Peter Ludwig: Dahin geträumt - 24 Nocturnes

Nocturne 1001 - Nocturne 1024

Prelistening:
Nocturne 1001
Nocturne 1005
Nocturne 1009

total time: 62:52

Peter Ludwig, Bechstein grand piano

Composer: Peter Ludwig

Recorded in September 2004
Recorded, mixed and edited by Peter Ludwig
Mastering: Thomas Bogenberger

Release Date: October 20th, 2005

For some time, the name of Peter Ludwig stands for outstanding interpretations and compositions in the field of Tango music. 3 previous CDs released by ORIENTE Musik (Trio Obscur: "éclairage intime", RIENCD32, and "Tango Metropol", RIENCD46; Tango Immortale: "Lisboa", RIENCD49) are the convincing proof.
Moreover, he gained a name for his work as a composer and arranger of stage and screen music. His new CD is probably his most private work and gives evidence of the relation between a great solo performer and his instrument.

More Informations (download + IT)

News sheet (pdf)

Cover (jpg)

Website Peter Ludwig

About "Dahin geträumt"("Dreamed along") and Improvisation from the Inside

Sometimes little fleeting moments give you the comforting feeling that what you previously thought was impossible now lies suddenly within your grasp. In the morning, after laying the little white oval table and pouring tea, I cross my legs and unintentionally but unavoidably my leg catches the table, causing the tea to slop out of the cups because the table's wobbly. Trying to adjust it now would only make matters worse. Then my wife usually says "Oh my husband!" and her voice is tender and resigned. But one day the table didn't wobble. In the course of the previous day's use its legs had managed to find by themselves the one single position that gave it stability. The ideal position in the context of all its possibilities.
For years now - or rather for decades - I have been sitting at my grand piano searching for this kind of moment in my music. In the beginning, when I was a kid, I used to face the piano as a composer wanting to discover, not as a pianist playing other people's compositions. Even then I had a pretty clear idea what my improvisations should sound like - only they always failed to measure up. This finally became apparent when I bought my first tape recorder with the money I had earned as a ship's boy on the river Rhein and began to record my improvisations. A perfect yet painful method of getting to know your own limitations.
Dahin geträumt was created after this fashion. Perhaps with the difference that I had decided in advance to accept my oh so familiar limitations: avoid flashy displays of virtuosity and long meanderings, and keep well away from those areas which I knew from experience I would need extraordinary luck to stride through without making mistakes. Another factor was the awareness of the capabilities of my old Bechstein grand. If it's out of tune I can record for documentary purposes only. If it's in tune it's rather like a bunch of meadow flowers. The pitch fades away tone by tone. So I tried to play as though I really wasn't "playing" at all. Perhaps a dressmaker has the same kind of feeling when he takes a bolt of velvet in his hands. He could make something with it but he still remains a dressmaker even when he's just feeling the quality of the fabric. In this manner the first intervals, the first series of notes, came about. Unintentionally. Note giving birth to note. Dahin geträumt - dreamed along. Surprising yet also familiar because this was the way I had experienced music as a child.
My parents were refugees and after the war they ended up in a huge manor house in Upper Bavaria. There in a kind of living room, called the "hall", stood two Steinway grand pianos draped in heavy cloths. This hall was strictly out of bounds. But from time to time my mother had to clean the enormous windows. So I was aware of the pianos even before I knew exactly what a piano was. I was six or seven when one day I crept into the room, reached under the cloth and opened the lid of one of these instruments revealing the keyboard. My first note, pianissimo. When the sound had died away I knew exactly what my vocation in life would be. My first piece of velvet. Much later I wrote: the difference between one note and no note is a thousand times greater than the difference between one note and a thousand notes.
Dahin geträumt came into being in September 2004 over a couple of nights. Twenty four nocturnes. When I played them through for the first time in their entirety, I had the impression that I was looking at a photograph of myself as someone asleep and lost in dreams, as somebody stripped of all possibility of showing himself in full consciousness. I experienced this music as more deeply personal than anything I had ever played or composed before. Yet at the same time it was also alien. If I had heard it somewhere else by chance, I would have thought that it stemmed from a region unknown to me. I would guess that this region is situated somewhere below my own skin. After all, it's the skin of my finger tips that creates the contact between me and the keys of the piano. But in Dahin geträumt it wasn't a command that caused the skin of the fingertips to touch the keys but rather a feeling of great tenderness. And that is the reason why the piano sounds as it does. If you listen closely, you realise that over the course of more or less a century each single chord of the instrument has developed its own distinctive personality. Some are brilliant, others muted or pert, worn, secretive or extrovert. Each has its own story to tell but collectively they make up the instrument. And such an instrument is no slave to be commandeered around but a partner - and a partner who knows my shortcomings better than I know his. It's no use trying to fool such an experienced instrument. You have to bond with it. And if you are prepared to bond with it, the new dimensions opened for you are truly fascinating.
