Expressly conceived as a “companion piece” to Carl Orff’s enduringly popular Carmina Burana, Enjott Schneider’s “Orbe Rotundo” received “exceptionally enthusiastic applause for a contemporary work” (Neue Musikzeitung) at its premiere. The composer describes the work (“a collection of pictures on Latin and medieval texts”) as a continuation and expansion of themes dealt with in Carmina Burana. Schneider also utilizes the exact vocal and instrumental forces of Orff’s composition, all of which were in top form for this live recording of the premiere performance. The Munich Motet Choir is the musical protagonist of the piece. Under the direction of Hayko Siemens, to whom the work is dedicated, the choir is by turns explosively dynamic, rhythmically supple, and expressively tender, while always maintaining an impressive and beautiful sonority.

The work was clearly a labor of love for Schneider, an experienced composer of thrilling film music. How could it not be, since the sometimes earthy and extreme texts deal with the full range of human behavior? One critic even speculated about a cinematic realization of the music. Whatever the format, the work seems destined to achieve the success it so richly deserves, providing those who love Carmina Burana with a worthy successor and sequel: “Orbe Rotundo.”

Marko Nikodijevic presents himself on this portrait with three large orchestral works interpreted by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) and the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt. The pieces look back to the past in different ways: sometimes they tie up with musical or cultural traditions, sometimes with personal memories. Like most of the composer's works “ABSOLUTIO“ unfolds from a simple but strict formal principle, in this case a three-note chord. Later, a spiral-like, whirling construction of ever-increasing gravitational pull arises, with the remote outlines of a ‘sonata form’. "abgesang", in turn, has very personal references to the composer's past. The work sets to music a symmetrically constructed poem by his former piano teacher Mátyás Molcer, which describes an autumnal cemetery landscape. It was written in 1995 when the composer's homeland, the former Yugoslavia, was in civil war. In "da ispravitsja / gebetsraum mit nachtwache" the composer goes back even further in his memories and deals with the cultural heritage of his homeland, with the music and liturgy of the Serbian Orthodox church. Using his characteristic, electronically inspired means such as reverberation, resonance and echo, he creates a dark, church-like acoustic space in this work.

Undisputedly brilliant in jazz and rock at all times, the percussion in all its diversity is proving more and more predestined for new music. Leonie Klein, a stirring artist in this field, offers here, partly in duo with Isao Nakamura, a compact, carefully compiled selection of today's music for percussion instruments. A solo version of Peter Eötvös's percussion concerto "Speaking Drums" is performed in true virtuoso style by the interpreter, with the voice of the percussionist joining the sounds of the drums. Vinko Globokar's "Dialog über Erde" experimentally exposes instruments to water, even in a small aquarium - a subtly elemental event. In Sara Glojnaric’s "Latitudes #2", the soloist on the drum set then enters into a breathtakingly virtuoso duel with artificial rhythm impulses from the tape. In Dai Fujikura's "Chattering Birds", the duo gives an astonishing demonstration of how much music is possible while radically reduced to finger cymbals. In Ursula Mamlok's "Variations and Interludes", again arranged for solo by Leonie Klein, the form emerges between the groups of instruments, and Hosokawa's "Windscapes" explores the contrast between vertical accent beats and horizontal sweeping and scratching sounds. And finally, Uroš Rojko's "Ritem kože", after many changes of perspective, constitutes the aesthetically homogeneous virtuoso conclusion to this album.

The new album with works by Enno Poppe joins a series of its own on WERGO, the albums of which are dedicated to the composer born in 1969, who has steadily developed into a permanent fixture among German composers of international renown. The two first recordings are once again ensemble pieces, performed by two new music formations closely associated with the composer: Ensemble Musikfabrik and Ensemble Nikel, a quartet of saxophone, electric guitar, percussion and piano. In the three-movement piece "Fleisch", the "sounds" and playing gestures of pop and rock music are evoked, and microtonal effects are savoured with Moog synthesiser sounds, for which Enno Poppe has a soft spot. Enno Poppe wrote the rhythmically concise piece "Prozession" for the Ensemble Musikfabrik. For almost an hour, the work leads through various instrumental combinations along a continuous chain of differentiated rhythmic impulses of a large percussion section in an astonishingly entertaining manner, only to mysteriously dissolve into natural sounds at the end.

