Spotlight Series: Fazil Say
- Leah Froyd
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Hello and welcome back to our preview for our concert Spotlight Series: the Prepared Piano. This week we will explore the career of the composer and pianist, Fazil Say whose work, Black Earth will be performed at our concert Sunday March 22nd!
Fazil Say was born in Ankara, Turkey and showed an enormous amount of potential at a young age being able to sound out various Turkish folk tunes and melodies. Recognizing his talents, his father quickly enrolled him in piano lessons with Mithat Fenmen who nurtured his compositional ideas by making him improvise as part of his daily practice. His Oeuvre includes six symphonies, two oratorios, various solo concertos, and numerous piano and chamber music works.
Say’s first composition was written when he was a student at the Ankara State University when he was 14 years old. His career grew quickly after winning the Young Concert Artist Audition in New York in 1994, gaining him a place as a performer on the international stage.
On his composition, Say notes that he takes specific inspiration from other Middle Eastern and European composers like Béla Bartók, George Enescu, Gyögrgy Ligeti, and Carl Orff. In addition to using both traditional and contemporary classical music techniques, he also incorporates Turkish instruments like the kudüm drum and ney reed flute.
Say and Moldovian-Austrian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja have had a longstanding creative relationship— many of Say’s works for violin were written alongside and for her. The piece below is a collection of vignettes encapsulating different moods and characters: Melancholy, Grotesque, Perpetuum Mobile, Anonym, and a restatement of Melancholy. As you listen, try to pick out different classical inspirations Say is able to draw from and the ways Say infuses his own tastes.
To me, the Melancholy movements seem very influenced by the long, Slavic melodies used by composers like Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky whereas Grotesque and Perpetuum Mobile are much more playful and use more contemporary techniques (for example the extreme riccochet).
“Composing is always a form of improvisation: with ideas, with musical particles, with imaginary shapes. And it is in this sense that the artistic itinerary and the world-view of the Turkish composer and pianist Fazıl Say should be understood” -- Fazil Say website
In addition to his unique compositional voice, Say is staunch in his humanitarian beliefs and in 2016 he was awarded the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights, Peace, Freedom, Poverty Alleviation and Inclusion in Bonn. His integrity has always comes before his career and has cancelled important performances and has had his events cancelled in regard to his beliefs and statements (x).
Below is an experiment by Say very much aligned with Insight’s! The “experiment” entails Say re-arranging Beethoven’s sonatas as works for full orchestra in order to demonstrate the different characters and motifs in order to understand what Beethoven may have intended when he wrote them.
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you back here next week to continue our deep dive into the world of Prepared Piano!
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