Ballade.Rauschen
(2014-15)
In opposite to the more gestural writing of recent piano music, the instrument in Ballade. Rauschen (2014-15) presents one long and almost uninterrupted line. The narrative aspect of this focus is obvious, as the linearity evokes concepts such as "storyline" or the German Lebenslinie (the course of one's life). This ever-continuing melody does not remain unaffected by outside forces, though, the strongest of which might be quite drastic accelerations and decelerations that are pushing this Lebenslinie into temporal extremes.
Others are the sudden thickening of the melody into hand-or armclusters, the gradual changes in loudness, and, referring to the title's Rauschen (noise), a layer of pedaling that transforms the otherwise transparent line into tremendous buildups of resonance – a sonorous violence that seems to wipe out almost all melodic identity whenever it occurs.
Ballade.Rauschen was commissioned by WDR Radio and Wigmore Hall and it is dedicated to Nicolas Hodges.
Fragment
(1994)
Fragment for Piano (1994) was written during the composer's last semester of high school. While the influence of Stockhausen's piano music as well as that of the late Nono is evident in the densely textured clusters of the beginning, the piece eventually charts its own course, leaving behind the sonorous explorations of its models as it begins to pursue its very own attempt at melody. Played at the edge of audibility and at a tempo so slow that its single notes seem continually at risk of losing connection, the melody appears sonically radically subdued and formally fragmented at first. It nevertheless brings an almost songlike expressivity into focus that foreshadows Thomalla's operatic writing as well as his later piano music.
Piano Counterpart
(2008)
Piano Counterpart (2008) is a rhapsody. The keys are struck seemingly without aim, like a child tapping curiously on unknown objects, listening with concentration to how that sounds. But not only single tones are presented this way in Piano Counterpart. Entire boulders of musical language appear: a continuation of the piano strings into the history of the instrument, into layer after layer of musical meaning. Piano Counterpart strikes these layers, lets them ring and excavates them at the same time. By means of reduction to fewer and fewer pitches at the border of the instrument, and by a constant diminuendo, the piano strings and their sonorous characteristics themselves come increasingly into focus. The now uncovered tones are connected mechanically at first, following the given chromatic layout of the keyboard. But their relation grows increasingly free, and like the loose connections between the ruins of musical languages in the beginning of the piece, the newly emerging musical figures now relate to one another spontaneously, unpredictably, triggered only by the musical moment. The piano "speaks" almost as rhapsodically as it was struck in the beginning of the piece. Piano Counterpart was commissioned by the Zurich New Music Days and it is dedicated to Nicolas Hodges.