Clarity and structure. These are the terms that first come to mind with Tom Sora's music. The compositions of this Romanian composer from Bucharest seem vivid and literally graspable. The music radiates a kind of physical materality. As an uncompromising free thinker he pursues his artistic goals with diligence and concentration. Sora's compositions are based on simple, specific musical or extra-musical ideas. Intuition remains an important principle for his method of composing and is also a significant factor in his personal musical style. This applies to his composition "Heavy Metal" for electric guitar and percussion. Beyond that, the title reveals nothing about the composition. As is usual with Sora, the piece follows a consistent musical dramaturgy and has nothing to do with heavy metal. On the contrary: this instrumentation borrowed from another genre serves to reveal Sora's artistic individuality. "Gruppenzwänge" (Peer pressures) has to do with conformity, with absolute acquiescence. Violin, viola, and cello are tightly synchronized with the same rhythms and closely bound together melodically. This is unusual for string trio writing and conveys a rather constricted impression. His "Zweites Streichtrio" (Second String Trio) makes clear, that an allusive title is not essential. The listener is given no clue for orientation and is entirely dependent on the unfolding musical processes. But the music does not need the crutch of a story or title: the musical events are so clearly structured that on hearing the piece on ehas the feeling a story is being told.

Songs and Poems is a title that promises quite a lot: there are neither songs nor poems in the usual sense among these five instrumental compositions for the Trio Accanto: there is no singing in Hans Thomalla's Lied, Aldo Clementi celebrates the art of instrumental counterpoint, and if Wolfgang Rihm's Gegenst�ck were a song, it would be a manifesto against vocality. At least the title of Walter Zimmermann's trio is based on a poem by Robert Creeley, but the words are not heard in the piece. Also, the audience does not need to be aware of the Baroque verse structures upon which Andreas Dohmen based his work commissioned by the group. The title "Songs and Poems" nevertheless points in a certain direction. It reflects an underlying longing in these instrumental pieces for language, voice, and song, for the authenticity of singing, the simplicity of song, and the hidden meanings of poetry. Perhaps "Songs and Poems" is a song collection that only dreams of songs, just as the Trio Accanto - with it's unusual instrumentation of saxophone, percussion, and piano - is a jazz trio that does not play jazz.

When it was first heard in 1962, Mauricio Kagel’s organ piece Improvisation Ajoutée created a scandal. The cause was clearly the sounds the organist and his two assistants were required to produce in addition to the sounds of the instrument – speaking, coughing, laughing, whistling, clapping, and above all loud groans and shouts. There is a further revolutionary innovation in “Improvisation ajoutée”: the two assistants arrange the organ’s registration, and even have a system of their own in the score. As a result, there are very fast shifts in registration and color, which follow their own rhythm and are independent of the organist’s score. The sound world of Kagel’s second work for organ, the Fantasie für Orgel mit Obbligati, is less complex. However, Kagel gave the new work a social, cultural, and theatrical subtext in which the borders between “art” and “life” are crossed more resolutely, thereby establishing an entirely new type of complexity. The organ part is here supplemented by two tape recordings that acoustically depict the organist’s working day, somewhat like an audio film. Dominik Susteck reflects on his experiences with Kagel’s organ works. In the spirit of Kagel, Susteck takes the chance material of the letters of Kagel’s name – K-A-G-E-L – as a challenge to his fantasy, and the titles that capture the basic ideas of the five improvisations have a “kagelesque” quality.

Stormy sounds of widely varying "wind quality" blow through the pieces on the new release by Edition Musikfabrik. In Steffen Schleiermacher's Das Tosen des staunenden Echos (The roar of the amazed echo) the paradox of a "roaring stillness" unfolds in a kind of cantus firmus - echoing ritual recitations from Laos - which meanders amongst the various instruments and moves towards it's finale with sonic force. Kaija Saariaho's storm references are more literary in nature: Shakespeare's play The Tempest serves as a backdrop for her Songbook of the same name and provides the lyrics for the pieces sung finely nuanced by Olivia Vermeulen and Peter Sch�ne. In antagonisme contr�l�, by Michael Wertm�ller, the storm takes place in the formal structure of the work, where the different temperatures of free jazz and new music collide: Peter Br�tzmann - on of the leading free jazz-artists today - together with Ensemble Musikfabrik's percussionist, Dirk Rothbrust, on drumset and Marino Pliakas on e-bass create a high pressure system to face the headwind of the full ensemble. The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Red-Blue-Yellow from 1973, which artistically comments on the thematic bundling of the programme from the highlights of the series "Musikfabrik i'm WDR". Richter has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

