Intensity

In March 2019, Bernd Richard Deutsch made his first visit to Severance Music Center to attend the US premiere of his concerto for organ and orchestra, Okeanos, with eminent soloist Paul Jacobs. He had just embarked on his first season as The Cleveland Orchestra’s 10th Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow, following in the footsteps of now-internationally recognized composers, including Susan Botti, Anthony Cheung, Matthias Pintscher, and Jörg Widmann.

This performance came early in the fellowship, while the Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst familiarized themselves with Deutsch’s soundworld, a musical landscape that has been described as virtuosic, playful, and sometimes ironic. (The performance was captured on A New Century, the Orchestra’s inaugural release on its own recording label.)

Deutsch remembers the concert vividly: “I listened to the music with my eyes closed and experienced the sound very intensely and highly emotionalized. Strong color impressions set in, gold, purple, bright, radiant colors, various forms of light. I memorized these impressions well, and they surely influenced and inspired my music.”

The result was Intensity, written especially for The Cleveland Orchestra. Deutsch defines this title as “a quality or state of experience that I expect from life as well as from art in general.” This quality resonates within his music and can also be found in the way the Orchestra and Welser-Möst approach music-making. It also captures how the pandemic heightened feelings of separation as well as togetherness in the artistic process.

Born in 1977 outside of Vienna, Deutsch studied composition, piano, and bassoon at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts. Since graduating in 2001, he has received several prizes and accolades, including Vienna’s Ernst Krenek Prize (2002), an Austrian state scholarship twice (2010 and 2017), second prize in the 2011 Tōru Takemitsu Composition Competition, the Paul Hindemith Prize (2014), and Australia’s Paul Louwin Prize for composition (2015).

“We believe Mr. Deutsch will be a major figure,” said Franz Welser-Möst. “He’s in the tradition of the third Viennese school, which has a lighter touch to it, but he also has a real original, personal voice in his music.”

The initial sparks of Intensity came shortly before the premiere of Okeanos, when Deutsch attended The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2018 performances at the Musikverein in Vienna. The all-Beethoven program, part of that season’s Prometheus Project, made an impression on the composer.

Deutsch recalled, “I thought immediately I should include a short moment in my piece, in which only the string section plays. A few months later, I then composed such a passage in the third part of my piece.”

Intensity unfolds in three main sections, which Deutsch describes as “departure — introspection (absence) — return.” Having written most of the piece in a period of self-imposed isolation just prior to the lockdowns early in the pandemic, Deutsch finds even more emotional weight within the last section: “It seems almost prophetic [that] ... after an enforced ‘absence’ of such long dimensions, the ‘return’ becomes even more emphatic.”

— Amanda Angel

Amanda Angel was The Cleveland Orchestra’s Managing Editor of Content.

COMPOSER’S NOTE

Intensity has three parts and is built on three main themes and two basic chords. I borrowed the second basic chord as an objet trouvé from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (The Old Castle). The fast movements of the first part convey a sense of a fresh start/euphoric mood (the German word is “Aufbruchsstimmung”). The motivic core for the whole piece emerges from a trumpet signal in the first bars.

The middle section is a very quiet introspection — a listening to the sound and an inward intensity — in contrast to the outward intensity of the first and third parts.

After a transition, there is a return of the euphoric mood. Motives from the first part are processed playfully and freely. The piece ends with a renewed burst of energy.

— Bernd Richard Deutsch