Turkish Music for Viola
Ayça Öztarhan Kocatürk (b. 1976)
Bir Damla Yasemin (c.2010)
Betin Günes (b. 1957)
Beste (2016-17)
Camogli (1990)
Ekrem Zeki Ün (1910-1987)
Sözsüz Türkü (1980)
Yunus'un Mezarinda (1933)
Melissa Uzunarslan (b. 1985)
Sonata in Four Movements (c.2013)
Yalçın Tura (b. 1934)
Viola Sonata (2000)
Kaptanzâde Ali Reza Bey (1881-1934)
Efem (arr. Attila Tiknaz)
Beste Tiknaz Modiri (viola)
Andrés Añazco (piano)
rec. 2017, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
MUSICAL CONCEPTS MC3108 [57]
The Turkish violist Beste Tiknaz Modiri and the Ecuadorian pianist Andrés Añāzco are accomplished and experienced musicians.
Modiri was born in Istanbul, where she is now a professor at the Istanbul State Conservatory – the institution where she began her advanced musical studies, before going on to study with Professor Johannes Meissl at MDW Vienna and with Leonard Matczynski at the Boston Conservatory. She has been the recipient of several international prizes, including a Gold Medal at the ICMEC competition. She is currently principal violist of the Philharmonische Kammerorchester Berlin, but is also busy as a soloist. She has given concerts at numerous famous venues, such as the Salzburg Festival, Carnegie Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Andrés Añazco won – at the age of twelve - first prize at the 1st International Piano Competition in Cuidad de Huesca. As a soloist or as pianist in the Acros Trio, he has performed at many prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall and the Musikverein in Vienna. Like Modiri he studied with Professor Johannes Meissl at MDW Vienna – so that is perhaps where the two met and began to work together.
As its subtitle suggests, the programme played on this disc includes music not originally written for viola and piano, such as Ekrem Zeki Ün’s Sözsüz Türkü (Song Without Words) composed for cello and piano and Yunus’un Mezarunda (At the Tomb of Yunus) written for flute and piano, Melisa Uzarnaslan’s Sonata in Four Movements originally written for violin and piano and Efem, an arrangement of a Turkish folk song.
The two senior composers represented on thus disc are the late Ekrem Zeki Ün (1910-1987) and Yalçin Tura (born 1934). Ün was a major figure in Turkish music for several decades. He was born into a musical family – his father, Osman Zeki Üngör (1880-1956), was a virtuoso violinist, teacher and composer he composed the modern Turkish National Anthem in 1922). Ün benefited from Kemal Atatürk’s project to ‘modernise’ Turkish music, obtaining a scholarship which allowed him to study in Paris from 1924-1930 (i.e. from the age of 14 to 20). He studied violin, composition and harmony, both at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and privately – his teachers included Jacques Thibaud, Marcel Chailley, Édouard Nadaud and Alexandre Cellier. He also absorbed many influences from the music he heard in Paris during these years. On his return to Turkey, he was initially based in Ankara (where his father was Director of the Music Teacher Training College). He also took up a position as a violinist in the Presidential Symphony Orchestra and gave concerts as a soloist in Ankara and elsewhere. He began, too, to publish his own compositions, including Yunusun mezarinda (At the Tomb of Yunus). He left Ankara in 1934 and settled in Istanbul, teaching at the city’s Municipal Conservatory. His later compositions included the symphonic poem Yurdum (My Homeland), a ‘Rhapsody for cello and orchestra’, at least two piano concertos and a violin concerto, several string quartets and a number of other works for various other chamber ensembles. Tura studied philosophy at Istanbul University, alongside private violin and composition studies. By 1955 he was already writing music for the stage. From 1967-2001 he taught at the Istanbul State Music Conservatory. A prolific composer, he is best-known in Turkey for the many scores he has written for Film and TV. His books include Türk Musikisinin Mes'eleleri (1988) (On the Questions of Turkish Classical Music), a collection of his papers and articles and Türk Musikisi ve Armoni (1998, Turkish Music and Harmony). A prolific composer, he is best-known for the many scores he has written for Film and TV. However, he has also written a number of works for the concert hall; these include, amongst much else, five symphonies, a Cello Concerto (1956), a Guitar Concerto (1997), a Suite for English Horn and Viola (1951) and a Sonata for Violin and Piano (2000). Of these I have heard only the Guitar Concerto and the Violin Sonata (courtesy of a Turkish friend).
