Description
In few composers' oeuvres does contemplation of the most varied kinds of visual media play as great a role as it does in the oeuvre of Johannes Kalitzke. Images are, as a rule, static, but Kalitzke's role could be compared with that of someone viewing a picture.
The observer, in observing, arranges a picture's components as a temporal sequence by fixing his gaze on details, following objects' contours with his eyes, or relating colour values to one another - thereby entering into a performative relationship with the image space's individual elements.
In Story Teller, with his decision to musically juxtapose a solo cello with an orchestral collective, one could say that Kalitzke resorted to a model that is itself characterised by a narrative context, since the soloist acts as a sort of "narrator" in the broadest sense: an individual who, embedded in an appropriate musical staging of his part, appears on this "musical stage" much like an actor and, using solo monologues, holds his own against the collective of other musicians.
In Figures on the Horizon] (2011), Kalitzke pits a solo violin part against a six-part ensemble consisting of viola, cello, flute, clarinet, piano, and percussion played one-to-a-part, thereby anchoring the narrative quality in a chamber music-like fibre from which the soloist repeatedly emerges as a component.