IDAGIO Meets ... Unsuk Chin

The recordings of your works with the Berliner Philharmoniker document a creative partnership that has been ongoing since 2005. How did this collaboration evolve?

It started with my contact with [Sir] Simon [Rattle] before he came to Berlin. Around the turn of the millennium, he was asked in an interview with an English newspaper how he saw the future of new music or music in general. He mentioned the names of five young composers and I was one of them. That was a big surprise for me, because until then I hadn't known that he knew my music. Shortly afterwards, in 2002, he conducted a piece of mine in England and that was the first time I worked with him. Soon after that, it was decided that he would come to Berlin to join the Philharmoniker. My collaboration with the orchestra began in 2005 with the Violin Concerto. It was a huge leap forward for me to be played by the Berliner Philharmoniker, three times in a full hall, that was really great! Before that I had little experience with concerts for "normal" audiences, I had more experience of concerts with a "new music audience" and they are very different. Of course, you hope that the collaboration will continue, but normally it's a lot for a symphony orchestra to play two pieces by a particular composer within four or five years, especially when you consider what percentage of the programme is new music. After the violin concerto, there was a discussion about a new work, but that didn't work out in terms of time. Then we continued with Le silence des Sirènes, the cello concerto and so on. We played these six works within 17 years. When you consider how often a world-famous symphony orchestra plays new music, that's a very large number of works.

You describe composing as a "lonely profession". What does this loneliness consist of for you and how does it relate to working with soloists and ensembles?

I don't think it's just composing, but making art in general, but also working in science, as a physicist or mathematician, in other words: creating something new – these are all lonely professions. Of course, you cooperate a lot. We constantly work with the orchestra, the soloists and conductors, but for that there always has to be the piece. In order to achieve this result, you have to work alone. In this phase you are completely alone and that’s especially true for me! When I'm writing a piece, during the working phase, I don't talk to anyone about what's going on inside me and what it's all about. I don't talk to anyone about this working process or about my thoughts – I'm completely alone.

Photo: Rui Camilo / EvS / dpa

What is particularly important to you when you compose for orchestra?

It doesn't really matter to me whether I write a piece for orchestra, ensemble or any other instrumentation. Of course there is the aspect of timbre, but that is more like a dress. Creating a new piece, creating new music, is a very complex process and it's all about the central idea: What do I want to say in this piece, what is my focus? These fundamental thoughts are important.

This edition includes orchestral works, instrumental concertos and a vocal scene. What does this programme represent for you?

That's a bit difficult because the six pieces were recorded over the course of 17 years and I also wrote many other works in between. You can't find a common thread running through these six pieces, they are all very different. But these six pieces are core works in my oeuvre, they are very important to me.

Can you tell us a little more about the concertante works?

For me, these instrumental concertos represent a very, very important dimension of my work, because I am very interested in the virtuosity of musicians. We composers approach composing with exactly the same passion, but it is a rather dry activity to sit at a desk and write music. I envy musicians; making music is not just a matter of the head, the whole body, the whole person simply has to be involved. I find it fascinating that a soloist tries to go beyond their own limits, and the orchestra musicians and the conductor do the same. This enthusiasm at the moment the piece is played is incredibly important to me. I can almost say that I live for this moment: everything else, fame and success, are of course all well and good, but essentially I want to experience this passion in the moment of the performance. That's why I've been writing solo concertos for over 25 years.

Are there different approaches, depending on which is the solo instrument?

Yes, definitely. Whether I have a specific soloist in mind or want to write an abstract piece also plays a very big role. In the beginning, in the nineties with the first piano concerto, I didn't intend to have the piece played by a specific pianist. For me, it was simply a very abstract form of music that I really wanted to write. But later, from the cello concerto onwards, I had more contact with the soloists and the way you look at and plan a piece became very different. The artistic, musical personality suddenly played a very big role and that shaped the music. From the cello concerto onwards, the concertos - the Sheng concerto and all the others - were actually composed with a specific soloist in mind.

You initially wanted to become a pianist and you are still passionate about playing the piano today, yet you don't play your own piano works. Do you ever use the instrument to compose?

I always compose at my desk, without a computer, without a keyboard. I never play the note I write on the instrument. I've just been trained that way, it's my habit and it's the only way I can compose. Even if I were to try something on the instrument, I could do very little with the information, make no decision. Composing, creating a piece, is simply very extensive work, you have to make a lot of decisions and it's about the whole thing, not about how a single note sounds. In any case, you can't play everything on the piano and I've never even tried my piano works on the piano.

With Le silence des Sirènes, a vocal work is also part of the album series. You use excerpts from the Odyssey and Ulysses in this piece. What interested you about these two texts?

If I had only had Homer's Odyssey, then the project wouldn't have interested me so much. The piece is tailor-made for Barbara Hannigan and her artistic personality. I saw in her such an incredibly ideal form of Sirène and that's why I wanted to write this piece. At the same time, I also found the text in James Joyce's Ulysses and that's a very different form of siren to the one of Homer. One is the siren we know and the other is just a barmaid – there's a huge range of characters in between, which I found interesting. There was also a basic idea from Franz Kafka, who once said: "The siren's silence is a much more dangerous weapon than her song." I found that very, very beautiful. And at the same time, the text in Ulysses consists of such condensed sentences that I immediately had the music in my head when I read the text by James Joyce – the words and sentences were so musical. It really was a great discovery for me!

The piece plays with the tension of silence and sound in the music...

Yes, especially the text by James Joyce. The text composed the piece, not me. I simply followed the melody, the feelings and shapes of the individual words and sentences. This is what came out: fragments, very, very compressed fragments.

The essay about this year's Ernst von Siemens Music Prize says about your work: "The materials of her music are not found, but invented, not ‘authentic’, but imaginary." Can you tell us a little more about the role of the imaginary, the surreal, the dreamlike in your music?

I think I already had an affinity for crystalline, silky, dream-like sounds as a child. Back then, I always dreamed of such sounds. When I played the piano, back then we had a small upright piano, the sound that came out of the instrument was somehow not enough for me. I always took off all the covers and pressed my ear to the strings, I just wanted to hear this lively, direct, metallic and crystalline sound. Now, of course, I try to realise this imagination or idea of sound in my works.

I think that's the reason why I use a lot of percussion instruments. I want to integrate as many different colours as possible into the orchestra. We already know the sound of the orchestra itself since the 19th century. Of course you can use special effects to create new timbres, but these are also exhausted and familiar. So you have to keep trying to create new sound materials.

What impressions do you hope listeners will take away from the Philharmoniker's recording cycle?

I think for those who are not that familiar with new music, I would simply recommend not to be afraid; to simply listen to the music, several times. You can understand a whole piece from the beginning to the end as a wave that starts and ends at some point – you just have to ride that wave.

To conclude the interview, would you like to tell us what you are currently working on? Will the collaboration with the Philharmoniker continue in 2024?

This edition was really intensive work. Perhaps we will take a little break, I don't want any inflation of my music. But I hope that at some point my collaboration with the Philharmoniker will continue. What am I working on at the moment? I'm working on my second opera, 17 years after Alice in Wonderland. It will be premiered next year at the Hamburg State Opera. I'm not allowed to say what it's about yet, but the opera house will be holding a press conference at the beginning of March and then we'll find out!