From Tubular Bells

It’s hard to imagine a powerful athletic ballet set to Mike Oldfield’s now-legendary music. Yet one of the most notable shows to watch for at this year’s High Performance Rodeo is a collaborative work from The Bergmann Piano Duo and Alberta Ballet: an original adaptation of Oldfield’s ’70s composition Tubular Bells. “It’s a nice texture to play for performers,” Marcel Bergmann says of the blending between the dance and Oldfield’s music.

The performance also includes choreography by Alberta Ballet’s Yukichi Hattori from Japan, as well as special guest pianist 2006 Honens laureate Hong Xu, from China.

Bergmann, who adapted Tubular Bells as a composition for pianos, began the ambitious project a few years ago in Miami. He was brainstorming ideas with his friend, pianist Jeroen Van Veen from the Netherlands, who will also take part in the Rodeo performance. “I had always been a fan of Oldfield’s music since I was a teenager, and I’m really fond of his album Tubular Bells,” he says.

The piece Bergmann was about to tackle with Van Veen is an explosion of sound and style, crossing musical genres and layering more than 20 instruments with a quasi-orchestral quality, featuring diverse instruments from a glockenspiel to an electric guitar. A segment of Tubular Bells may be familiar to fans of The Exorcist — it’s the ominous thematic music of the film, although it was originally written for and released as an album (Virgin Records’ first-ever release, in 1972).

Both the first and second parts of Tubular Bells are more than 20 minutes long, making the musical adaptation difficult. Bergmann listened very carefully to the complexities of the original, repeatedly. “When I made the arrangement — I listened very carefully to all the elements of it — I discovered that this main theme appears throughout the first part, in a kind of a metamorphosis. That’s a very classical technique of developing and changing a motive or a theme and using it in that same way,” he says.

The stylistic influences of Oldfield’s Tubular Bells drew from Celtic and South American influences, as well as Balinese and “a lot of pop and rock” to name a few. “Despite the fact that he has these various sections that feel very different from each other and not connected at all musically, he uses the main motive as a connector and as an element that makes it so homogenous in the end,” he adds. “It holds together so well.”