to an utterance (2020)
(for piano and orchestra)

For her piano concerto To An Utterance (2020), with a huge orchestration, not only in the percussion section, the British composer Rebecca Saunders - Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winner 2019 - had to come up with something special to provide the soloist with a tonal counterweight. Lots of clusters, but above all ubiquitous glissandi, often across the entire keyboard and sometimes at such breathtaking speed and dynamics that you almost think you're listening to a player piano by Conlon Nancarrow. What Nicolas Hodges' hands achieve here - protected from abrasions by fingerless gloves - goes far beyond what Stockhausen, for example, demands in his infamous Klavierstück X, especially in terms of emotional energy. In fact, this mostly emanates from the piano; the grandiose orchestration of the composer, who has long specialized in chamber music scorings - always full of tension, like the threatening abyss for the hyperactive pianist - takes up its suggestions and transforms its resonance space, often used as a stopping point, into wild and beautiful sounds: e.g. enormously differentiated string harmonics, which are then crowned with accordion in the highest register. [...] With his phenomenal technique and tireless presence, Hodges is once again an experience in the Herkulessaal, and the orchestra and conductor clearly feel at home in Saunders' calculated orgy of sound: thunderous applause.