Guitar SKU: FG.55011-071-7
Hommage to Paul Klee. Composed by Kai Nieminen. Fennica Gehrman #55011-071-7. Published by Fennica Gehrman (FG.55011-071-7). ISBN 9790550110717.
Completed in Karstula, Finland during late July 2010, this carefully structured, but also free-ranging work is drawn from ideas for a much earlier work in four movements, Fantasy dating from the 1980s.
Kai Nieminen has been for a long time an admirer of the work of artist Paul Klee (1879-1940), and the solo presented in its final form here is influenced by the painting Dances caused by Fear or as it is often refered to Dancing from Fear painted towards the end of Klee's life in Bern, 1938.
Having left Germany for Switzerland in December 1933, Klee's later works were often full of signs and lines, very often represented in black, depicting human figures or various objects against a variety of coloured backgrounds, in the case of this painting of a brownish hue. This development in his painting style and technique is felt by some to be an effect perhaps of his long-term illness, systemic sclerosis, but in the case of Dances caused by Fear there is suggested an atmosphere of panic and terror, an attempt to escape from horrors to come (World War II), represented in the violent movement of the arms and legs of the figures, and the dark, indeed brooding nature of the colours.
In Kai Nieminen's guitar work Images of Fear, there is only a very brief passage of calm at the very beginning, after which come three main connected sections in which a wide range of musically unsettling ideas emerge one by one, making use of the tritone, minor seconds, glissandos, tamboura, campanella, etc. The third and final section incorporates the grouping of 5 sixteenth-notes, to give an uneasy feeling to the music, with a short haunting and pleading five-note phrase (Cantando) heard immediately following this passage, before the work ends with further glissandos, and distant and diminishing harmonics.
As with Kai Nieminen's other guitar works, the use of 'orchestral colour' is vital to the performance, and passages suggestive of for example brass, strings, woodwind, etc., should be taken into account and played with suitably considered contrast of tone.
John Mills.
