Status: 08.02.2023 4:36 p.m
Johanna Summer has her roots in classical music. As a child and teenager she played exclusively this music. The intensive engagement with jazz and free improvisation came later.
Johanna Summer dedicated her highly acclaimed debut “Schumann Kaleidoskop” to just one composer. There are nine on the second album “Resonanzen”, which has just been released: Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Ravel, Scriabin, Mompou and Ligeti. On the basis of their original compositions, the young artist creates new worlds of sound at the piano and tries to narrate the works through her free improvisations. An exciting experiment that she also dares to do in our studio.
Johanna, most of the underlying works are quoted in a recognizable way, so they should be recognizable – is that so?
Johanna Summer: Yes, sometimes more, sometimes less. There are definitely pieces where there are really only beginnings and where I’m perhaps more referring to a certain playing style that underlies the original piece, or a mood or some detail. It doesn’t always have to escalate into a complete quote, but sometimes it makes sense and then I’m in this mode. Then I also like to play a few bars, as they might be in the original. But these are rarely one-to-one quotes, as I might be in a different key or time signature, and then of course I try to match that. It’s not about showing: “Hey, look, I can now play four bars from the Ravel here”, but of course it has to make sense. Otherwise I could leave it.
You deconstruct the pieces in order to rebuild them a little bit, but you don’t try at all costs to make something completely different out of them. How do you avoid falling into the cliché trap? The Bach transformation, for example, was an example for me when I first heard it, that you don’t fall into this cliché trap – it was more of a questioning monologue.
Summer: Yes absolutely. I don’t think I can really put into words what I think while playing. It all comes from somewhere. I don’t think about it and I don’t have a checklist “This and that has to be in the piece”, but I usually start out of a free impulse. And that first thing that happens in the first few seconds has a life of its own. I then try to explore this life of my own a little, to play with it, and perhaps to discard it if it doesn’t suit me.
Ultimately, I then try to establish a connection between these musical things, which are already there, and the piece: whether they can perhaps go hand in hand, whether they contradict each other, whether one can build in any kind of contrasts. They enter into a dialogue: the piece and the free idea at the beginning. I don’t worry about falling into any clichés. The pieces naturally have a certain tonal language. That has to do with the fact that they come from a time and people composed like this at the time. But I can, to put it bluntly, add my two cents, take parts from it and make something of my own out of it.
If you take a look at the past few decades, it has often happened that the music has simply been jazzed up when you think of Jacques Loussier or Eugen Cicero. Was something like that also a source of inspiration for you, such border crossers as Friedrich Gulda or Gabriela Montero?
Summer: In fact, not so much. I totally admire them all, Friedrich Gulda and above all Gabriela Montero: It’s incredible what they can do. Basically, I’ve always had a great soft spot for classical musicians who are interested in improvisation and also practice it, because there aren’t that many. If you bring both to the stage and also play purely classical programs and purely jazz programs, that totally fascinates me – because I don’t do that. It’s not my job to bring a piano concerto or a purely classical recital to the stage. I just do what I do, but I didn’t really think about these people when I developed the program.
The conversation is led by Philipp Cavert.
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