Peta Stewart
Celebrating 60 is one thing; celebrating the premiere of another piece for this acclaimed and award-winning South African composer is another! Hendrik Hofmeyr’s Symphony 11 – The Elements will receive its first performance at the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra’s third symphony concert in the Spring Season at The Cape Town City Hall on Thursday, September 7. Conrad van Alphen will be on the podium.
Four basic elements
Hofmeyr, who has probably written more works for voice than most composers, perhaps because he grew up with a mother who loved art songs, was just itching to write a full symphony.
“I have written many pieces for small ensemble but was dying to write another symphony. When Louis Heyneman, the CEO of the CPO, said that the orchestra wanted to acknowledge my career on this birthday I jumped at the chance to write something new. The work has been in progress since August last year and explores the notion postulated by the ancient Greeks, that everything in the universe is constituted of four basic elements – air, earth, water and fire. As in medieval metaphysics, the elements are also treated as symbols of human conditions.”
Setting poetry to music
Hofmeyr was captivated by the creative arts when he was at school. “It was a toss-up as to whether I would make music or literature or fine art my career, but an inspirational music teacher helped to tilt the scales in music’s favour. On her advice I entered UCT to study not only piano (with Laura Searle), but also musicology. This has made it easier to obtain a position at university, which also allows time for creative work.” Of course he has managed to combine his love of literature with his love of music, as setting poetry to music, something he does often, can enhance the meaning of the poem in countless ways.
“Music is perhaps the one thing man has added to the universe. It is irreplaceable. It enhances our experience as human beings more than any form of human utterance. One can never capture music completely and this is one of the things that make it endlessly fascinating. It’s the perfect way to spend one’s life!”
Hofmeyr, who now holds a doctorate from UCT where he is professor and Head of Composition and Theory, graduated with a Master’s degree with a couple of purposes. One was to continue to study music, the other to avoid conscription into a political system to which he didn’t subscribe. So he went to Florence and Bologna and studied piano, conducting and composition, and also picked up Italian at a rate of knots.
“When you live in an area without a supermarket, and you need to order your pane from the baker and your meat from the macellaio, you are forced to speak it. We fondly believe that English is spoken everywhere, but I found often that communication often broke down after three words! I also needed to speak excellent Italian to coach voice, which I had to do when my two bursaries from UCT came to an end.”
During his ten years in Italy he never lost touch with South Africa, coming home for Christmas whenever he could manage it. When a position opened up at Stellenbosch University at the end of 1991, he applied, and with an ending of the old guard approaching, he was able to return to South Africa and defer forever the threat of military service.
“My heart has always been in the Cape, and while Italy was wonderful, there were huge differences. Italians make the most warmhearted and generous friends, but the country itself is rather chaotic, and the music scene highly politicized. If one wasn’t a card carrying member of the right political party, one’s works didn’t get performed; one needed to be recommended by others to get anywhere. Here you are judged on merit – my kind of style.”
Queen Elisabeth Competition for Composition
Hofmeyr has achieved much in his career – he is the only South African to have won the Queen Elisabeth Competition for Composition (in fact the only South African to win at any of the Queen Elisabeth competitions). He also won the first Dimitris Mitropoulos Competition in Athens (with Byzantium for soprano and orchestra), and the South African Opera Competition and the Nederburg Prize with The Fall of the House of Usher. He also won first prize in an international competition in Trent, Italy, with an orchestral work, composed for a film by Wim Wenders.
“This was quite an experience,” he recalls. “We were given a rather incoherent video assemblage by Wenders of what I presume were some scraps from the cutting room floor from the film, Wings of Desire, and which had no theme, no form, no rhythm. Yet we had to write not only music that suited the film, but music that could stand alone on a recording that would be released separately. Perhaps it was just as well that I only saw the video twice on a friend’s machine, and then followed my own head.”
It worked and he won!
Symphony 11 – The Elements opens the CPO concert on September 7. The other works are the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Russian violinist Marina Grauman and the Second Symphony by Borodin.
Who: Hendrik Hofmeyr, composer
What: Cape Town Philharmonic’s Spring Symphony Season
Where: The City Hall, Cape Town
When: 7 September, 2017 at 8pm
Info, book: http://bit.ly/SibeliusSymphonicConcerto
Web: www.cpo.org.za
WS