Most of the music by Ün which I have heard largely uses Western instruments and specifically Western forms, but also draws on the composer’s Turkish heritage, whether by reference to Turkish figures or places or by the incorporation of some of the modal patterns of the Turkish musical tradition. An early work, Yunusun mezarinda illustrates thus interplay of influences. The reference in its title, ‘At the Tomb of Yunus’, is very specifically Turkish. Yunus Emre (c.1238-c.1320) was a Turkish poet and mystic who was an important influence on later Turkish poetry. He seems himself to have been influenced by the example of the Persian Sufi poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273). Although Rūmī was born (of Persian-speaking parents) in Balkh, now in Northern Afghanistan, while he was still young his parents gradually moved further and further west because of the Mongol invasion of Central Assia. They finally settled in Konya in south-western Anatolia. Despite Rūmī’s influence, Yusuf Emre wrote in his native Turkish, rather than in what were the then ‘international’ languages of Arabic or Persian.
Yunus’un Mezarunda (At the Tomb of Yunus) has, not unnaturally, a certain elegiac quality, but is essentially a respectful celebration of Yusuf Emre’s importance to Turkish culture. Given that here we hear the piece in an arrangement for viola and piano, made by Beste Tiknaz, it is interesting to note that this piece, originally scored for flute and piano was written for the flautist Nazim Acar who, before switching to flute had studied viola with Ün, as explained in the (unsigned) booklet notes for this CD. Essentially in binary form, to Western ears it might almost appear to be in B minor, but is better understood as making use of the Hoseyni maqam of Anatolian folk music, a version of the Dorian mode. There is a quasi-improvisational quality to some of the writing, especially that for the unaccompanied flute (here, viola). The piano part will strike most listeners as remembering some of the piano music the composer had heard during his (then very recent) years in Paris. The writing for flute employs many long phrases which would present a flautist with more difficulties than they do for an accomplished violist such as Takniz. The opening passage, for unaccompanied viola is especially moving in its traditional starkness. The interplay between such distinctively Anatolian elements and the Parisian – one might almost say ‘impressionist’ – piano writing has much to say both about the composer and also about Kemal Ataturk’s project of Westernization-Europeanization. Though it lasts only six and a half minutes in this performance, the whole has an almost monumental quality, intelligent thought and emotional expression in perfect balance. It is not hard to understand why this piece has been one of the composer’s most frequently performed works, both because of its intrinsic quality and for what it has to say about Turkish cultural history. Here it gets an outstanding performance by Beste Tiknaz Modiri and Andrés Añazco.
The other work by Ekrem Zeki Ün, Sözsüz Türkü (Song Without Words) is again heard in an arrangement by Beste Tiknaz Modiri, having originally been scored for cello and piano. With regard to the Turkish title, my very rusty and limited Turkish tells me that sözsüz means ‘tacit’ or ‘unspoken’ and that, in this context, Türkü refers to any traditional melody with lyrics. If so, this title corresponds neatly with the European ‘Lied ohne Worte’. This piece, written almost fifty years after Yunus’un Mezarunda, is more of a miniature, almost a Romantic salon piece, with a mostly elegant string line played attractively by Beste Tiknaz. Though it makes for pleasant listening, I find it altogether less substantial and memorable than Yunus’un Mezarunda.
Yalçin Tura’s Viola Sonata is in the conventional three movements, marked Adagio-Allegro, Largo and Presto. Although Tura wrote extensively on traditional Turkish music and sometimes used materials from that tradition in his ‘Western’ music, this Viola Sonata is wholly European in form and idiom. It was composed in 2000 for the Turkish violist Ruşen Gones, who might perhaps be known to some readers from his time spent with the RPO, the orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the LSO. Born in Ankara in 1934, Gones lived and worked in London from 1969 and died there in May of 2020. Before his years in London Gones was Professor of Music at Izmir Yaşar University. He gave the first performance of Tura’s Viola Sonata, along with pianist Judith Uluğ in Istanbul. The unidentified author of the booklet notes accompanying this CD writes of Tura’s Sonata that it is in “the middle European style of Modern music, influenced heavily by the composer Paul Hindemith”. I am not sure quite what elements of Hindemith’s considerable stylistic variety the writer has in mind - perhaps his approach to harmony? Or perhaps the connection is with Hindemith’s familiarity with the viola’s nature, he having played the instrument professionally. There is a dignity - and even a grandeur- to the Adagio section of the first movement of Tura’s Sonata, qualities which are, to some extent, also evident in the ensuing Allegro section, though endowed with more in the way of ‘romantic’ emotion. The Sonata’s central Largo is quiet and at times meditative, though the feeling is never one of personal introspection. Perhaps one might describe this movement as an example of neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity), to borrow a phrase of Hindemith’s? The closing Presto has – like some of Hindemith’s quicker movements – a certain stiffness that never allows the music to relax. Tura’s Sonata is an interesting piece which I don’t yet feel I really know, despite several hearings; it strikes me as a work which will reveal more of itself with further (post-review) attention.