When Pablo Casals rediscovered the cello suites of Bach at the beginning of the 20th century, the novel thing about it was that he played them "senza basso", i.e. without piano accompaniment. In a time of music-historical over-maturity and experimentation, renowned composers soon came up with their own attempts, among them most famously Max Reger's "Solo Suites" and Kodály's "Solo Sonata", both written in 1915. The cellist Julius Berger has made amazing discoveries especially in this early history of new cello solo music and presents them here as a performer in a most lively way. In the accompanying booklet, he enriches the production by adding exciting and witty stories worth knowing about the composers recorded here and their works. The introduction and transition to the new discoveries is made with the second of Reger's three suites, which Julius Berger comments on in an informative and very personal way.

Adolf Busch, on the one hand an eminent musician of the best German (emigrant) tradition, a world-famous violinist, and on the other hand a composer who is at the same time a highly experienced instrumentalist, wrote a Suite dedicated to his cellist brother Hermann in 1914, which is beyond neo-baroque models as regards the character of its movements, as well as a "Prelude and Fugue" from 1922, such as often composed by Bach, but not for cello. The British composer and musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey was a friend of the Busch brothers and admired as a genius by Casals. His expansive "Passacaglia" reminiscent of Bach's "Ciaconna" is admirably mastered with regard to its large-scale form and dates from 1910. The program is completed by a suite that makes reference to baroque movement types by Swiss composer and Munich composition teacher Walter Courvoisier from 1921, which Julius Berger premiered as recently as 1 October 2022.

Once again, Ensemble Aventure presents a jewel of new music that has so far been little known in Europe within its series of works by Latin American composers on WERGO: "Flores blancas", chamber and ensemble music by the Argentine composer Mariano Etkin. Listeners are captivated by the raw power of “La naturaleza de las cosas”, the title of which is an apt characterization of Mariano Etkin’s compositional language, which is a celebration of the sensuous nature of sounds and of the human senses as a source of knowledge without illusions, realized with a small number of “sound objects” that appear and fade away with a sense of both beauty and pain. Each of the eight works (from 1992 to 2016, Etkin’s late compositional period) on this recording focuses in its own way on the physicality of sounds and the foundations of human existence.

In his last years, Etkin’s musical language became more densely lyrical, introspective, and focused on fundamental elements of human existence such as dreams (“Sueños olvidados”) or blood (“Le sangre del cuerpo”) and, above all, tears (“Estudios para lágrimas”). Mariano Etkin creates authentic crystals of intensity – an unflinchingly existential music that looks into the eye of darkness, but nevertheless spreads its wings. It sings, throbs, and shivers with excitement before dissolving in pain and beauty.

For decades, Ludger Brümmer has represented a unique, courageous, and often instantly recognisable voice in electronic, algorithmic, and computer music. He develops structures that lead to aesthetic experiences normally found, if at all, only in the most expressive of instrumental works. Ludger Brümmer’s music is dominated by processes. All processes are on a trajectory towards a climax or evolve from a climax to a minimum. Ultimately, a complete lack of orientation is to be achieved in the climax: an established system has used itself up and thereby becomes obsolete. The moment remains when the idea, the sonic construction, the parameters have reached the maximum and collapse in on themselves to make room for something new.

Ludger Brümmer’s compositions oscillate between moments of greatest energy and complete emptiness. Both states can be absolutely equal in their emotional intensity. There is an alternation between inner and outer perception, between intense stimuli from outside and the subtle inner experience of time. Radical from the get-go, Brümmer has unified instrument and musical structure in most of his digitally produced works. He can thus be seen as a digital pioneer, unifying our perception of his music not just conceptually but experientially across all time levels in works of often symphonic proportions. The double album “Ludger Brümmer: Sonic Patterns” published by WERGO in the Edition ZKM, is a result of the project EASTN-DC and funded by the program 'Creative Europe'. The first double album “Ludger Brümmer: Spheres of Resonance” was released by WERGO in August 2022.

The fact that Genoël von Lilienstern's childhood falls in the 1980s is proven by his portrait album in many ways: On the one hand, it is synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 that shape the aesthetics and sound of his works; on the other hand, the radio, as the supplier for countless mixtapes at the time, is the focus, sometimes directly, sometimes more hiddenly. Booklet author Julian Kämper refers to their special quality when he describes von Lilienstern's recourse to pop cultural artifacts and practices of the Eighties: "Thanks to the new studio facilities of that decade, a distinctive sound was newly defined and perfected, a sound which, von Lilienstern maintains, has ‘never mouldered away’ and has remained all-pervasive to the present day through ceaseless daily bombardment on radio and television, in department stores and on the internet."

