Roger Woodward’s remarkable recording of Hans Otte’s Stundenbuch
(Book of Hours) has already received a review
on MusicWeb International, but is most certainly deserving of
another look – I wasn’t expecting to like it that much, but
was converted within minutes of proper listening.
Consisting of 48 pieces, none of which are longer than three
minutes and many under one, you might be forgiven for expecting
something rather fragmented, possibly even rather aphoristic
and awkward. Yes, each individual piece is brief, but the musical
landscapes they conjure are vast and deep. Like all powerful
works of art, the Stundenbuch can be taken in many layers.
There is the human scale, the short divisions in the work: each
section being at once both a manageable handful of notes and
an elusive riddle on which to ponder as a parcel of timeless
rumination. Then there is the span of the work as a whole, or
as four ‘movements’ of 12 pieces each: 12 being a massively
more useful and proportionately more satisfactory number than
your Napoleonic 10, as we all know. I wouldn’t want to labour
the numerological point, but listen to the timeless suspended
almost-resolutions of the central No.24 and you can’t help imagining
Otte seeing this as a kind of axis around which the other “time-suspended
galaxies” can revolve.
Hans Otte was based in Bremen as pianist, composer and radio
programmer, and the Radio Bremen synergy seems to close a kind
of charmed circle for this CD. Taught and supported by pianist
Bronislaw von Pozniak, and subsequently by Paul Hindemith and
organist Fernando Germani, Otte’s own relative reticence in
promoting his own work seems to be in an inverse proportion
to the energy he put into broadcasting music by his contemporaries.
In this way he left his mark on music for a substantial part
of the 20th century, and hearing the music on this
recording I now regret missing the opportunity to hear him performing
his own pieces in Europe.
This is ‘modern’ music, but should hold no fears for anyone
with an open mind and good musical taste. Otte’s philosophy
is embraced by his respect for tradition, and the instrument
for which this music has been written: “There can be no better
challenge for any composer than writing for [the piano, an instrument]
which has been so closely involved in developing the new musical
languages of this century.” Imagine Debussy’s Des pas sur
la neige, its atmosphere preserved but its intervals expanded
and, for brief moments, its dynamics and tonalities widened
to explore the reaches Bartók explored in his Mikrokosmos,
and you might have some idea about the kind of music you will
find on this rather marvelous CD. One can sense Roger Woodward’s
empathy with the creative mind behind this work, and with a
warmly resonant recording on a luminous sounding Bösendorfer
there is nothing to leave any piano fan wanting. For an expression
of poetry in music, this is hard to beat.
Dominy Clements
see also review
by Jonathan Woolf
Roger Woodward (piano) 
