The collaboration with Dai Fujikura
In the collaboration with Dai Fujikura, everything is characterized by the composer’s great curiosity to get to know the performer and his instruments very precisely and to develop the musical material of the work together. To this end, he records numerous videos during the rehearsal phases, allows the player to improvise a lot and is on the lookout from the outset for sounds that show instrument and player “in harmony”, i.e. that radiate a liveliness that has an immediate musical effect.
He tries to translate these “finds” into compositional material, which he then transmits directly to the musician with the request to record these “snippets” and send them back to him. This creates an immediate dialogue—the musical material is formed in direct contact between the composer and his performer. Dai is a master of encouragement and good humor and it is very important to him to “satisfy” and spur on his partner. The result is a musical material the soloist feels at ease despite the challenges.
Of course, this does not lead to “easy to play” pieces— rather, the dialogue process gives the performers more and more desire to playfully challenge themselves, which in turn produces interesting new material for the composer who attentively encourages this process.
The piece is essentially “tailored” to the performers. In this process, Dai Fujikura devotes himself with great dedication to his “favorite sounds” that he hears from the musicians’ playing, which he then develops into musical material: in other words, he writes the music that he would most like to hear in collaboration with this musician. In fact, he is very generous in his dedication to this collaborative work: he really wants to make his soloists “happy” with “their” piece and he really means it. Being seen and appreciated that way creates a bonding and a friendship: there is no musician who ever worked with him who does not love Dai: he brings out the best in you!
In the case of the recorder, this collaboration was also preceded by a shorter solo piece, Pérla, in which he had already intensively explored the recorder as a particularly differentiated instrument in relation to many ways of articulation. This principle of extensive articulation which is only possible in this variety on the recorder, is developed in the Recorder Concerto in an even much more differentiated and extensive way with the tenor, sopranino and basset recorder. The orchestra also adopts the principle of differentiated articulations and acts as an echo and sound space for the soloist’s actions. Through contrapuntal overlapping of the motifs, however, constantly new phrases and dialogues of the various principles are created: an actually calm melody by the soloist can “come back” as an answer with added articulatory elements such as tremolos from the orchestra. In the very first conversation about the piece, Dai Fujikura told me about the concept of data transfer where information is compressed by the sender and then “unpacked” by the receiver—and about the unexpected events that may arise if such a seemingly simple principle would have a small change or disturbance on any side in this ongoing process: from then on, many processes would unfold a completely unpredictable effect. For me, this is an apt image for the motifs that vary between quick and extended and wander back and forth between soloist and orchestra. Underlying everything, however, is a horizontal, wind-like movement that blows through the entire piece, as Fujikura writes in his very short program note, which leaves everything else up to the listener of this marvelous piece.
Jeremias Schwarzer (from booklet of his album "New Recorder Concertos")