This new WERGO album brings together first recordings in studio quality of works composed especially for Ensemble Resonanz. Composer Enno Poppe has always been drawn to string instruments because of the nearly infinite possibilities to vary their pitch, playing techniques, and sound qualities. Ensemble Resonanz, based in Hamburg, has received international acclaim for its precise intonation, its fresh interpretations of both contemporary and traditional works, and its inquisitive openness to unconventional musical formats. Poppe’s “Wald” [Woods] for four string quartets (2009/10) has been a permanent feature of the ensemble’s touring repertoire for many years. With its fractal relationships between the four strings of four instruments in four string quartet groupings, “Wald” gives us the impression of directly participating in the composer’s thought processes. The collaboration with renowned soloist Tabea Zimmermann for Poppe’s concerto “Filz” [Felt] for viola and chamber orchestra (2013/14) was particularly enjoyable for all concerned. Zimmermann combines technical virtuosity with a willingness to master unusual challenges: in this work, she plays an endless and permanently shifting intonation curve within an amorphous atmosphere of 1/3-tone intervals. The result sounds like music from another world, and the inspiration came from Poppe’s experiences with traditional Korean music. “Stoff” [Material] was originally composed in 2015 for Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne using strings, woodwinds, and brass (available on WER 73952}, but in 2018 Poppe created the more homogeneous version for string orchestra heard here.

Enno Poppe’s works are probably performed more often than those of any other living German composer – not only in Germany. With his idiosyncratic manner of dealing with tradition, this red-haired artist, born in 1969, has developed an instantly recognizable musical style that fascinates and touches both specialists and listeners normally skeptical of new music. No matter how wild or eccentric, how chaotic or structured Poppe’s pieces may sound, they always reveal the raw materials from which they are made: a small number of nondescript building blocks (quasi-motifs). The fascination for the listener consists in the perceptible transformation of these motifs. Poppe has worked closely for many years as a conductor with the Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne and has written a number of pieces especially for the group. The current album collects these chamber music works, including “Stoff” for nine musicians. The German word “Stoff” can refer to fabric or any kind of material, including musical or literary material; the appearance and disappearance of motivic threads is also characteristic of the “Nouveau Roman.” The titles and sounds of the other works are also simultaneously direct and ambiguous. This album is part of WERGO’s comprehensive series documenting Enno Poppe’s music.

Classical Music

“Seidener Faden -Silken Thread” is WERGO’s second album portrait of Younghi Pagh-Paan. The first appeared 26 years ago, and this new recording is long overdue, given the composer’s increasing recognition in the field of New Music and the countless international awards she has accrued in recent years, among them the Berlin Art Prize in 2020. Born into a working class family in South Korea, Younghi Pagh-Paan has had a remarkable career: she was a student in Seoul from 1965–72 before receiving a scholarship to study in Germany in 1974. One of her composition teachers was Klaus Huber, whom she later married. In 1994, Pagh-Paan was the first woman in Germany to be appointed a professor of composition. She has been an influential teacher and mentor to a younger generation and a role model for female composers around the world. Her works have been performed at the most prominent international festivals and have a strongly individual identity, combining western Modernism with elements of traditional Korean music such as microtonal variation rather than chromatic motion. The E-MEX Ensemble prepared these first recordings in close collaboration with the composer. The newer pieces arose in connection with Pagh-Paan’s chamber opera “Mondschatten” (Stuttgart, 2006) and deal with questions of human existence, mortality, and religious experience. The three older works included here, “BIDAN-SIL” and the two “TA-RYONG” pieces, are anchored in the rituals and instrumental traditions of Korean folk music.

The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new WERGO album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX – Accanto” (2017) is a testament to his long-standing friendship with the musicians. Peculiarly serene and unobtrusively narrative, the piece features many reminiscences and hidden quotations from music by J. S. Bach to union songs. There are also tributes to Wolff's own “Exercises”, whose more recent numbers can be heard on the album as well. These “Exercises” sound lucid and atmospheric, yet complex. Each player has to decide for himself/herself on the course of the musical thoughts and spontaneously put them together in the group as an exercise. Collective agreement for individual positions as a musical and social task. This music by Wolff “still sings a longer modernism”, writes Seth Brodsky. “You can hear the historical horizon in it, not as some grandiose prophecy, but like an outline full of white space. The music is interested in the grace of presentness, of being-here, but it doesn’t lack desire.”

“I felt obliged to belong to the avant-garde – which at that time meant serialism or the alternative culture of Happenings – but I always had a somewhat uncomfortable feeling”, the composer Balz Trümy said. “The reason is simple: I have no talent for that kind of music. Nonetheless, I naturally wanted to ‘belong’. With the ideological line, it was a similar situation: in order to be taken seriously, you had to have a ‘program’, and here too I lacked any particular talent. I finally decided that my program consisted of the simple wish to write beautiful and coherent music, whatever that may mean.” For Trümpy, composing represents the “possibility to transport something from other dimensions into our reality of time and space.” This is made most clear in the longest work on this album, the “Oracula Sibyllae”, which can be seen as both the point of departure and the goal of this collection. Balz Trümpy wrote the piece for the El Cimarron Ensemble, to whose members it is dedicated.

