[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.

Ein Traumspiel" (A Dream Play) - Aribert Reimann's first opera - is finally available on CD, in the production by the Hof Theater that was enthusiastically acclaimed by critics and opera audiences alike. Vocal music is a central element of Aribert Reimann's compositional output, and literature plays an equally central role for him as a source of dramatic impulse, inspiration, and subject matter - as well as providing an opportunity for creative friction and musical transformation. Reimann's compositions for the voice - from unaccompanied solo pieces to opera - are almost always settings of literary texts. The visually stunning "Traumspiel" captivates from the very first note with it's melodic diversity and intensity. Aribert Reimann succeeds in bringing the underlying theme of August Strindberg's play, compassion, to life in a sensual way, and at the end gives Indra's daughter a gift package of human worries, sufferings, and complaints, tied up with masterful music, to take with her to the afterlife to the god Indra. In addition to August Strindberg, Reimann was also inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, although he takes a completely different musical approach to Rilke's first "Duino Elegy": in his composition "Denn Bleiben ist nirgends" (For to Stay is to be Nowhere), he combines the text, recited by a speaker, with a symphony orchestra playing in a broad, expansive style to create a melodrama. Herein, the music corresponds to Rilke's poetic text that - according to Reimann in his notes on the work - "justifies the development of an independent piece of music and is not simply the point of departure for subsidiary background music." The result is "a constant exchange, in which the expressive impulses sometimes come from the language and are taken up by the music, or vice versa, until each becomes the instrument of the other.

“It was only with Partch that a music began to take shape that could do equal justice to the physical desire for rhythmic pulse and a curiosity for new, unheard sounds; a music that enthralls us despite, or rather, precisely because of its unfamiliarity. A music for which we have no category, and which has no location, and yet in a strange way is grounded.” (Heiner Goebbels) The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is considered a pioneer of the Just Intonation movement and was far ahead of his time when he began to explore microtonality. In the course of his life, he not only created a highly complex tonal system, but also designed and built an extensive set of instruments of sculptural beauty and great stage presence for its realisation, the only and original set of which is preserved in the USA.

On the occasion of the opening of the Ruhrtriennale 2013 with "Delusion of the Fury", staged by Heiner Goebbels, Harry Partch's entire set of microtonal instruments was reconstructed for the Ensemble Musikfabrik and learned by the musicians. It was only through this enormous reconstruction that performances of Partch's music outside his home country became possible at all. The dance and music theatre "Delusion of the Fury", whose recording by the Ensemble Musikfabrik sets new standards, is considered a key work and musical quintessence in Harry Partch's oeuvre. The extensive booklet documents the extraordinary music theatre production with numerous pictures as well as texts by Heiner Goebbels and Edu Haubensak.

The title 'Vida' of Misha Cvijovic's portrait album combines meanings from different languages - life, sight, healing and myth. The composer's music is equally multi-layered, resulting from her exploration of varying sonic and artistic perspectives. Booklet author Carl Rosman explains: 'A keen awareness of stage and physicality is constantly present, in works whose language is typically gestural, eclectic, and direct - although not without irony and polyvalence.' The album has three focal points: it begins with early compositions such as 'Lica Persefone', 'Tikkun Olam' and 'Cirque du Soleil'. As part of a young generation of composers from the former Yugoslavia who are significantly shaping the local contemporary music scene, Cvijovic also uses the ?-time rhythm of the Balkan region in the latter work, among others. She transfers this into a kaleidoscopic sound world in which the trumpet (Marco Blaauw) stands out with short acrobatic solos. The album also includes works such as 'Penumbra', 'Carbon' and 'Emotional Logic - Anger', which depart from the classical mainstream and take greater risks in improvisation and form, for example by expanding the ensemble with the timbres of accordion, baritone saxophone and electric guitar in 'Penumbra'. With 'Iktsuarpok' and 'Incandescent', the focus finally shifts to electronic and electroacoustic sound. Five of these works were recorded especially for this album in collaboration with the Ensemble Musikfabrik and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Enno Poppe can also be heard, as well as Sebastian Berweck on the Minimoog and the Trio Splitsignals Berlin.