Wilhelm Killmayer has written songs since the beginning of his career as a composer, and they are a prominent and essential part of his oeuvre. In the case of Killmayer’s songs, one can clearly see various musical effects influenced by the texts being set, yet these effects nevertheless retain a basic musical identity. A particular atmosphere is especially noticeable in these settings, to which Killmayer has devoted three groups of works of Friedrich Hölderlin. In general, Killmayer succeeded in finding a unique aura of sound for his almost complete setting of the poems, a sound quality that is entirely appropriate for this simple and hermetic poetry. In Killmayer’s two song cycles based on poems by Georg Trakl there is also a musical lyricism growing out of a profound and intense understanding of the text. In a manner appropriate to the poet’s tone of voice, Killmayer’s settings employ a richly varied sound texture to attain a deeper psychological perspective, something that Trakl’s poetry has in common with Hölderlin’s. Killmayer’s extensive song cycle based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff can be performed in two ways: either as an alternation between songs for unaccompanied male chorus and songs for tenor with piano or as a conventional song cycle.

Shaped equally by her roots in China as well as European influences, Ying Wang, with her struggle for an individual musical language, embodies in an exemplary way the challenges of finding a point of balance between two cultures. Ying Wang mediates between the two cultures. She has achieved quite personal solutions in her works, integrating dramatic impulses and meditative sensual sonorities. She regards as especially fruitful the transferring of techniques for the creation of electronic sounds to acoustical instruments. Restriction and freedom are important criteria in "Wave in D", where Wang, out of extremely limited tonal material, draws a rich assemblage of differentiated sound colors from the possibilities of the traditional instrument and the electronics. In "Tun Tu" baritone saxophone and electronic sounds interact and come together in an imaginary sound landscape. The distorted sounds of the instrument, embedded in a cosmos of mysterious electronic colorations, seem at first almost improvisatory, but "Tun Tu" is rigorously organized. In "Coffee & Tea" Ying Wang reflects on contrasts between the cultures of Asia and Europe and uses coffee and tea as metaphors.

I need a musical discourse, Holliger once said. This is a good description of his characteristic way of composing. Unlike Boulez, he does not base his works on charts and tables, but neither does he employ carpets of sound in the manner of Ligeti or the Spectralists. Particularly in his vocal works, Holliger allows himself to follow the associations suggested by certain words, and these associations in turn generate still other connections. "Shir Shavur" [The Broken Song] is the title of a cycle for choir that Holliger wrote based on 12 of David Rokeah's poems. The idea of discourse can be seen in the fact that Holliger set both the Hebrew and the German versions of the text. This principle is also evident in the different ways the choral forces are handled. There are antiphonal or double choir settings, but also responsorial settings for solo and choir. In "Utopie Chorklang" [Choral Sound Utopia], he divided the choir into three groups of twelve voices each. These three groups are "tuned" in different ways, like registers of an organ. The second group sings it's pitches, but the first group sings a third of a tone higher than written and the third group a third of a tone lower.

The compositions on this album are about crashing, decaying and failing. The individual downfalls have very different qualities and consequences: Brian Ferneyhough's La Chute d'Icare is an allegorical fall: the divine punishment for the exuberant Icarus, who drowns in the sea instead of flying to the sun. Stephan Winkler's composition Von der Gewissensnot der Insekten, by contrast, refers to a fall with a more profane cause: excessive alcohol consumption and an open window lead to a fatal event. Eventually, the background of Oscar Bettison's piece Livre des Sauvages is a fall in a figurative sense, caused by the free fall of a supposedly scientific sensation. The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild from 1983, which artistically comments on the thematic bundling of the program from the highlights of the series "Musikfabrik i'm WDR". Richter has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

A cycle of unaccompanied songs for solo voice, framed between two orchestral pieces, this release celebrates the 80th birthday of Aribert Remann. Remann rewrote this cycle of poems for orchestra without the voice, which resulted in Nine Pieces. This cycle took an entirely different direction than the nine poems originally.

