Light over shadow
This duo for two flutes by Michael Schneider spreads a hopeful mood with modern playing techniques.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Pan-Verlag published the composition Light over shadow for two flutes by the composer Michael Schneider (*1964). Schneider, whose work ranges from chamber music and vocal music to orchestral works, received important inspiration from János Tamás during his time at grammar school and then studied composition with Dimitri Terzakis in Bern.
Light over shadow was composed as early as 1993 in a master class by Edisson Denissow during the International Music Festival in Lucerne, where it was premiered by Kathrin Rengger and Katja Marty in the same year. The composer dedicated the duo to Elfriede Frank, the second wife of Anne Frank's father, who herself survived the Holocaust but lost her husband and three children. In the foreword, he describes her as a vital and open-minded woman whose life was overshadowed by the loss of these family members. A poem by the poet Ossip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who was persecuted under Stalin, entitled Into the distance is the motto of the play. Powerlessness and violence on the one hand are juxtaposed with hope, humanity and the power of poetry on the other.
In this duo, the composer impressively describes moods inspired by the fate of persecuted people with soft, airy, fragile tones. The piece begins darkly and mysteriously in the low register, but becomes increasingly brighter as it progresses through the expansion and shifting of the range into the second and third octaves of the flutes, which illuminate each other in the interplay, but still moves dynamically in the quiet range between pp and mf. The dialogue between the two flutes becomes increasingly colorful, first through a harmonics melody in both voices, which often alternate in the upper voice, and then through simultaneous multiphonics in both voices, which sound almost like spherical sounds, even if the piece always returns to the lower register. The end of the duet is freely arranged with whistle sounds and is reminiscent of a whispering of voices. Light over shadow is thought-provoking and an impressive dialog in which hopeful light is cast over shadows by the timbres of the flutes.
Michael Schneider, Licht über Schatten, for two flutes, PAN 360, € 9.00, Pan, Basel/Kassel 2015