Yongbom Lee's music is characterized by continuous streams of sound and a finely balanced interplay between instrumental and electronic elements. Shaped by his intercultural background, Lee is particularly interested in the intersections and distances between contrasting concepts - such as the foreign and the familiar, or the conscious and the unconscious. Booklet author Leonie Reineke elaborates: "Ambiguity is another concept associated with the focus on spaces, a theme running through all the compositions on the album. Suspended states, associative developments, as when dreaming, and musical situations in which anything can develop from anything else recur time and again." The work "Imaginary Rooms", performed by Ensemble Recherche, moves between a progressive narrative and fragmentary snapshots. In "D�paysement", the composer again explores the coexistence of opposing ideas: the first movement grants the musicians of the Broken Frames Syndicate improvisational freedom, while the second is written in a strictly traditional manner. The title piece, "Continuous Deformation", for cello (Kyubin Hwang) and live electronics (Yongbom Lee), reflects his engagement with neuroscience - linking the performer's sound production and brain activity, and guiding listeners through overtone landscapes.

The music of Iranian composer Elnaz Seyedi challenges the listener to discover multi-layered and subtle sounds, often at the limit of perception. According to Dirk Wieschollek in the booklet text, Seyedi's compositions are characterized by the simultaneous presence of opposites: "the widely separated registers of the instruments, and the tension between fragment and continuum, development and stasis, tonal abstraction and enigmatic relationships to extra-musical content." Borrowings from poetry, which often form the intellectual breeding ground of her works, are particularly striking, such as in "Nach neuen Meeren" for clarinet and accordion, written for and interpreted by the Zollner-Roche duo. It was based on the homonymous poem by Friedrich Nietzsche. The painting "The Sun" by Edvard Munch in turn inspired Seyedi to create the ensemble work "a sun of one's own". The finest colour gradations and an imperceptible brightening are reproduced here by the Kommas Ensemble. In addition to traditional instruments, the composer also experiments with unusual sound producers such as spatulas of different sizes and pitches in the musical-scenic work "PS-nach Spuren" in collaboration with the composer Ehsan Khatibi, which is integrated into this portrait as an online video. Special instruments by the pioneer of microtonality Harry Partch can be heard in Ensemble Musikfabrik's interpretation of "fragments inside".

New music with entertainment value can be found in the works of Benjamin Scheuer. On the surface, his music surprises with humorous, crazy sounds and playful elements. In the background, Scheuer shapes his compositions, which often consist of various miniatures, in a very precise and complex way. "His preference for whimsical sounds, dislocated vocals and weird gestures is, of course, evidence of a wild sense of humor, but at the same time it demonstrates an indestructible musicality and, yes, seriousness," says booklet author Gordon Kampe. In the song cycle "Impulsive Lieder", which gives the album it's title, Scheuer illuminates an idea, a particular sound or a process in each track, dissecting and exaggerating them. The use of the simplest electronic means lends the pieces a lo-fi-aesthetic and often leads the listener astray. In addition to three ensemble works, two solo pieces, interpreted by Vanessa Porter and Nikolai Rosenberg, complete the portrait both as audio and video. Here it becomes clear that Scheuer makes use of a broad palette of sounds: rubber pig, kazoo or unrolling party horn can be heard as well as traditional instruments. And last but not least, his compositional focus lies on people and their voices, as in "Lachtherapie" (Laughter Therapy), in which the pianist amazes with crazy nuances of laughter.

Multifaceted tonal colours, virtuosity, and a field of tension between ruptures and connections characterize the music of Turgut Ercetin. In particular, he illuminates the in-between spaces in a wide variety of dimensions. As Paul Griffiths explains in the booklet, the composer explores "the space between instruments or groups, between harmony and noise [...], between spectra, between what is played and what resounds from the performance space." At the center of the album lies the cycle "Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wortern" ("The Phoneme Between Two Words"). The largest part, (b), draws on one of Turgut Ercetin's research fields: vanished architecture, here referring to two demolished Byzantine buildings. In this work, the SWR Symphony Orchestra as a modern orchestra meets a Baroque ensemble with musicians from the ELISION Ensemble. However, the two formations do not appear as opposites but as mutually interacting seeds. The smaller pieces (a) and (c) function as fanfare and epilogue: they condense the themes of fusion and separation, ultimately leading the ELISION musicians back to modern instruments. Ensemble Musikfabrik is featured in two works on this album: "Resonances (b)" and "Thousand Dead Bodies Under My Bed, All Cloaked with the Breath of the Living". The latter recalls how the past continues to live on - in art, in memory, in trauma. Within three interlaced ensembles, an interplay unfolds: characteristics drift from one group to another, while the very nature of the piece as a whole gradually shifts.

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.

