A kind of "organized confusion" characterizes the music of Sebastian Claren (b. 1965). "The music should, so to speak, exist without preconditions and should initially refer only to itself. In my estimation, culture and good-breeding are completely out of place in a work of art," says Claren. In his music, this view assumes audible form in a constant alternation between continuity and discontinuity, whether consecutive or simultaneous. It is a game of sophisticated montage techniques involving myriad contrasting splices and a multitude of camera positions translated into music. Yet his stupendously energetic and sometimes highly volatile compositions are not montages in the strict sense; they are not concerned with reproducing things already said elsewhere. Claren is more interested in the dense synchronicity of (inner) events viewed from the vantage point of the self, the composer, who, of course, works with and within past and present-day music. Hence Claren's keen interest in certain styles of pop music, which are no less essential to his aesthetic than the roughly one-hundred years of modern music and it's forerunners.

Nyabole - Singing on the Way to the Dancing Ground "Look here, the customs of our fathers keep us warm." The men of the Hamar, a south Ethiopian people, still tell of the great deeds of their ancestors, from whom they have inherited their heroic will and strong personality. The music of the Hamar is varied: the word painting of the mouth bow, the sound of the flute, the interplay of voice and lyre stand alongside running songs, leaping dances, and war songs. The recordings were made between 1970 and 1976 by the field researcher and ethnologist Ivo Strecker and - after having been published on LP in 1977 - were awarded the annual German Record Critics' Award, in 1981. This edition not only presents a general introduction to the music of the Hamar, but it also provides us with the social, psychological and historical contexts of the music in the sense of an ethnography of communication and performance. Events that take place at the periphery of a musical performance may be important to help one understand it. This is why an edition of the present kind is only possible with the help of experiences such as those which Ivo Strecker was able to accumulate during his long periods of intensive field research as a participant and observer among the Hamar. This CD set includes a very extensive and richly illustrated booklet.

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.

Soprano Claudio Bottcher and pianist Jovita Zohl have worked as a duo since 2008. Their recording entitled Zeit(t)resume is dedicated to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. Stockhausen's music box cycle Tierkreis (Zodiac) is presented here in a version for soprano and piano. In Berio's Sequenza III, based on a text by the Swiss writer Markus Kutter, a wealth of emotional states is expressed. Using the voice, the natural instrument of man, the text is articulated through sounds, syllables and words. Stockhausen's Klavierstucke IX shows the characteristic principle of his serial thinking - to arbitrate gradually as well as organically between pairs of opposites. The special charm that characterizes Quattro Canzoni poplari is born out of Berio's fascinating interpretation of traditional folk songs.

Achim Bornh�ft studied composition with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith at the Folkwang University in Essen from 1988 to 1994. The works he has chosen for this portrait CD are not merely acoustical simulacra captured on a sound recording. What he has committed to disc here, resounding from the loudspeakers, has been adapted to suit the possibilities and limitations of a stereo CD. Bornh�ft has anticipated the virtual auditorium during the production phases and modified the sound mixtures and the spatiotemporal proportions of the original scores accordingly. He has embraced the 'compact disc' situation.

If you're holding this CD in your hands, you prize the unexpected. Not because it's written on the cover, but most likely just because you like to listen to new music. In other words: The unexpected is exactly what you're expecting. Admittedly, this expectation makes it considerably harder to present you with something genuinely unexpected in the seventh CD of the Edition MusikFabrik released by the label WERGO. The question posed by David Lang in the title of his melodrama - "Are you experienced?" - is rhetorical in nature, given that the piece takes a speculative look at the unexpected end of a concert evening. Philippe Boesmans, best known as a composer of operas, surprises us with a "Biedermeier" sextet. For Richard Barrett, interference becomes a structural principle, and Luca Francesconi knows the formula for driving the formulaic out of music. The tracks on this CD also trace an arc, from the beginning of the Ensemble MusikFabrik i'm WDR concert series to a world premiere during concert twenty-four at the network's Cologne studios: twenty-four concerts that formed the basis of the first seven CDs in the Edition MusikFabrik series. After many more concerts, the public can answer the ironic question "Are you experienced?" with confidence: "Yes, we are." How about you?

