Four Pieces For Orchestra was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 2000-2003. Programme note: In 1983 Hans Abrahamsen wrote the first seven of his Ten Studies for Piano. In the early eighties most composers who wrote for the piano were still making strenuous efforts to distance themselves from the instrument s romantic past for example treating it as a percussion instrument rather than exploiting its expressive singing potential. The piano s modern identity as a mechanical rational emotionally cool instrument is reflected in Abrahamsen s studies 5 7; but in the first four studies Abrahamsen allows the piano to recollect its past: especially what the composer calls the golden German romantic time full of expression night timelessness dream and the irrational . Accordingly these first four studies were given German one might specifically say Schumanesque - titles: Traumlied ( Dreamsong ) Sturm ( Storm ) Arabeske ( Arabesque ) and Ende ( End ). While Abrahamsen was in no way dissatisfied with the first four Studies as piano music he soon felt the urge to expand them in both time and space. In their new identity as Four Pieces for Orchestra created between 2000-2003 the original studies nearly doubled in length while the forces required expanded from one soloist to an orchestra of Mahlerian/Straussian dimensions including instruments beloved by the late-romantics: Wagner tubas bass trumpet guitar mandolin and the hammer used so memorably in Mahler s Sixth Symphony and Alban Berg s Three Pieces for Orchestra. The results are not so much arrangements of the four piano studies more recompositions. A helpful comparison might be made with certain painters: Cézanne portraying the same mountain from different angles; or Monet obsessively returning to Rouen Cathedral in different lights and weather conditions. Abrahamsen himself remembers an important visit to the Munch Museum in Oslo where he saw how Munch painted the same subject