In “Voz Comercial”, for example, the Berlin composer uses transcriptions of radio commercials from Mexico and Peru; in “Big Picture”, in turn, a one-hour recording of worldwide Internet radio stations serves as the source material. In both works, the vocals of Johanna Vargas respectively Soetkin Elbers, take on a central role and, in their interplay with the Ensemble Garage, evoke an image that oscillates between excessive consumer society and acoustic reflection. In the two other pieces on the portrait album – “Couture” and “Top” - synthesizers dominate: von Lilienstern uses them as sound generators of a bygone era. In the case of Couture, they mix with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, so that the individual musical sources are sometimes no longer discernible.

After the invention of the saxophone about 180 years ago, it has been hugely successful in certain musical styles, but never really established itself in the symphony orchestra. It’s still seen as a newcomer, and relatively few solo works have been written for it – at least until recently. Marcus Weiss, one of the most successful classical saxophonists, chose four very characteristic concertante pieces from recent decades that demonstrate a wide range of possibilities for the instrument. All four pieces were premiered by him and three of them are dedicated to him. The compositions represent various directions within New Music with very distinct individual characters each.

“The pieces also show that we saxophone soloists always play the full range of instruments, from the lowest to the highest, from baritone to soprano. Every instrument is able to show its particular qualities in these works.” (Marcus Weiss) When Adolphe Sax applied for patents for his new instrument in Paris in 1846, he submitted drawings of the baritone saxophone. Georg Friedrich Haas’s work is therefore the centerpiece of this recording – the baritone with its physical power, with multiphonics that are juxtaposed with the orchestra, but also with a singing parlando. The youngest piece of this album, Peter Eötvös’s very virtuosic “Focus”, and the work by Johannes Maria Staud use both tenor and alto sax, while the soprano is exactly the right choice for Vykintas Baltakas’ crystalline music.

The music of Sergej Maingardt is at the pulse of time. He draws inspiration from socio-political topics and the effects of the digitized and globalized world on our perception and thought processes. The use of modern technologies, pop cultural influences and “noise”-elements form a sonic connection in his works. The pieces of the album “straight run” interrelate, complement, and comment on each other. “SMOG” is the initial point of this portrait. Its sonic material is generated from electromagnetic fields of computers scanned and selected with solenoids. “The noise inherent to SMOG leads subtly to a continuum spanning all nine pieces. The sonic noise is partly joined by ‘pictorial noise’”, as Egbert Hiller points out in the booklet’s essay. Six audio-visual works were created in productive interaction with video artist Jens Standke. The musical journey leads from distorted (self-)perception in social networks (“Construct ¬– deconstruct”) to the splitting up of features and patterns of pop and rock music (“It’s Britney, bitch!“ and “HeroIn“) and ends with a declaration of the own artistic independence of the composer in the last work of the album: ‘Moreover, Declare Independence is a rebellion and is meant to show that above all I am curious, always on the lookout and ready to embark for new shores.’

The Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020), who died at the beginning of the pandemic-related cultural hiatus which has been unique with regard to world history, was able to experience considerable appreciation in his last two decades, which recently gained more and more momentum. Coming from an aristocracy of piano teaching - Kapustin was a pupil of a pupil of Horowitz's teacher Blumenfeld and then studied with the great Alexander Goldenweiser until 1961 - he was denied great recognition in the Soviet Union. As with many great piano composers since Chopin, the cycle of concert etudes from the middle of his life is particularly suitable for an introduction to this world of works. Kapustin's typical reference to jazz, which probably kept him from greater success in the Soviet years, is based on the highly individual, deliberate adaptation of stylistic elements. He got to know jazz greats such as Ellington, Basie, Cole, Garner, Peterson and others through records and the radio and picked out what suited him.

The extremely sensitive, not monotonously hammering as is so often the case, approach of the Chinese pianist A Bu, who is also trained in jazz, is pleasing with regard to interpretation, and he demonstrates his affinity for Kapustin's music through two samples of his own work. An affectionate and valuable addition to the recording is the story of his acquaintance with Kapustin in Moscow told by the young A Bu in the accompanying booklet, illustrated with photos.