In Wolfgang Rihm's compositions, there is a continual energy inherent in the sound objects themselves that the composer senses and liberates. Rihm coined the term "vegetative composing" for this particular relationship to the material; elsewhere he has spoken of reacting "seismographically". By means of inscription, contrafacture and overpainting Rihm creates absolutely new works out of works composed earlier within a compositional row. "Frage" stands out for it's two essential design approaches from the visual arts - linearity and the planar, objectlike - and it's use of two painting techniques: overpainting and inscription. More than that, however, the work is embedded into a network of references to the visual arts. Whereas in "Frage" elements of various ages were recombined into a montage, in "Sph�re um Sph�re" a model is completely reworked, namely, in the form of a contrafacture. Both works of this CD were premi�red by ensemble recherche, and "Frage" is also dedicated to this ensemble specialized in New Music. - First recording! Coproduction with Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

Hans Werner Henze called the opera of Pollicino and Clotide that he wrote in his adopted homeland of Italy, based on the tale of Tom Thumb as told by Collodi, a "fairy tale for music," and dedicated it to the children of Montepulciano. The opera deals with matters of life and death, difficult relationships between parents and children, poverty and hunger, staying in and being freed from inhuman conditions. The little hero, Pollicino (Italian: "little thumb"), and his six brothers who have to seek for shelter in the house of Orco, the maneater (whose daughters are Clotilde and her six sisters), because poverty drove them away from home, have to go through several adventures before they all together manage to turn their fate for the better. First recording with extensive booklet and German-English libretto.

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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

“To me the composer’s role is to comment on the things that surround us in the here and now,” says composer Martin Schuttler (b. 1974) who lives in Berlin. What surrounds us in the here and now is the reality of the street, normal life, things outside the box of our private universe, things we stumble across every day.Dirt, garbage, trash, grunge, low-tech, junk, kitsch, scrap: all of this, the profanest of the profane, finds room in and provides material for Schuttler’s music, his steely, angular compositions, which are not without their gentle, mild, dulcet, almost suave moments. Puzzlement. Disruption. An attempt to explain and enlighten. “Pelze & Restposten” (“Furs and Remainders”) is the title Schuttler chose to give to his first portrait CD. It’s a dialectical word-game on luxury items and mass commodities, on value and worthlessness, on quality and quantity, not without a touch of self-deflation. His CD presents compositions from 1998 to 2009.

There is to be a journey, not too far away, because, after all, it's nicest at home, isn't it? A journey for invited guests, offshore and onshore, by boat and by bus, and a few steps on foot. A journey full of surprises. A journey as a performance. A journey into the night... When looking for a word to best describe Harald Weiss' musical oeuvre, the most applicable certainly appears to be "cross-over". He has been honored with numerous prizes and awards for his artistic work: among others, the Rome Scholarship of the Villa Massimo, the Lower Saxony Scholarship for Film and Music, and a prize from the Premier TV station for his video clips.

During his Berlin visit in 1998, the Siberian sound shaman Spiridon Shishigin made recordings for his first solo CD, "Soul of Yakutia". Khomus - instrument of seduction with spiritual and healing effects. The area around Lake Baikal is not only the home of the Turks, of the Mongolian and Tartar people, but also the original home of the mouth harp. From here the instrument has spread almost all over the world. The Sakha people say that the khomus (mouth harp) has been their means of expression, central to their existence, for at least three thousand years.

The artistic credo of the renowned Canadian organ duo (and husband and wife) Sylvie Poirier and Philip Crozier is manifested in their exclusive commitment to interpretations of original works, supplemented by commissions from composers who have done concerted work with the performance possibilities and compositional demands of four-hand and four-foot organ performance. The present organ CD offers two works by Albrechtsberger and Wesley from the first half of the nineteenth century and works by contemporary composers with whom the performers work closely.

Mark Andre's music is introverted and fragile, but it speaks to the listener with a shy intensity: hij! This is the title given by the German-French composer to a pair of pieces recorded for this album by the cr�me de la cr�me of avant-garde music ensembles: the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne conducted by Mariano Chiacchiarini as well as the SWR Vocal Ensemble and Experimental Studio with conductor Marcus Creed and sound director Joachim Haas. The music on this album is characterized by the unique nature of it's sounds. It sensitizes our ears to the tiniest nuances and creates mesmerizing fields of tension on the borders between sound and silence. Intricate and subtly transformed contrapuntal structures weave their way through hij 1 (for orchestra) like bewitching sound shadows searching for resonance, a resonance which becomes the point of departure for hij 2 (for vocal ensemble and electronics). This music is absolutely contemporary, yet it embraces the inherited musical tradition in a completely authentic and unpretentious manner. It slips stealthily into our consciousness and vanishes just as mysteriously.

