If there is one idea that unites Christian Ridil's chamber music, it is a fascination with musical communication. His music thrives on interaction: voices converse, challenge one another, overlap, and continually reshape their relationships. On the sixth album in GENUIN's Christian Ridil series, the musicians of Ensemble Modern illuminate these relationships with remarkable acuity and infectious vitality. These world premiere recordings bring together works from different phases of the composer's career and offer a multifaceted view of the chamber music of a composer now over eighty-from a work for solo viola and pieces for wind trio to large mixed ensembles with piano.
Energetic as well as poetic is Karola Obermüller’s music, and it reveals hidden and unknown elements underneath the multilayered musical material. Many of the works on this portrait album in the series Edition Zeitgenossische Musik were developed as work in progress during a long period of time. Distinctive for Obermüller’s work are therefore the reflection from several perspectives and the superposition of different layers of sound. Zooming in on musical details is another special feature in several of her pieces as in “Pulstastung” for example. Here the distances between the musical occurrences are going to be extended more and more, “with an increasing pulse at the same time” (Karola Obermüller). Obermüller is receiving a special inspiration by ancient poetic texts as from the greek poet Sappho. Here she finds the essences of human existence like light and night, eros and longing. In „Untergegangen der Mond“ and „…silbern.“ her music tries “to create moments of magic“ (Volker Blumenthaler). In “Myrmecia” microtonal shiftings are confronted with percussive making of sound, which are creating a “strange, crackling, and insisting stream of sound”, the composer compares to the wild activity of the primordial ant, the title is derived from. The instrumentation of the pieces on this album offer a panorama from solo pieces for bass flute (Camilla Hoitenga) or piano (Emanuele Arciuli) and an extraordinary instrumentation with guitar, hammered dulcimer and harp (International Contemporary Ensemble) arriving at big pieces for ensemble (Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Musikfabrik).
The music of the composer Zeynep Gedizlioglu (born in Izmir) is like a kaleidoscope of diverse moments - sometimes fragile, sometimes harsh-angular, then again expressive and culminating in virtuoso sound ecstasies. A central motivation force of Gedizlioglu‘s music is the reaching out for the ineffable, as Dirk Wieschollek writes in the booklet of the album: “shapes solidify, contours emerge, often in imperceptible variants or shifts among things already heard, only to vanish once again.“ The perception of the world and herself, the shift between distance and approximation and the search for relations and non-relations are characteristic of the work of the composer. The alternation between antagonisms play an important role in Gedizlioglu’s work, among others in “Verbinden und Abwenden” (Connect and Reject). The composition in three acts for orchestra and ensemble places the individual opposite the collective and questions the role assignments of both, the orchestra and the ensemble. The musicians of the ensemble are spread amidst the orchestra as soloists, like “foreign objects” in unrelated instrumental families. “Kelimeler” (Words), the only vocal composition of this portrait, searches for possibilities and impossibilities of artistic speech. Based on a Turkish text which was written by the composer herself the piece focuses on “darkness” and “voice” once whispering, speaking, breathing heavily, in impulsive outbursts or linear melisma. With these recordings Zeynep Gedizlioglu presents herself both with chamber music and large compositions for ensemble and orchestra. Formations like the hr-Sinfonieorchester, Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien, Quatuor Diotima and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart can be heard on this release.
Besides various intangible elements - a balance of physical and metaphysical properties of Saed Haddad "good music" needs. The former he counts beauty, power, magic, power, virtuosity, etc.; in the second category are elusive concepts: the existential, the spiritual and the transcendental. The works on this CD come from two different marked by compositional practice periods. In the first period from 2004 to 2006 Haddad sought a synthesis of Arabic and Western music - without the usual Western mesh as tourism, exoticism or some form of abstraction. The aim was a real, existential and transcendental integration, not a juxtaposition or even constraints of a tradition on the other. More recently, since 2007, prefers to always questioning composers continued increasingly from a direct, existential contact with Arab culture.
Paul Hendrich's sound system is a coherent whole in which individual parameters of a musical work (such as harmony or rhythm) are ordered by analogous processes. Each composition expanded the boundaries of the system and created its next layers. The uppermost layer could not exist in this structure without all the lower levels. In this sense, every other piece of Paul Hendrich is a metaform, because it uses the musical language developed in earlier compositions. At first glance, Paul Hendrich's thick scores seem complicated. However, they are composed of simple processes. This simplicity would appear to us if we could look at this work as a multidimensional space, which we can trace each parameter separately. Performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik, this release brilliantly displays the composer's genius.
Motschmann: AION For Large Ensemble, Artificial Intelligence
Berlin Classics
CD
$19.99Oct 11, 2024
Johannes Motschmann's latest album is a revolutionary fusion of human creativity and artificial intelligence. This groundbreaking project showcases a unique AI, custom-built and meticulously trained on Motschmann's extensive work to replicate his distinctive style seamlessly. Unlike generic AI music tools, this AI collaborates intimately with Motschmann, pushing the boundaries of modern composition. This album promises an unparalleled auditory journey. It was performed by the illustrious Ensemble Modern at the SWR Experimental Studio and conducted by the renowned Peter Tilling. Immerse yourself in the future of music, where technology meets artistry.
Enno Poppe has 'tailor-made' concise ensemble works for two of the most important ensembles of contemporary music: "Gold" - a purely vocal work for the SWR Vokalensemble - and "Korper" - for the Ensemble Modern. In the three-part a cappella work "Gold" (one of only two choral compositions to date), Poppe indulges for the first time in his love of the lustfully excessive texts by Arno Holz (1863-1929), one of the most important representatives of German Naturalism and literary Modernism. The poems are parodistically related to less humorous high literature. The SWR Vokalensemble's supple miracle sound appears confidently in various combinations, sometimes fanned out in 24 voices as in old vocal polyphony. "Korper" takes us to another end of the scale of possible sounds. Here, the 21 soloists of the Ensemble Modern form a formidable big band, augmented by appropriate woodwind and brass instruments (including saxophones, of course). Here, however, Poppe is more concerned with exploring and expanding what the big band provides as a 'sound body', i.e. The colors, dynamic and rhythmic possibilities, with the means of New Music, an art that the Ensemble Modern has truly perfected. As so often with Poppe, the piece "Korper" goes through multiple processes of intensification and collapse. In the climaxes, the physicality of the music is almost overwhelming. Nevertheless, the nuclei of the piece are the intimate, thinly scored moments when the electric strings ever so gradually rise up with the percussion, or when a saxophone, a keyboard, or a trombone steps out of the thicket of sound and is allowed a few moments of self-discovery.
Yongbom Lee's music is characterized by continuous streams of sound and a finely balanced interplay between instrumental and electronic elements. Shaped by his intercultural background, Lee is particularly interested in the intersections and distances between contrasting concepts - such as the foreign and the familiar, or the conscious and the unconscious. Booklet author Leonie Reineke elaborates: "Ambiguity is another concept associated with the focus on spaces, a theme running through all the compositions on the album. Suspended states, associative developments, as when dreaming, and musical situations in which anything can develop from anything else recur time and again." The work "Imaginary Rooms", performed by Ensemble Recherche, moves between a progressive narrative and fragmentary snapshots. In "Dépaysement", the composer again explores the coexistence of opposing ideas: the first movement grants the musicians of the Broken Frames Syndicate improvisational freedom, while the second is written in a strictly traditional manner. The title piece, "Continuous Deformation", for cello (Kyubin Hwang) and live electronics (Yongbom Lee), reflects his engagement with neuroscience - linking the performer's sound production and brain activity, and guiding listeners through overtone landscapes.
