Klavierduo Esther Ropón & Ernst Surberg

Programm

Parham Behzad
overcomplication (2025)
for piano and midi keyboard

A simple premise spirals – caught between control and its own undoing. The piece unfolds in two recursive layers: one where a slowing pulse meets increasingly fine subdivisions, locking tempo and rhythm in paradoxical stasis. The other dives into the fractal interior of sound itself—live electronics accelerate samples into pitch, then stretch them until buried textures escape. Overcomplication is not chaos; it’s precision tangled in its own reflection, playfully chasing clarity through excess. The piece is written for the peerless piano duo Esther Ropón & Ernst Surberg.

Noh SeungJu
Fundament (2025)
for two pianos

For me, a piece’s title always carries a dual meaning. The first refers to a subjective, biographical significance—what this piece represents within the stage of my life as a composer. The second refers to a relatively objective(?) meaning on a descriptive level, pertaining to the piece’s outward features. On that outward level, the title “Fundament” describes the feeling evoked by relatively fixed pitch materials, central pitches, and occasionally occurring long bass lines that support various textures. Subjectively, these past three months spent composing this piece have been a time for me to reexamine the abstract, fundamental dimension of my compositional approach, and this is reflected in the piece.
I need to elaborate on the latter point a bit more. The basic methodology I intended to reexamine at first was the organization of pitch materials. In other words, when I began working on this piece, I wanted to focus more than anything on the way I organized pitch material. However, when the piece was almost complete, I realized that the first large section of the piece is not actually developed through pitch material progression at all. I had thought that the most fundamental aspect of my compositional process was pitch material, but it turned out not to be the case.
Facing this realization, I made the decision to divide the first section into uniform time chunks and unify each chunk’s pitch material to five or six pitches. When I did this, the musical result barely changed, confirming my previous suspicion. As I had anticipated, once I started making these adjustments, it became clear that parameters such as rhythm and gesture—rather than pitch materials—were the real driving force behind the development of the piece. To organize and refine these parameters, I substantially revised the first section, removed the second section which could not fit into the flow at all, and separated the third section, which needed only minor adjustments, and the first section into individual pieces.
All in all, this process revealed very clearly what I possess and what I do not possess as a composer. In that sense, one could say that this piece represented a “Fundament”-stage for me as a composer.

Tibor Victor Hugo Kovacs
anrmat (2025)
for two pianos and electronics

I’m very excited to present to you anrmat, an exploration of the sonic possibilities of 2 pianos, drone music, ring modulation (hence the title), and the spaces in between. Hope you enjoy!

Anna Skladannaya
Lichter im Nebelglanz (Winter 2025)
for two pianos

Özkan Umutcan Bapbaci
ANTI_DYNAMO (2025)
for piano duo, electronics and video projection

A dynamo is a process in which motion sustains a magnetic field. In contrast, antidynamo theorems define the conditions under which this process fails: when a system is too perfectly balanced or constrained to the point that it cannot accommodate any non-conforming elements, it loses its ability to sustain itself and gradually fades away.
Drawing on this phenomenon, the work investigates time and motion through altered, developed, forcefully maintained, dissolved, and repeatedly interrupted blocks of sound mass. Mechanized and synthetic textures of processed sound are contrasted with the intimate sounds of whispers and breaths—emerging from the interaction between the performers and live electronics. Performers are invited to engage with readily available processes to create personal expressions and modes of sonic investigation, while being guided by an overall arc that moves between mechanized and personalized characters. This narrative is supported by glitches from historical films exploring the interplay between humans and technology of former times.
The piece is written for—and dedicated to—the wonderful piano duo Ernst Surberg & Esther Ropón, as part of their residency at Mozarteum University Salzburg.