The prophecies of Leonardo da Vinci – timeless and enigmatic. They are at the heart of the compositions by Andreas H. H. Suberg. After studying Leonardo's more than 150 prophecies intensively, Suberg used them to create a fascinating cycle. These musical scenarios are now for the first time released by WERGO in a top-class recording. Performers include powerful and dynamic countertenor Daniel Gloger, intensely expressive trumpeter Paul Hübner and brilliantly precise percussionist Olaf Tzschoppe. Suberg translated some of the prophecies into percussive instrument sounds, making the tonal suggestions of the texts the starting point of his compositions: I dadi (The dice) becomes an aleatory and performative exercise in the spirit of John Cage. De´ metalli (Of metals) and Delle campanelle (Of bells) play with the sounds of metal and bells while Delle pelle (Of skins) work with the sounds of skin. And finally, Leonardo's prophecies gave the composer cause for reflecting musically on currently virulent phenomena: Delle pelle II, the prophecy on the balls for playing, for example, is put by Suberg into the context of modern football playing. And De la bocca dell’ omo ch’è sepoltura (Of the mouth of man) deals with the life-despising methods of meat production.

String quartets have for a long time been received as a conversation between four rational people. For 20th and 21st century composers wanting to leave this idea of a discussion behind, the question has been: in what other ways can one write for two violins, viola, and violoncello? Helmut Zapf’s three string quartets perfectly illustrate the stages of such a confrontation. They have appeared throughout his entire career as a composer, and can be understood as markers for different periods in his compositional output. In Zapfs first string quartet elements of an individual musical rhetoric survive and are clearly understandable as such. However, the context – the “rational conversation” – is now present in only a rudimentary fashion. The second string quartet is a logical continuation of the path already established by Zapf: the last remnants of rhetoric and conversational discourse are dispensed with. The four instruments do not act individually, but are treated as a single organism. The third string quartet has been written for the Sonar group. This composition takes up the experiences of the previous pieces and at the same time tries to connect with the tradition: a reconnection from a great and skeptical distance.

“In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” John Cage noted in 1957. Like the white of a canvas, deafening silence continually surrounds notated and sounded music. And even where music can be heard, it can eloquently conceal things; it can loudly shout out the longing for silence, or it can masterly play with resounding silence. In this edition, four distinctly different pieces reflect four completely different attempts to deal with emotional or audible silence, giving us a glimpse behind the “continuum” that surrounds us. As John Cage stated, “times have changed; music has changed”. It will never stop doing so. The demanding artwork of the album series is created with pictures by the painter Gerhard Richter, commenting on the thematic concentration of the programs in an artistic manner. Richter, one of the most important living German artists, has been a member of the board of trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

Siberia is known for its vast distances and the unfathomable dimensions of its unspoiled landscapes of rivers and lakes, forests and mountains, and tundra and taiga. The city of Krasnoyarsk is at the center of Eurasia between Moscow and Beijing and has a surprisingly vibrant musical life. In 2019, the city commissioned two works by Enjott Schneider, one of Germany’s most multifaceted composers. For the “Asia-Siberia-Europe Festival”, Schneider composed “Spirits of Siberia” for trumpet, strings, and percussion. In this work, trumpet virtuoso Reinhold Friedrich embodies the world of shamanistic mysteries. In the piece’s four movements, the soloist conjures the Siberian flora and fauna with mystical sound worlds that take us far beyond the reality of our normal physical senses. “Leporello & Giovanni” was commissioned by the Trans-Siberian Art Festival. The double continent of Eurasia is symbolized in this double concerto by double bass and contrabass balalaika played by two of the world’s finest virtuosos: Artem Chirkov, the principal double bass player of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia, and Mikhail Dzyudze, whose innovations have brought the balalaika from folk music into the classical concert halls of the world. The music moves against the background of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, with the soloists energetically personifying the complicated relationship between Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello.

Rolf Riehm is an unconventional artist, a radical composer, and a politically engaged human being. His compositions reject tradition, yet draw on the entire historical spectrum of expressive possibilities. Skeptical of systematic organization, Riehm’s music tells stories in sound for attentive listeners, stories that deal with mythical, psychological, and political themes. The two pieces by Riehm on this album evoke archaic and archetypal situations: O Daddy (written in 1984) reflects on the true story of Marco Caruso, a young Italian who killed his father in 1977 and became the recipient a remarkable outpouring of public support. In the course of Riehm’s music, it is impossible for the listener to predict whether any particular musical constellation will be followed by rapid movement in the strings, by the electronic sounds of a recorded voice, or by percussive rhythmic figures. Die schrecklich-gewaltigen Kinder [The Terrible and Violent Children] from 2003 bases on an excerpt from the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogeny. Riehm drew inspiration for compositional structures and details of his music from this work and its history of adaptation by contemporary authors, transforming the material into archetypal worlds of sound.