For instance, when I'm playing and a melody doesn't sound as well rounded as I'd imagined it, this could be because - let's call the note 'E-flat' - I haven't struck it quite as forcibly as the notes preceding and following. Consequently a kind of acoustic clair de lune lies over the sound of this E-flat. A gift offered by the piano. The note might not sound exactly how I wanted it, but suddenly something unexpected is in the room. If I give myself over to E-flat, then this E-flat dictates the further course the music will flow in. Perhaps I will repeat the note out of sheer gratitude or keep returning to it over and over again. It can even become the base note for a totally new and unexpected turn of events. And when you consider that my piano has over eighty four individual notes and that each of these notes in the course of its long life has developed the most intimate relationship with the hammers that strike the chords - and when you also consider that all it takes is a slight pressure from the foot applied to the pedal to change the whole resonance in the room - then you get some idea of the endless universe of possibilities a piano holds within. So isn't it nonsense to think that you could create music at the piano without the piano itself? Or isn't it so that in the last instance it's the piano itself that creates the music? What is for sure is that if someone were to ask me what I had in mind before sitting down to play a free improvisation, I really couldn't give an answer. If there were a definite answer, then there would also be the possibility of repeating a free improvisation. And this is simply not possible, at least not for me. The hierarchical principle of the pianist in full command with the piano as his instrument can only function properly in the ear of the listener. According to my way of seeing things it's much more like an open conversation where one word follows the other. I'm comparing the word here as the embodiment of sense to the note, the sequence of notes which you can transcribe in the same way as you can write down words. But that's only one part of the truth. The other, far more decisive part, is the inflection, tone colour, dynamic, stress and gesture. Let's imagine that the performer is sitting in front of the piano and the music he's making is given sub-titles. We read the translated notes - "I was in town yesterday. And when I was crossing the bridge over the Inn, somebody spoke to me." We're a bit bewildered because we had imagined a great deal more was happening. So let's imagine the following: instead of subtitles we have an actor who performs this little story. He says "I was in town yesterday", then breaks off, narrows his eyes and whispers "And when I was crossing the bridge" - "somebody" - lowering his gaze - the delivery now comes in gasps and the audience is preparing for the worst, but it turns out quite different "spo-ke to ME!" This information is given with a gesture that we all immediately associate with the most steamy scene of seduction. So now we know the difference between notes and colour we can let the pianist play on and the actor continue with his performance. In this example the chopped delivery of " spo-ke to ME" is a chord that slowly derives itself from the cumulative effect of four notes. It stays put in the pedal. A tone that gradually loses its power but not its secret. A single note is enough to further raise the tension. Silence. Finally the pianist gradually releases the pedal, pauses, and: there are many possibilities. A powerful bass tone in fortissimo? A surprisingly quirky little waltz rattled off in quick time? The solemn tread of a funeral march? Or even nothing more, just an abrupt ending? It's all feasible but this isn't the time to think about feasibility, it's the time to play. Let's take a small boy playing with a new toy car for the first time on the carpet of the living room. He just pushes it around without thinking of the route it's taking. He imitates the sound of the engine, drives around or over obstacles, then suddenly gives the car a shove, releases it and watches where it goes. Wherever it comes to a stop, perhaps under the sofa, he continues his game. Has he thought all this out beforehand? No, he's playing but in equal measure the toy car is also playing with him, just as the room is and the sofa and the carpet. The boy is part of the unfolding event and needs the other ingredients in order to perform his play. In the same way the person improvising needs the piano, the room, the shade of light on the keyboard, the silence or the incidental noises of his surroundings - and his own mood in which he has sat himself before his instrument. If his mood is euphoric his first notes are sure to sound like "I was in town! I was in town!! I was in town!!! And, crossing the bridge, somebody met! met!! met!!! ME!!!!" If the performer is in the throes of a deep depression, on the other hand, the opening "I was" could be the prelude to bitter introspection. What is truly marvellous is that this tone, this very "I was", could prove the springboard projecting the pianist onto a completely new dimension and weaving, dreamed along, yet another new little design for living.

Peter Ludwig, 21.06.2005