[The] new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022. -- The New York Times

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–1970) was one of the most distinctive composers in the musical avant-garde after the Second World War. While Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a kind of ‘generator’ in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s, inventing completely new sounds and techniques, Zimmermann was in many ways his opposite, a ‘transformer’ who redefined previously existing material by placing it in new contexts and collage-like structures, anticipating the ideas of the Postmodernists. Zimmermann created these new contexts on many levels.

Especially in his younger years, he arranged and orchestrated songs and piano pieces using brash and daring instrumental colors. These arrangements then found their way into his works that are now recognized as modern masterpieces: “Alagoana”, “Konzert”, “Sinfonie in einem Satz”, “Stille und Umkehr”, etc. His self-composed works employing numerous quotations as well as his arrangements ‘recomposing’ previously existing music are juxtaposed in the excellent recordings presented by WERGO in this collection. It contains more than three hours of music as well as an extensive booklet with a wealth of information and an interview with Heinz Holliger, the guiding spirit behind this production.

Holliger conducted all of the recordings and has worked for years to ensure that Zimmermann’s long-forgotten arrangements were rescued, published, performed, and recorded. The performances and recordings took place as part of the celebrations organized by the WDR in Cologne in honor of Zimmermann’s 100th birthday. This new release from WERGO presents a fresh perspective on the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose tragic suicide shortly after the completion of “Stille und Umkehr” shocked the musical world. His fascinating instrumental effects and his embrace of popular and traditional music make his works feel much more at home in our contemporary world than they did in the cultural atmosphere of his time, with its faith with technology and progress.

The new album of orchestral works by composer Enjott Schneider focuses on the materials wood and metal. Wood represents the organic world, it is alive. Created from solar energy, wood is the engine of our living ecosystem. Metal symbolizes the inorganic world and since the beginning of its use – made possible by the taming of fire – for progress, but also for the lifeless. The antagonistic worlds of wood and metal are depicted on this album in two very different percussion concertos. This was made possible by the enthusiastic participation of the two soloists.

David Christopher Panzl constructed a unique setup containing everything from bullroarers to bells made of elm wood. Stefan Blum scavenged garbage dumps to collect scrap metal and created a full spectrum of modern percussion colors out of this "scrap". The outer movements of the concerto “Secret of Trees” were inspired by two particular trees, the elm and the spruce. The middle movement consists of a series of miniatures symbolizing the three energy fields of all trees: roots, trunk, and foliage. "Machine Worlds", the concerto for scrap metal, percussion and orchestra, is dedicated to the dialectic "man – machine" as it appears in the movies "Batman: Gotham City" or "Metropolis" as well as in the visual arts – e.g. in the works by Duchamp, HR Giger up to Jean Tinguely and his machine sculptures. As a follow-up to Enjott Schneider's percussion concertos, both performers also recorded small solo works to present the rich variety of sounds offered by the unusual instrumental setups.

The double album “Spheres of Resonance” contains central works from Ludger Brümmer's compositional oeuvre. In these, Ludger Brümmer not only explores new timbres or new musical architectures, but also attempts to resolve the ontological discontinuity between macro- and microstructure inherent in traditional musical writing. Central to Ludger Brümmer's compositional concept are the methods of granular synthesis and physical modeling all controlled by custom-made algorithms. The pieces “Gesualdo”, “Carlo”, “Glass Harp” and “Falling” on this album were created with the help of granular synthesis. This method can be described as an image that is cut into small particles and reassembled. The sonic results of such an operation can certainly be compared to the painting of the pointillists. For the works “Cellularium”, “Spheres of Resonance”, “Lizard Point” and “Gestalt” the simulation software GENESIS was used. This is a method by means of which the material and vibration properties of real objects can be imitated extremely realistically and the slowed down course of the vibration can be viewed in detail.

Ludger Brümmer uses these means to create a dramatic world of sound in which the sound structure plays a major, almost expressive role. In many works the interaction with historical material is central – an attempt to build a new language on old foundations, with sometimes astonishing results. The album “Ludger Brümmer: Spheres of Resonance”, published by WERGO within the Edition ZKM, is a result of the project EASTN-DC and funded by the program “Creative Europe”. The second double album “Ludger Brümmer: Sonic Patterns” will be released by WERGO at the end of 2022.

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.