The Trio Accanto’s unconventional instrumentation of saxophone, piano, and percussion fascinates composers and inspires them to look beyond their usual musical horizons. This is confirmed by the collection of pieces on this recording, which documents the ensemble’s challenging yet accessible repertoire. Helmut Lachenmann describes his “Marche fatale” as a kind of musical “derailment”. It is a highly virtuoso and brilliantly constructed march in which the master of unconventional playing techniques and noise-like instrumental sounds surprises listeners with his mastery of major/minor tonality, something still shunned in certain avant-garde circles. Lachenmann’s “Sakura-Variationen” [Cherry Blossom Variations], on the other hand, are anything but noise-like. These melodic postmodern collages appear in three different versions on this release. Works by four other composers are also included in this collection. Martin Schüttler’s “xerox” plays with the “trashy” aesthetic of our everyday electronic environment, presenting glittering metallic sounds that turn out to be the noises of a copy machine. “In Between” by Yu Kawabara offers an abstract scenario of contrasting sound characters and gliding wave motions. Martin Smolka’s “fff (Fortissimo feroce Fittipaldi)” is short, wild, and extreme: it depicts a Formula One race with legendary Brazilian driver Emerson Fittipaldi. Michael Finnissy’s “Opera of the Nobility” has a clear, symmetrical architecture. With original material as well as quotations from works performed by the historical London opera company of the same name, Finnissy creates a web of relationships where there is no separation between history and the present tense, the private and political spheres, or the music’s inner life and extra-musical reality.

Founded in New York in 2005, the contemporary music quartet Yarn/Wire is made up of two percussionists and two pianists. The group has gained an international reputation for dazzling and innovative programs. This release features outstanding studio-quality first recordings of three works that grew out of Yarn/Wire’s long association with the artistic team of Wolfgang Heiniger (percussionist, composer, sound designer) and Enno Poppe (pianist, composer, conductor). Heiniger and Poppe have worked together for more than 20 years and the piece “Tonband” (2008/2012) was a collaborative effort: Poppe composed the first two movements and Heiniger the final three. The work is indebted to Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” for piano, percussion, and four-track electronics from 1958–1960 but also contains references to rock music and has an uninhibited approach to melody. The other pieces on this album grew out of the two composers’ work on “Tonband”. “Feld” is the most explosively rhythmic music Poppe has composed to date – extremely challenging for the performers yet electrifying and highly expressive. While Bartók used the pianos for percussive effects in his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion from 1937, Poppe here treats the percussion instruments like “extended pianos.” Heiniger’s “Neumond” (2018) places historic electric organ sounds in a constantly shifting tonal space, recalling the dark aesthetic of old horror films as well as other pieces on which he collaborated with Enno Poppe such as “Rad”, “Arbeit”, and “Rundfunk”.

Mark Barden’s music attends to the thresholds of our perception. Subtle deviations, ephemeral swarms of detail, and sustained sonic textures predominate on this portrait recording, as Paul Griffiths' booklet text notes. In these works, which range from solo to full orchestra, Barden hunts for extremes. “Veil” unfolds at the edge of stillness. Two piccolos enfold one another, superimposing pitched and breath sounds with the fluctuating caprice of a veil caught in the air's shimmer. Other works sculpt volatile sounds verging on ex- or implosion that Barden culls from registral extremes. In “cleft”, an exhaustive string duo played with ferocious intensity by Ashot Sarkissjan and Séverine Ballon, Barden focuses on the threshold between unity and divergence, between fusion and splitting. “Can we imagine,” he asks, “that a gap created between cleft layers is not empty but instead rages with chaotic violence?” While smaller instrumentations frame this violence in a sharp and rarefied manner, the orchestral and ensemble works here inhabit a broader, more weighted space. In “aMass”, interpreted by ensemble mosaik, Barden deploys three very different trios to produce a dense, self-similar sound mass that grows to a brutal, sustained climax. Rivaling this sonic power is the titular work “anatomy”, an early orchestral work for percussion solo and large orchestra, heard here by Brian Archinal and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Peter Rundel.

Gy�rgy Ligeti's "Requiem" for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra is one of his most impressive compositions - especially, when directed by Michael Gielen - and at the same time "the" requiem of the 20th century: Sound which is chromatically layered moves gradually from the lower registers to the higher, thus changing from mourning sounds into the promise of the eternal light. In the Kyrie the polyphonic net which was previously static begins to move gently. It was a part of this composition that Stanley Kubrick used to accompany the discovery of the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Also on this WERGO disc are two other essential works, "Aventures" and "Nouvelles Aventures", highly theatrical and justly celebrated choral works.