Of the works by younger Turkish composers which make up the rest of the programme on this disc, highlights include Ayça Öztarhan Kocatürk’s Bir Damla Yasemin, Betin Günes’s Beste and, with slightly more qualification, Melisa Uzunarslan’s ‘Sonata in 4 Movements’.
Born in the port city of Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast, Ayça Öztarhan Kocatürk has spent most of his life in Germany where she has an established reputation as a composer, teacher and pianist. She is currently based in Berlin. Her Bir Damla Yasemin effectively creates a link across several generations of Turkish composers. Its title alludes to (and it was to some extent inspired by) a famous work by written by one of the so-called ‘Turkish Five’, composers who, in response to Ataturk’s project to ‘modernise’ Turkish music studied European music and wrote pieces in Western forms which often had Turkish titles and/or incorporated elements from traditional Turkish music. Ayça Kocatürk’s title remembers the Beş Damla (Five Drops) of Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-1972), a set of five piano miniatures composed in 1931 and premiered by the composer in the same year. Between 1925 and 1930, Erkin studied at the École Normale de Musique and the Paris Conservatoire, as well as with Nadia Boulanger. After his return from Paris, he taught at a variety of institutions in Turkey and his compositions exerted a considerable influence on later Turkish composers, as in the present case. Ayça Kocatürk’s Bir Damla Yasemin was written for Beste Tiknaz and, according to the booklet notes accompanying this disc, was premiered by the composer (at the piano) and Beste Tiknaz “on January 2, 2011 in Istanbul”. The ‘Yasemin’ of Bir Damla Yasemin is the composer’s daughter; the piece has a gentle charm and more than a little of the sophisticated ‘naiveté’ of Erkin’s five piano pieces.
Betin Güneş (born in Istanbul) is another member of the substantial Turkish diaspora in Germany. After studies in Turkey, a scholarship took him to the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where he studied composition, conducting and electronic music. He appears to have been based in Cologne since 1980, being conductor of the Cologne Symphony Orchestra since 1988. As a composer he has written, alongside a body of electronic music, some ten symphonies, some chamber music and a number of pieces for solo piano, being an accomplished pianist himself. Beste was written for Beste Tiknaz, with this recording in mind. It had its first performance by the duo of Tiknaz and Anazco in Istanbul in May of 2017. Günes has known Beste Tiknaz and her family for some years and the booklet writer tells us that in this work “the composer tried to portray … all sides of Beste Tiknaz’s character and personality”. This brief recording - it is only three minutes eighteen seconds long here - has passages of real tenderness along with some incisively energetic writing and there is lyricism as well as thoughtfulness, all of which may, I suppose, constitute a portrayal of its dedicatee.
The youngest composer represented on this disc, Melisa Uzunarslan, is a highly versatile artist. She is violinist, singer-songwriter and composer who also plays piano and guitar and has appeared as an actress. She has a Master’s degree in violin and composition from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory in Istanbul – the university bears the name of Mimar Sinan (c.1488-1588), one of Ottoman Turkey’s greatest architects. Melisa Uzunarslan has worked in many different settings; she has been a violinist with the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic and has also been active as a violinist and vocalist with the Turkish rock musician Teoman. She has made recordings of some of her own songs and she has also written film music. The booklet notes provided tell the reader that the Sonata recorded here “was originally composed for violin and piano and premiered on February 7, 2013 in Istanbul by the composer herself on violin and Ayça Yilnaz Aytuğ on piano. Hearing the piece at its premier, Beste Tiknaz asked Uzunarslan to transcribe it for viola. The version for viola was formally premiered on May 6, 2017 by the Tiknaz/Añazo [sic] duo”. The work is in four movements, headed Thus: I. Sana (To You), II. Onlara: Moderato (To Them), III. Bana: Presto (To Me) and IV. Hasta (Sick). The booklet notes also tell us that this “is the composer’s first composition in Sonata form”. In the light of this information, it is perhaps not surprising that Uzunarslan’s use of the sonata is fairly basic and functional. This is not, I think, music which seeks to impress by formal subtlety, being more concerned with strong emotional expression (not, of course, that the two considerations are necessarily incompatible. The four movements are somewhat uneven. In the first movement I find the piano part a little ponderous and over-insistent, though there are some lovely lines for the viola; the second movement contains some attractive and interesting dialogue between the two instruments. The presto third movement has a powerful, at times almost fevered, energy, in which viola and piano combine well. However, it is the last movement which really stands out, to my ears at least. Its ‘romantic’ and melancholy introspection has a striking power - though it seems an odd way to close the work. Uzunarslan’s Sonata intrigues me, but does so as much as for what it suggests about the composer’s potential as for the finished achievement of the work itself.
If, like me, you are interested either in the ‘western’ music of the Middle East and/or the music of the viola, you will surely find things to enjoy here.
Glyn Pursglove