The works for violoncello solo recorded and compiled on this CD by Friedrich Gauwerky are reference works for John Cage's unusual way of composing. Apart from the tones, Cage also helped to put the varied forms of silence on the musical map: In John Cage's "Concert for Piano and Orchestra", the western art work, score, exploded: The work is composed in individual parts whose execution is freed of every constraint. Each part is even conceived as an autonomous work, e.g. like "Solo for Cello". "59 1/2 Seconds", one of his "time-length pieces", ranks among Cage's most radical "graphic" compositions. Stars become notes or noises in "Atlas Eclipticalis" - again without a score. With the "Variations I", written for any number of people using any sort and number of sound-producing means, Cage's composition reached the outmost limit on the way to absolute indetermination. But, if one hears "Etudes Bor�ales" for cello solo, however, one experiences that it is a piece whose status can only be compared with J.S. Bach's cello compositions. A critic wrote about Friedrich Gauwerky: "... a virtuoso with far-sightedness, good taste, amazing technique, and a captivating instrument." (Lutz Lesle: Neue Zeitschrift f�r Musik)

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."

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.

Chinese Australian composer Liza Lim was inspired by the lyric poetry of the Sufi poet Hafiz for her work Tongue of the Invisible. Lim explains, "the way in which he mixes and shifts levels of meaning gives rise to complex and indeterminable frames of mind in oneself." This variety of meaning is first and foremost reflected in the juxtaposition and coexistence of precisely and meticulously composed textures and improvised elements. But the compilation of the text set to music also facilitates numerous variants and interpretations. These dialogues are superbly "narrated" here by the pianist Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and the soloists of the ensemble musikFabrik.

What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds," says Rebecca Saunders. "From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour." Samuel Beckett's works have become very important for the composer. Therein lies, perhaps, a certain parallel to Rebecca Saunders's more recent music: in the increasing sparseness of a language that gradually shuts out the inessential and ornamental. "Stirrings Still" is a music that seems to be inside and outside at once - both mobile sound sculpture and a journey beneath the surface of the sound waves, into the interior of a sound that suddenly seems more distant yet more intense. "Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end," Beckett writes at the end of his "Stirrings Still". "Oh all to end.

In the beginning of the 1950s, Hans Werner Henze wrote two radio operas for the former North West German Radio. The genre was developed around the 1930s and means a form of opera without any visual elements and hence without a stage. Under such circumstances the plot has to reach the listeners' ears by other means - by making the text exceptionally easy to follow, and by means of acoustic special effects like echo or sound collages. With this CD, WERGO publishes the premi�re of the revised versions on Sept. 27, 1996, in the Philharmonie in Cologne: Franz Kafka's oppressive surrealism in "Ein Landarzt" (A Country Doctor) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer's scathing satire in "Das Ende einer Welt" (The End of a World). In "Das Ende einer Welt", Henze himself took the role of the narrator, which underlines how topical the subject matter of this work remains for him. On the occasion of the premi�re of the revised versions of these two operas the composer wrote of the "inner connection" between the works: "There is, first, the state of a man who has taken leave of his senses, of being exposed, of the most terrible isolation, as if 'ordered' by invisible powers acting on a 'higher level.' There is talk of deception, of self-deception, of deceiving and being deceived, of the volatility and unreliability of life matters, beginning with the most simple (or most banal) and ending with the metaphysical and the grotesque." It is also conceivable that the increasing disquiet that took hold of Henze in the early fifties with regard to an evolving society that nonetheless remained the same at it's core ("Everywhere the old was not yet old enough, while the new pointed to a future that did not look very promising, " wrote the composer in his essay "Nach dem Krieg" [After the war]) took musical form in his two radio operas: on the one hand, a nightmare vision of horror; on the other, a cynical farce.

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.

Pieces are like seismographs says Adriana H�lszky about her own work - but it could well be applied to all the works recorded on the present CD: Music as a seismograph for a composer's aesthetic premises, musical ideas, and the circumstances of composition or, beyond the period of composition, to provide information about the approaches that musicians and listeners, respectively, adopt toward it, about our changing understanding of music. The combination of works recorded here by Julius Berger and Stefan Hussong demonstrates that for all the historicism of our musical life, the most recent music and older music do not contradict each other, but instead the perspective and experiences provided by the most recent music can provide surprising approaches to older music.

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.

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.

With the new WERGO production "Initiale - Lieder und fr�he Kammermusik" (Initials - Songs and Early Chamber Music), the complete Lied compositions by Bernd Alois Zimmermann are now available as a recording for the first time. The eleven songs were all interpreted by the adorable singer Anna Prohaska. The up-and-coming 27-year-old star currently captivates the opera world with her light and lyric soprano voice. Except for "Sonate" of 1950, all works compiled on this CD were created between 1939 and 1946. WERGO thus closes a gap in Zimmermann's repertoire and puts a focus on the beginning of the career of this great composer: Never had Zimmermann been as close to the neo-romantic tonal language as in his song compositions in which he set texts by Rilke, Klabund or Nietzsche among others to music. This genre - to which he never returned again - reflects both the expression of intimate feelings and his strong interest in literature.