The music moves pianist Ananda Sukarlan

By Y. Bintang Prakarsa

JAKARTA (JP): Living in Spain, giving recitals in European cities, having his performances recorded, working with great composers, meeting all sorts of people, including royalty -- nobody would deny that Ananda Sukarlan is simply the most accomplished young Indonesian pianist there is today.

Behind those achievements and feats, there is an interestingly ambiguous musical self.

Ananda has a memory he never forgets: seeing for the first time trees without leaves in winter. Let's think of one similar, more famous account: the leafless tree of a lost love in Wilhelm Muller's cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) set to song by Schubert.

It is too speculative to say that the memory points to his loss, perhaps, of his home country, that until now he still looks forward to every visit to Indonesia. What is clear is that he seems to enjoy Romantic imagination as much as Romantic poetry -- William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman (his favorite) -- and paintings very much.

But his affair with Romanticism ends as soon as he does something musical.

And this is what distinguishes the artistry of this 33 year old Gemini: his passion for modern music and his discomfort with the esthetics of musical Romanticism. While many pianists are pampered by the 19th century repertory of Chopin or Liszt, he finds it "simply alien for me ... too many and too much".

For him "Romantic" is not just a historical concept, but also a tag for any composition characterized by thickness, exaggeration and an entire dependence on the composer's inner inspiration.

In other words: lack of clarity, balance and conscious borrowing or "stealing." In this sense, he considers most German composers since the 19th century as Romantics, including Stockhausen (b. 1928) and Rihm (b. 1952) who "like to exaggerate and have the obsessive tendency of developing the materials exhaustively".

An exception is that he plays the Etudes of Ligeti (b. 1923), one of the greatest composers in Europe. Ananda classifies him as Romantic mainly for his thick textures, his incessant thematic treatment and his impossible demands.

For more cooperation and musical affinity, Ananda turns to "neoclassics." This is another label for Ananda's ideal music, characterized by attention to structure, clarity and balance, as well as the eclectic use of diverse materials from other compositions, periods, or cultures.

First there is top Spanish composer Luis de Pablo (b. 1930), who dedicated his Pictures and Transcriptions, the third volume of a series of piano pieces, to him. Not a typical Spanish composer, de Pablo stays out of those Spanish folk things. Instead the "cultural circumnavigator" (IRCAM website), takes ideas from other cultures and historical periods: Victoria, Debussy, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Mompou, music from Iran, Japan, Melanesia, Korea, Bali and, more recently, Myanmar.

He is also fond of Sir Michael Tippett (1905-98); others include Theo Loevendie (b. 1930) and Luciano Berio (b. 1925).

He likes learning while preparing a performance or during the composition of a commissioned work. It comes naturally when the composer shares his ideas about a work's creation and expression down to the technical aspects of performance.

Ananda's hero is the voraciously eclectic Stravinsky. Ananda "fell in love" with him, admires him as the neoclassic par excellence and adopted the composer's quip "good composers don't borrow; they steal" as his favorite saying -- if not credo.

He admires the way Stravinsky domesticates various techniques to suit his ever-changing style, whether it is folk, religious, medieval, classical or 12-note. He admires, too, his craft of composition: his progressions, transitions, sense of proportion and solid technique. Even if his compositions are often built on separate blocks of passages, there is always a sense of movement from one to the other.

With Stravinsky as a model, Ananda is now gaining a reputation as a composer.

He did not want to learn composing at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1993, because "you'd be taught serialism (a postwar 12-note technique that became an orthodoxy during the following decades) and that extremely conceptual stuff." He chose instead to learn directly from those who cultivate the craft: composers.

One of his works for piano, Just A Minute, is a collection of playful remarks on people -- mostly his acquaintances. These are not profound pieces, "not letters, just birthday cards" lasting for about one minute. More serious is Whitman Landscapes for flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon and French horn, which was premiered recently. It is an eclectic 12-note composition with a lot of influences.

Once again, literature and paintings supply him with help and inspiration.

Picasso and Mondrian are his instructors in clarity and organization in blocks, whereas Dali inspires him in handling transitions. To learn about proportion, observing paintings is better than listening to music, he says, because one can see everything in the painting in just seconds. Paintings, dramatic characters and poems stir his imagination, too.

Here we come full circle again to Ananda the Romantic. Perhaps, as befits every artist, it is the tension caused by internal contradictions that makes Ananda tick. The presence in him of both Romantic and neoclassic tendencies, the attraction- rejection relationship with Romanticism, is the source of his blossoming creativity.