Johannes Kiem

PORTRAIT OF THE CONCERTS AT THE FRANKFURT OPERA

The creative work of the Frankfurt artist Johannes Kiem (b.1976 in Freiburg) is singular, and his development as a musician astounding. The biographical and aesthetic process was shaped and driven by a talent that is very rarely found today: the special ability to transform sensory impressions and musical experiences directly into music at the piano. Bodily work, the training of highly virtuosic passages, was – and still is – central to the daily encounter with music at the instrument.

At the age of four, before beginning conventional piano lessons at school, music in the home stimulated childlike improvisation. By adolescence, this ability had grown sufficiently for him to present his own musical approaches to blues and jazz on stage. Classical music had always been there, however. Giving concerts in Germany, France and Switzerland and studying the great piano works of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt strengthened his artistic self-assurance and his interest in the structure and substance of music. The driving force for his improvisations and ‘real time compositions’, as he calls them, was always the wealth of harmonic variety in the great works of Late Romanticism and early expressionism.

The artist Johannes Kiem has impressively demonstrated his extraordinary skill time and again in workshops and concerts, for example in his recitals for students in the composition class of Prof. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Academy of Music, Leipzig.
In cooperation with the Frankfurt Opera (more specifically, the dramaturgs Dr Norbert Abels and Zolt Horpazy), Kiem presented two different products of his art in two concerts, stimulated by texts on Verdi and Wagner as well as themes from Verdi’s String Quartet: inspired by the spontaneous incorporation of randomly selected, unknown texts and the information reflected in their language, semantic relationships and emotional states, he created a concert paraphrase on the model of Franz Liszt with bold anticipations of the (then) approaching twentieth century. The opera-infused themes of Verdi’s quartet were gradually worked into an excellent, formally structured “real time composition” in the spirit of Franz Liszt’s great Sonata in B Minor.

An extended engagement with the virtuosic and poetic challenges of Franz Liszt’s work and Wagner’s compositional technique will also define the next phase of work for the artist Johannes Kiem. His unique talent for transforming themes called out by the audience, elements of language or musical ideas into compositions of his own, thus allowing listeners to share in a process of development between heavenly regions and the dark depths of the soul, remains – like all great art – something of a mystery. In concert halls small and large, in the opera houses of the world and the composition classes of our music academies, far more attention should be paid to this autodidactically attained skill.

Kronberg, 30 October 2013
Prof. Dr Frauke Grimmer

Translation: Wieland Hoban.