In a film portrait of dancer, painter and sculptor Antje Tesche-Mentzen, I learned that in former times she was a proficient pianist. When she told me that she intended to begin playing again, I promised to compose her a cycle for her new beginning: 34 miniatures, some of them with a direct connection to her paintings and sculptures.
The main part of Kosmos was composed in 2014, 400 years after Albrecht Dürer created his copperplate engraving ‘Melencolia I’, in which a magic square appears. In a magicsquare, numbers are arranged in a grid so that their sum in each column, row, and the two diagonals is the same number. In the square I have chosen, the magic number is 34. Wilfried Hiller
Instrumentation:
piano (2 pieces for 2 pianos)