Composer Michael Hersch adapts the tragedy of Medea from Ovid's Metamorphoses in his new opera for soprano Sarah Maria Sun, the vocal ensemble Schola Heidelberg, and Ensemble Musikfabrik. With librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. Hersch's setting underscores the profound psychological trauma at the heart of the tale with a characteristically powerful, bracing score.
The title 'Vida' of Misha Cvijovic's portrait album combines meanings from different languages - life, sight, healing and myth. The composer's music is equally multi-layered, resulting from her exploration of varying sonic and artistic perspectives. Booklet author Carl Rosman explains: 'A keen awareness of stage and physicality is constantly present, in works whose language is typically gestural, eclectic, and direct - although not without irony and polyvalence.' The album has three focal points: it begins with early compositions such as 'Lica Persefone', 'Tikkun Olam' and 'Cirque du Soleil'. As part of a young generation of composers from the former Yugoslavia who are significantly shaping the local contemporary music scene, Cvijovic also uses the ?-time rhythm of the Balkan region in the latter work, among others. She transfers this into a kaleidoscopic sound world in which the trumpet (Marco Blaauw) stands out with short acrobatic solos. The album also includes works such as 'Penumbra', 'Carbon' and 'Emotional Logic - Anger', which depart from the classical mainstream and take greater risks in improvisation and form, for example by expanding the ensemble with the timbres of accordion, baritone saxophone and electric guitar in 'Penumbra'. With 'Iktsuarpok' and 'Incandescent', the focus finally shifts to electronic and electroacoustic sound. Five of these works were recorded especially for this album in collaboration with the Ensemble Musikfabrik and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Enno Poppe can also be heard, as well as Sebastian Berweck on the Minimoog and the Trio Splitsignals Berlin.
Multifaceted tonal colours, virtuosity, and a field of tension between ruptures and connections characterize the music of Turgut Ercetin. In particular, he illuminates the in-between spaces in a wide variety of dimensions. As Paul Griffiths explains in the booklet, the composer explores "the space between instruments or groups, between harmony and noise [...], between spectra, between what is played and what resounds from the performance space." At the center of the album lies the cycle "Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wortern" ("The Phoneme Between Two Words"). The largest part, (b), draws on one of Turgut Ercetin's research fields: vanished architecture, here referring to two demolished Byzantine buildings. In this work, the SWR Symphony Orchestra as a modern orchestra meets a Baroque ensemble with musicians from the ELISION Ensemble. However, the two formations do not appear as opposites but as mutually interacting seeds. The smaller pieces (a) and (c) function as fanfare and epilogue: they condense the themes of fusion and separation, ultimately leading the ELISION musicians back to modern instruments. Ensemble Musikfabrik is featured in two works on this album: "Resonances (b)" and "Thousand Dead Bodies Under My Bed, All Cloaked with the Breath of the Living". The latter recalls how the past continues to live on - in art, in memory, in trauma. Within three interlaced ensembles, an interplay unfolds: characteristics drift from one group to another, while the very nature of the piece as a whole gradually shifts.
