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POTEMKIN I: BABY BABY
Nyabole - Singing On the Way To the Dancing Ground (Recorded
Cage: Etudes Australes / Sabine Liebner
John Cage's Etudes Australes, performed here by pianist Sabine Liebner, launched a series of virtuoso studies born out of the composer's renewed interest in traditional instrumentation and notation. This complex work consists of a total of 32 etudes divided into four books, which John Cage based on maps of the southern night sky. From these maps, locations of planets were selected via chance and translated into pitches, transforming indeterminacy into a new aesthetic category. For Cage's Etudes Australes, the moment of performance is its only moment of reality. Only what is in the present can be heard: in this case, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sound.
zeit(t)räume
NATURELL CONCENT LACK INFRA
UNEXPECTED
Rihm, W.: Frage / Sphare Um Sphare
POLLICINO
Henze: El Cimarrón / El Cimarrón Ensemble
HENZE El Cimarrón • Angelo de Leonardis (bar); Gundl Aggermann (fl); Christina Schorn (gtr); Ivan Mancinelli (perc) • WERGO 6710 (2 CDs: 84:22 Text and Translation)
"I made my case for El Cimarrón in Fanfare 31:2; I think it is a potent work, perhaps Henze’s masterpiece, but I didn’t like that Stradivarius recording by Nicholas Isherwood. That issue is too recent to merit quoting at length; if you don’t know the work, please refer to that review. The piece falls into a musical no-man’s-land between song and speech. Henze’s singing actors are given far more freedom than Schoenberg’s—there is little of Sprechstimme here, unless a performer so chooses—which is both the glory and the curse of El Cimarrón . Early recordings (there have been four that I know of) concentrated on the music; baritone William Pearson sang in the 1971 DG recording led by Henze himself, which remains my favorite. One might say that those performers (at the composer’s direction, of course) followed the score, trusting in the words and music to make the full dramatic impact. More recent productions, the Stradivarius and now this one, take advantage of the aleatoric elements of the score and lean toward a chewing-the-scenery style of acting—screaming, ranting, and raging—which puts me off. For one thing, it makes the protagonist less sympathetic; we are less likely to take his life experiences seriously, which is the main point of the work. Henze’s complete title (translated) is El Cimarrón, The Autobiography of the Runaway Slave Esteban Montejo; Recital for Four Musicians . Henze met Esteban Montejo; at age 108 “he radiated dignity.” There is little dignity here, whereas Pearson’s deep bass speaking voice and overall formality delivered dignity in spades. This wild acting style also tends to obscure some wonderful music, turning it into background accompaniment instead of full participant. This issue credits an artistic director/dramaturge (Michael Kerstan) rather than a conductor. Does the composer approve of this recent trend? He attended a rehearsal for the staged production that led to this studio recording, and was “very impressed by the energy, the artistic élan, and the human commitment they manifested.” I interpret that as damning with faint praise, as he has always raved about any performers who tackle his œuvre.
De Leonardis starts off very much as Isherwood did, using many voices from bass to falsetto, crooning and moaning, shouting and whispering; he calms down a bit as Esteban’s life progresses and is a fine singer when required, which Isherwood was not. More of the music comes to life this time; I like the slow tempos very much. The big surprise is that de Leonardis sings an English version by Christopher Keene; the booklet gives no hint as to why. Wergo is the recording division of Schott Music & Media, Henze’s publishers; one would expect it to use Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s original German libretto for this “official” documentation. Texts appear in both languages, on facing pages. De Leonardis makes every word clear, though he sings with an unidentifiable accent; at least it is not that of an upper class, educated white man. The English grows on me at repeated hearings; it’s nice not to have one’s nose buried in the libretto. The other three musicians are excellent, and an impactful digital recording is especially effective in reproducing Henze’s wide variety of exotic percussion."
FANFARE: James H. North
PELZE & RESTPOSTEN
WEISS, H.: Journey into the Night
(Yakutia) Republic Spiridon Shishigin: Soul of Yakutia
Kloppers, J.: Dance Suite / Bedard, D.: Petite Suite / Bolti
Andre: … hij … 1 & 2
SOLO FOR CELLO ...
Lachenmann: Got Lost / Kakuta, Sugawara, Trio Recherche
Helmut Lachenmann is often associated with the musique concrète instrumentale that he developed during the middle years of his career. The pieces on this recording, however, were written both before and after this particular aesthetic phase. The point of departure for these ideas (as Lachenmann put it in 1970) is sound itself “as the characteristic result and signal of its mechanical origin and the more or less economical use of the energy required to produce it.” Noise-like instrumental sounds are examined for similarities and contrasts. They are also cataloged: categories and families are created as the foundation of a kind of motivic development using noises and sounds. In “Got Lost” Lachenmann used four lines from Nietzsche, the poem “All Love Letters Are Ridiculous” by Fernando Pessoa and a short note in English lamenting the loss of a laundry basket which gave this work its name. Lachenmann wrote: “Three only seemingly unrelated texts, stripped of their lofty, poetic, or mundane diction, are all presented by the same sound source – a soprano voice singing ‘any old way’ – and sent into a constantly changing intervallic field of sound, resonance, and movement."
Kagel: Mimetics / Liebner
In 1961, Mauricio Kagel wrote a piano piece with two titles. As a solo work, it is called “Metapiece." It can also, however, be played together – either simultaneously or in alternation – with other pieces by Kagel or other living composers, and is then called Mimetics. In this way, Kagel opens at the conceptual level various possibilities for the interpreter to realize his composition. The pianist Sabine Liebner has accepted Kagel’s invitation to collaborate and undertaken her own musical journey through the composer’s piano music. Sabine Liebner‘s response to his invitation to play with the idea of open form is unique in that she combines “Metapiece” exclusively with other piano pieces, all of them composed by Kagel himself. “Metapiece”, in its “Mimetics” form, surrounds these other works or is laid over them. Framed by “Mimetics”, the “Cuatro piezas para piano” and “MM 51” are played in their original forms, and the piano etude “An Tasten” is subverted by a version of “Mimetics”. At the end of Liebner’s response to Kagel’s original invitation, “Metapiece” itself appears in a 20-minute solo version.
Liza Lim: Tongue of the Invisible
Saunders, R.: Stirrings Still / Vermilion / Duo / Blue and G
Henze: Ein Landarzt - Das Ende Einer Welt
Zimmermann: Sinfonie in einem Satz / Hirsch, WDR Sinfonieorchester Koln
The works compiled on this CD emphasize, in a richly varied manner, Bernd Alois Zimmerman's conception of music as the ultimate "art of time" in which different temporal layers permeate each other, thus eliminating historicity. Zimmerman served in World War II and was discharged for a chronic skin problem as a result of exposure to poison. Those experiences characterize his oeuvre.
HOLSZKY: Wolke und Monde / Nouns to Nouns II / Miserere
Andre: ...Auf... / Cambreling, SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Orchestra
French composer Mark Andre's ...auf... consists of three independent orchestral pieces. Taken together, they can be heard as a cycle or as a triptych. Though they are related, each work begins again the search for new resonances and means for transitions between sounds. Andre studied composition with Claude Ballif and Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire de Paris. He continued his studies in Stuttgart with André Richard at the SWR Experimentalstudio and with Helmut Lachenmann.
LE CONTREDESIR THE SUBLIME
