BACKSTAGE WITH… Pianist Danny Driver
Your solo recital in Cardiff on 16 January is a wonderfully eclectic affair. How did you devise the programme?
For me, a programme needs to be a rich tapestry that is both varied and stimulating for the audience. That means there has to be aesthetic variety, perhaps some interesting relationships between the pieces, and also a sense of trajectory. In this instance, the second half builds very strongly from Lili Boulanger’s small, reflective pieces, through the Betsy Jolas piece to Schumann’s longer-scale work that has a real drive. Often, my programmes also have something to do with how I am feeling at the time and what else is going on – it all comes together in a kind of soup with many flavours!
You’ve included works called ‘Etudes’ by both Schumann and Ligeti. But they’re a lot more than piano studies, aren’t they?
Absolutely. At the very basic level they are, yes, a technical exercise, but they are equally compositional studies. In the case of the Ligeti, each piece has its own rules, by which a process is set in motion and then you see what happens from there. For instance, in Galamb Borong, the first of the four that I am playing, one hand deals with one whole-tone scale collection and the other deals with the other. So, the two hands may be playing a completely different set of pitches and different cross-rhythms too. But on top of that, there’s the influence of the gamelan, which is why I’ve programmed it with Debussy’s Cloches, which is also inspired by that instrument.
Tell us more about Betsy Jolas’s Pièce Pour…
Betsy Jolas’s father was French and her mother was American – she grew up in both countries and so has had a foot in two continents throughout her whole life. She is now 95 but is still writing! Pièce Pour was a commission for a competition at the Paris Conservatoire so is, again, almost like an exercise in the way it engages the fingers and the mind. Jolas studied with Milhaud and Messiaen, and while her music is atonal, she was never a fully paid up member of the avant garde. Earlier in her life, she was connected with singing and Renaissance music in particular, and so there’s a strong relationship with the human voice in her music. It has an intensity that really draws you in.