impressed as I was. I guess, with his age, he has experienced some kind of complicated relationships that inspired him to understand this piece :) . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QlfNte4TC8 . He will perform my Violin Concerto with myself conducting on October 28th this year, and I am working hard in finishing it. ................................................................................................................................................ Wait, wait ... working hard in finishing it? Yes, but I am sort of stuck. Instead, I have been writing some "occasional" pieces, hoping that some of those pieces would trigger me to come back to the violin concerto. Apart from finishing & revising all my chamber works for strings to be published next week (it's in printing process at the moment), I wrote very quickly several pieces for piano. That's how funny life is: I am always inspired to write pieces which are NOT obligatory (read: commissioned, or paid). Money apparently doesn't inspire me, the lack of it does! Two of those short piano pieces are based on initials, one is "Randy Ryan" of which you can read in my previous entry, and the other is called, funny enough, Not a fugue, No, but they still complete each other. The title is a response to the emails that pianist Henoch Kristianto and me interchanged. He is busy recording 6 of my Rapsodia Nusantaras at the moment (I will tell you which ones they are when the CD is about to be published, hopefully in September or before), and he is recording my shorter piano pieces (all from Alicia's Piano Books) to fill up the CD too. I told him that I should one day write a piece on H-E-N-O-C-H , but for now he is the dedicatee of my longest and most complex piece for piano (Rapsodia Nusantara no. 4). He answered "Tune on my name? Well, better make it a fugue if you ever want to do it someday. I am having a lot of fun with some you've made." I wanna take a break from writing fugues that bore the listeners to death, and since we are doing groupings of some pieces which can be grouped together in Alicia's Piano Books, I had the idea of writing him a piece that can fit in all those groupings. Therefore, this piece can be included in the cycle "Friends", "Sunsets" ot "Love Songs". It can even be a lullaby, considering the repetitive figures made by his wife Yenny's name. Yeah, the piece is built on 2 motifs, on Henoch's and Yenny's initials. There is a photograph at Henoch's facebook, where he and Yenny were sitting in a beach (I think it was somewhere in Australia) and the colours of the sky and the sea (which are amazingly quite similar, a kind of greyish blue) triggered a sound of a chord which appears persistently throughout the piece, which is built on the interval of 4ths and their inversions and transformations. I remember feeling that colour too in England during the summertime, which made me feel like having a deja vu when I wrote the piece. ................................................................................................................................................ Back to the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, the Indonesia Opera Society commissioned me to write a short piece for piano & orchestra based on themes from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and Tannhauser. I decided to call it Wagner's Restless Nights and it is going to be premiered in his annual Opera Gala, sponsored by CIMB Niaga Bank, in September this year, by the fabulous French pianist Frédéric D'Oria- Nicolas, and I will conduct it with my orchestra. So, in fact I am working on 2 works at this moment: the Violin Concerto and this kind of short piano concerto. Wagner's Restless Nights is going very well, I just love doing fantasies and throwing somebody else's themes into a whirlwind, as I have been doing with my Rapsodia Nusantaras which has numbered 11 for now. It's the Violin Concerto which is stuck. But hey, I am a Gemini, and we Geminis like to have everything in pairs. And sometimes those pairs don't resemble each other at all, one is nice and tamed, while the other can be a problematic rebel!

It ain't that easy ....

Am deeply immersed in the writing of my first (hopefully not the last) opera, Why did you kidnap our son ? . As this will be the first opera ever that uses "real" Indonesian language (not a poetic one), I am having trouble in some parts of it, especially the recitatives. I have no models to follow! (by the way, no complains to the script writer whose work I heavily edited -- not changed! -- , Seno Gumira Ajidarma ; he wrote a fantastic script !)
I've been watching a lot of operas by Mozart, Wagner, Britten and Bellini lately (oh, and Shosty's fantastic Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Enjoyed it sooo much but I don't know if it helps, since I don't understand any Russian. What one should be aware while composing is that the music should be communicative enough to people who do not understand the language of the vocal parts.) to see how they solve the problem of doing their dialogues. It's such a difficult language, Indonesian. I mean, I have written more than 50 songs based on Indonesian poems, but again, it's totally different from doing recitatives. An opera is not just a series of arias. Ohh... Being the first to do one thing is always a problem !

The arias are quite ok, the ensemble part is quite enjoyable to do (especially with Chendra's collaboration for the choreography ; basically all the movements, characteristics and durations came from him, so I am having an easy job on this), they don't pose many problems ... but uugh, those recitatives ! In Indonesian ! Can you imagine ? What shall I do with this bloody language ??? HEEELLLP !!! Aaarrrghh !!!

Another thing is that there is much violence in this opera, that somehow my "dark side" has surfaced ... and made me rather worried . I think this opera will be rated PG .... and all this after writing my new song-cycle "Love and Variations", and my sweetest, delicious, loveable cantata Ars Amatoria that includes a children choir !