Surging sounds of the sea, over them the whistling or even the calling of birds - or so it might seem. An instant later, we only hear the ebb and flow of choral sounds, with individual male voices whistling rubato glissando tones over them. These sounds are typical of Martin Smolka's style. He evokes magically realistic sounds with his compositions.

The final volume in Wergo's acclaimed series of recordings, Earle Brown - a Life in Music, completes the label's reissue of the eighteen LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, recorded between 1960 and 1973. These rare and historically important recordings have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The first disc in this set contains works by John Cage and Christian Wolff from the early 1960s. Disc two presents the outstanding violinist Paul Zukofsky, brilliantly accompanied by the pianist Gilbert Kalish, performing works by George Crumb, Isang Yun, Charles Wuorinen and John Cage. The final disc contains works by the South American composers Gerardo Gandini, Cesar Bolaos, Marlos Nobre, Oscar Baz�n, Manuel Enriquez and Alcides Lanza, performed by the New Sound Composers-Performers Group under the direction of Alcides Lanza.

These piano works by Cowell and Cage cover the period from 1912-1948 and document not only the emergence of experimental American music, but also their teacher-student relationship. Before John Cage began his brief and informal studies with Arnold Schoenberg, he studied composition with Cowell. Amiable Conversation allows us to compare Cowell's piano pieces with Cage's to reveal common features that are as clear as the differences.

Zender has worked to give the central category of “harmony” a special “oppositional” character. Out of his growing dissatisfaction with the equal tempered tuning system, he pushed the treatment of microintonation to the point of dividing the octave into 72 microintervals. It requires enormous vocal and instrumental mastery to make this microtonality seem an unanticipated enrichment. The four compositions on this album, presented here for the first time as a cycle, are steeped in these complex and subtle harmonic ideas, rich in possibilities yet extremely fragile. The pieces, with different performing combinations, function as a cycle primarily because of the poet chosen. ‘St. John of the Cross’ a great Spanish mystic of the 16th century. His “Cántico spiritual” is counted among the literary high points of the Spanish Golden Age. Zender set the first 14 of the complete 40 verses in a manner “entirely like Mozart”; this easily fits into Zender’s sophisticated and pluralistic musical and literary view of the world, which mediates between Hölderlin and Joyce, Shakespeare and Michaux, Dada and the Bible, and which discovers closer connections between Surrealism and Zen philosophy, or Master Eckart and Master Ikkyu, “than are dreamt of in our philosophy”.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces appeared, many of which Scelsi then collected into suites. He began his series of suites with the number 8, since the number 8 had for him a mystic significance. The “Suite No. 8” is subtitled “Bot-ba”, which means “Tibetan”. In fact, the suite has nothing to do with actual Tibetan ritual music, but is an expression of Scelsi’s deep affinity for Eastern philosophy. His final “Suite No. 11” is a special case and was put together quite late in Scelsi’s life, at least in its final version. The interpretation by internationally acclaimed pianist Sabine Liebner is therefore the first authentic recording of the work with its original sequence of movements. Liebner’s meticulously researched 2015 recordings of Scelsi’s Suite No. 9 and Suite No. 10 (WER 67942) have been celebrated by critics.

Like hardly any other personality in music history, Harry Partch has freed himself from the constraints of musical conventions. He has not only left the beaten paths of the conservatories, but has also developed his own microtonal sound system, which he has captured in spectacularly beautiful, archaically wild yet angularly modern instruments that are indispensable for a live performance. Since 2013, Ensemble Musikfabrik has been the only ensemble in possession of a full set of replica Partch instruments. These are not used solely for the performance of Partch’s own music, however; through numerous commissions in the context of their project "pitch 43_tuning the cosmos", they have inspired composers from all over the world to immerse themselves in these fantastical musical sculptures and their world of microtonal sounds. This album presents three outstanding examples of the many and varied ways in which the Cologne-based ensemble has taken up Partch’s legacy: Sampo Haapamäki’s "Heritage", "Wooden Clouds" by Martin Smolka and" Voices for Harry Partch" by Carola Bauckholt.

