Frank Corcoran

irish composer

DUTCH RADIO PORTRAIT 2015

Composer Portrait for Concertzender .

FRANK CORCORAN

“It’s a long way to Tipperary ” goes the old song. And it is a long way from Tipperary in southern Ireland where I was born to ( at that time still West ) Berlin where 1980 – 1981 I spent a year as an invited guest of the Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm.
I had had my First Symphony premiered in Vienna in 1980, a work for wind alone. No strings. No percussion.
I began my Second Symphony for Large Orchestra.What was the motor-idea for this large work ; how bend time ? What form or shape ? music cannot exist for me without form. As a young composer I wanted to shape and control my vast colour forces . I had the idea of two contrasting movements , the first ( “Soli” )
concentrating on the individual solo lines of , eg. the trombones, the gongs and deep percussion of the opening, the solo double basses and celli and higher strings,
my music not synchronized metrically – as a contrast then to the second movement , ” Tutti ” , which would use the same material but barred as ” normal”, synchronized music. So two twin movements ; the first a vast movement of smeared chorales and instrumental masses, but with no clearly heard lines and the second then as more “normal” as the lines scurry and hurry towards their end. The opening of this first movement of my Second Symphony does in fact achieve a hieratic ” chaos versus order ” quality, a shifting carpet of kinetic art . : Mahler famously said that a symphony must become itself “a world”, a different world from our everyday world. Here you hear the first movement, “Soli”, my symphonic world which I composed in 1981 in West Berlin.
( Could I re-create this work like that today ? No, impossible ! )

MUSIC 1. Frank Corcoran 2. Symphony. Mov. 1. All. ( RTESO Dublin . Conductor: Colman Pearce . Marco Polo 8.225107 )

Posted under: Humble Hamburg Musings

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