Otto Ketting - De provincie

Otto Ketting (1935-2012)

De provincie : muziek uit de film van Jan Bosdriesz, voor hobo, hoorn, piano en klein strijkorkest (1991)

Gerard Bouwhuis, piano
and members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra
Conductor: Otto Ketting


Otto Ketting was a Dutch composer. He studied the trumpet at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and then received lessons in composition from his father, Piet Ketting. In 1954 he became a trumpeter with the Hague Resedentie-Orkest, but in 1961 he abandoned his post to study composition with Hartmann in Munich. Afterwards he devoted himself largely to composing, becoming a lecturer in composition at both the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Royal Conservatory. Ketting has also been active as a conductor, chiefly of 20th-century music. His works have received numerous awards, including Due canzoni (Gaudeamus Prize, 1958), Time Machine (Kees van Baaren Prize, 1973), the Symphonie voor saxofoons en orkest (Matthijs Vermeulen Prize, 1979) and the Symphony no.3 (Barlow Prize, 1992). In addition, the Amsterdam Muziektheater was officially opened in 1986 with the première of Ketting's opera Ithaka.
In the early, sober and introverted Due canzoni (1957) and the exuberant First Symphony (1957--9), the influences of Webern and Berg (both at the time still rarely heard in the Netherlands) are skillfully moulded to Ketting's own ends. Notable is the tension between horizontal and vertical aspects, between serialism and unambiguous tonal points of emphasis. This co-existence of atonality and tonality has remained a characteristic, particularly in Time Machine (1972), the Symphonie voor saxofoons en orkest (1977--8), which contains references to Time Machine, and the Third Symphony (1990).
Ketting's style is a unique blend of Bergian expressiveness and Stravinskian objectivity, which the Symphonie voor saxofoons en orkest, in particular, shows need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed Ketting has in common with both these models a modernist aesthetic, which never allows for a simple tonality or neo-Romanticism. The tightly motoric yet lyrical Symphonie refers to other specific sources -- jazz and minimalism, while the Third Symphony points to Mahler, Stravinsky again and Reich. However these remain at the level of allusions, never quotations, and are firmly embedded in the syntax. The Symphonie voor saxofoons en orckest also shows, like the earlier For moonlight nights for flute and 26 players (1973), a 19th-century virtuoso concertante style replaced by a considered exploration of the functioning of an individual or small group in relation to a larger body. Aside from this clearly politically inspired background, the result is one both able to surprise and to move. Ketting displays a more subdued, delicate side in the song cycle The Light of the Sun for soprano and orchestra (1978, rev. 1983) and above all in Summer Moon for soprano and small orchestra (1992).
The distinctiveness of Ketting's musical language comes across no less markedly in his many film scores. While reinforcing the screen image, the music possesses such suggestiveness that it can happily stand alone. Conversely the composer's 'abstract' concert music powerfully provokes figurative associations, not least in the four-part work comprising De overtocht ('The Passage') (1992), Het oponthoud ('The Delay') (1993), De aankomst ('The Arrival') (1993) and Kom, over de zeeën ('Come, Over the Seas') (1994), the last of which was commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Each piece represents one part of a four-stage journey, full of subtle references to each other within changing contexts. A parallel to such a process may be made with film editing in which a visual vocabulary is developed through shuffling and recombination.