WERGO's unique "studio reihe" series continues with a rather special release. Arnold Schoenberg's “Serenade”, Op. 24 for seven instruments and baritone voice is one of the historically significant musical works of the early 1920s when Schoenberg began to develop what came to be known as “twelve tone” music or as “composition with twelve tones related to each other” – to use Schoenberg's terminology. The “Serenade”, Op. 24 is one of the earliest compositions that demonstrates twelve-tone technique in its most rudimentary form. The fourth movement, a sonnet by Petrarch and interpreted by Louis-Jacques Rondeleux, deserves special attention; it contains a rather simple sequence of twelve tones which are applied to a hendecasyllabic metre each. The sound recordings were released on the WERGO LP WER 60002 in 1963 and are now remastered in DSD. The recording was made under the direction of Pierre Boulez. Under the title of “studio reihe neuer musik”, WERGO released outstanding recordings in the 1960s, thus creating a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the early years of the label already.

This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award! Herbert Henck: piano.

Soundtrack to the TV film in four parts, "Jahrestage", directed by Margarethe von Trotta (with Suzanne von Borsody and Mathias Habich in the roles of the protagonists) after the four-part novel by Uwe Johnson. Johnson is - besides Grass and Boll - considered to be one of the leading, unerrent and shrewd, chroniclers of the recent German history. The scenes take the viewer to the former German Democratic Republic of the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Republic of Germany, New York, and in flashbacks into the Weimar Republic, the so-called "Third Reich", the terrible time of World War II with the difficult post-war situation. At the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels which took place in Biarritz from 16 to 21 January 2001, the composer Enjott Schneider from Munich, whose stylistically wide-ranging œuvre comprises the opera "Albert - warum?" (Regensburg, 1999), the symphonies "Glockensinfonie. Lied an das Leben" (Domstufenfestspiele Erfurt, 1999) and "Sisyphos" (Herkulessaal Munich, 2001) as well as numerous film musics ("Schlafes Bruder", "23", "Stalingrad", "Das Madchen Rosemarie", etc.), received the golden film award "Fipa d'or" for the best film music ("Meilleure musique originale") in the category "Series et feuilletons". This European prize was awarded to him for his music for the four-part ARD television film "Jahrestage" (directed by Margarethe von Trotta after a novel of Uwe Johnson) which had been released by WERGO on the label ALCRA (ALC 54012) in November 2000.

To unfold a seemingly simple form into an intricate structure: The fan epitomizes the transformation from simple to complex. Transitions from clearly defined forms to figures of great heterogeneity are fundamentally inscribed into the two compositions on this album. In Caspar Johannes Walters "metrische Dissonanzen" the solo percussionist and the ensemble transform harmonic relations into rhythmical processes, fanning out a vast sound universe. And in "Schwankende Zeit" (Swaying Time) Isabel Mundry relates two adaptions of pieces by Louis Couperin to three new pieces of hers and thus creates with numerous musical and extramusical stimuli a network of references and allusions, of nearness and remoteness. The artwork of the album shows Gerhard Richter's "Abstraktes Bild" from 1962, commenting in an artistic manner on the thematic concentration of the program from the highlights of the "Musikfabrik i'm WDR" series. Richter, one of the most important living German artists, has been a member of the board of trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

The continuous change of timbres, lines and textures characterizes the three ensemble pieces on the present portrait album of Lula Romero. Instrumental and vocal parts merge with the manifold interacting live electronics to fluctuating, surreal soundscapes. Sometimes transforming other sounds, sometimes acting as an autonomous sound producer, the live electronics are in first line constructing space. The composer considers spatial elements as an integral part of her compositions and relates them with musical structure and sound material. The ensemble installation 'ins Offene' is - like Romero writes in the score preface - "a trial to superimpose different spaces and to blend them." Another example is the cycle 'die Wanderung' (the trek/wandering) where reduced sound material moves through various states, parts and instrumental spaces. Romero uses a broad range of compositional possibilities, which includes rule-based composing techniques as well as aleatory elements, and thereby creates complex musical structures. The recordings were produced in collaboration with the Deutschlandfunk and the SWR Experimentalstudio. Interpreters include the ensemble Vertixe Sonora, the Zafraan Ensemble and the vocalists Aki Hashimoto, Silke Evers and Noa Frenkel.

A fascinating multitude of tonal colors! We are presumably all familiar with the soprano recorder. But who would have imagined that this instrument from our childhood could also become the subcontrabass recorder or a bass gemshorn? In her "Book of A Hundred Melodies" Barbara Heller (70th birthday on 6 October 2006) has collected musical ideas, condensed them, and thus given each piece it's own character. The freedom the composer has granted in the choice of instrument enables Johannes Fischer to exploit for his interpretation not only all available means of artistic expression but the type of recorder as well. Nearly fifty different instruments, some of them rare and exotic, were used for the recording. Sheet music from Schott Musik International: ED 9484 Barbara Heller: Hundertmelodienbuch for Solo Recorder or other instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet).

Classical Music

Siegfried K�hler's life has been a tight-rope walk between so-called serious music and music for entertainment. He worked as a harpist, repetiteur, and conductor while he composed chamber music works as well as works for large symphonic orchestras. This CD contains works, directed by the composer himself, that show the wide spectrum of his oeuvre from serious chamber works to parts taken from musicals, a criminal comedy, or a musical revue. Liner notes in German.

On this portrait-album the British composer Naomi Pinnock creates tender-fragile, finely differentiated sound formations from highly reduced sound material. The attempt to transform imperfection into sound is crucial for Pinnock's work. Dirk Wieschollek explains in the booklet: 'The concentration and compression of musical gestures into essential expressive elements, always accompanied by the possibility of not existing at all, are often taken to a melancholic extreme.' "String Quartet no. 2" for example in the beginning remains in a heavy, wearily advancing motion created by varied expressive repetitions of a descending chord progression. In the second movement it segues into resigned, melancholic sound circles which end in a barely perceptible, toneless pizzicato at the bridge. Naomi Pinnock frequently derives inspiration for her works from literature and paintings. The piano solo "Lines and Spaces", which gave the title to the release, owes it's existence to her encounter with the abstract paintings of Agnes Martin, whose minimalist square canvases reveal the subtlest nuances of colors and lines. In the composition various differentiations and relations evolve through the reduction on horizontally-conceptualized, singular lines and chordally-inspired, vertical spaces. In "Music for Europe" Naomi Pinnock deals with the Brexit - but not politically motivated: 'I'd already started sketching the piece when the United Kingdom made it's decision to leave the EU. I was utterly devastated about the referendum result. [...] Even though I do adhere to the idea that you should concentrate on the work and not yourself when you're making art - it's going to express yourself anyway, so you don't need to think about self-expression - I can't tell you where I stop and the music starts. The fragility you hear is not contrived.'

Composed by John Cage between 1946 and 1948, "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano is one of the most famous works of the composer and one of the works most admired by listeners and performers alike, holding a key position in his catalogue of works. Several years earlier, Cage had already developed the technique of piano preparation to explore the possibilities of sound manipulation: Preparation tables preceding each of his pieces indicate which materials (e.g. screws, bolts, rubber, felt or plastic elements) have to be used and where they have to be placed between the piano strings. Each object, it's size, strength, fixing method and position changes the pitch, volume, timbre and duration of the original piano sound. In comparison with Cage's earlier pieces, the preparation tables for the "Sonatas and Interludes" are comprehensive and accurate. The preparation, which takes the pianist from two and a half to three hours, encompasses more than half of all the strings of the piano. At first, Cage thus tried to achieve a specified sound image - an ideal which he later modified: "When I first placed objects between piano strings, it was with the desire to possess sounds (to be able to repeat them). But, as the music left my home and went from piano to piano and from pianist to pianist, it became clear that not only are two pianists essentially different from one another, but two pianos are not the same either all led me to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be."