In Farzia Fallah's music, all ears are focused on the sound. It is both the core and the shell of every acoustic process, its beginning and end. From this consistent approach, the Iranian-born composer develops different, mostly filigree structures and forms. This reflects Fallah's idea of music that speaks through sound, but is difficult to verbalize, as she explains in the booklet text: "For me, art is a kind of reflection, but it is difficult to speak literally about the content. I believe that there is content in every work of art, but linguistically we can only approach it by analyzing and describing it. There is always a distance.

In her search for sound, Fallah draws on various line-ups for the CD portrait: it begins with Benedikt Bindewald's multi-layered violin playing in "… und dann befreit…?", gradually expanding the range of instruments over the course of the album. In addition to Tobias Klich's and Henrik Dewes' guitars in "täglicher Blick auf den Alborz," a trio from Ensemble S201 ("Ausgedehnter Augenblick," online only), the Sonar Quartet ("Holz-Haar-Atem-Licht"), the six-piece ensemble DEHIO ("im selben Augenblick"), and the Ensemble Aventure as a nonet ("Unter Bewunderung der Farben") have their say.

Vladimir Guicheff Bogacz's music thrives on surprises. Behind every note, there are unexpected twists and turns, which in turn lead to an exuberant sea of sound. Genre boundaries are deliberately crossed or not recognised at all. New music meets jazz meets South American folklore. Booklet author Rainer Nonnenmann summarises Guicheff Bogacz's musical approach as follows:"Hardly anything in his music is what one would expect from a particular instrumentation, genre, section or style. Existing traditions and narratives are questioned anew, turned around or dissolved."

In “encuentros casuals”, for example, the Uruguayan-born composer draws on the music of jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy or makes the cello in “igualito, igualito, igualito” sound like the guitar of Chilean singer Violeta Parra. “Vos, seguime” – recorded by Ensemble Musikfabrik – reflects on the classical piano trio, with its expansion simultaneously leading to its deconstruction. Finally, the members of Kollektiv3:6Koeln are allowed to complete an almost 35-minute tour de force in the ensemble composition “Heimlich”: In it, Vladimir Guicheff Bogacz explores the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, in order to develop a grab bag of artistic possibilities.

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.

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.

It crunches, rustles, whispers, rattles, bubbles - extended playing techniques, preparations, and various everyday materials produce a seemingly endless variety of sounds in Eloain Lovis H�bner's compositions. H�bner does not understand sound as fixed material, but rather as a state or "as a living relationship between bodies - instrumental, vocal or electronic," as booklet author Sophie Emilie Beha describes it. "The music is constantly in motion, attracting, repelling, tilting, shimmering, breaking apart, and reassembling itself. It creates spaces in which listening itself becomes a physical experience: focused, fragile, and yet full of energy." Two series of works are at the heart of the album. "crunch modes 1.0" (Schallfeld Ensemble) and "crunch modes 3.0" (Sp�ldzielnia Muzyczna Contemporary Ensemble) initially reveal what is typical of H�bner's composing - they zoom between micro- and macrocosm and move between structure and loss of control, accumulation and decay, and radicalism and delicacy. "Trauma und Zwischenraum" [Trauma and Interstice] was composed under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic and features three very different instrumentations: in the first part of the work, the ensemble airborne extended plays the recorder, flute, prepared harp, and harpsichord. In the second part, the musicians of the Arditti Quartet swap their bows for whisks, corks, or toothbrushes, creating acoustic metaphors. In the third part, interpreted by the Lange//Berweck//Lorenz Trio, hybrid sound bodies such as accordion plus effects unit or Korg MS 20 Mini with electric guitar are used. In "[untitled]," the only vocal work on the album, AuditivVokal Dresden deals with nonsense speech, noise imitation, and film language, referring to the legendary airport scene from the film "Casablanca".

Al Gromer Khan (born 1946) was influenced by growing up in England, Morocco, and India. In 1975, at the suggestion of his teacher, Imrat Khan, he was taken into a family of sitar players with an unbroken tradition going back to the seventeenth century, the age of the moguls. Al Gromer Khan's music is based on the artful decoration of traditional Indian ornaments that are placed in the context of electronic soundscapes. His fascination with the idea of "listening to music indirectly" joins with a poetic form of meditative music. When the wind moved at night, it brought fragments of sounds and melodies from the distance. "Music as a Perfume" - is sparsely and carefully measured, soft but capable of creating a powerful magic situation.

The second CD with Paul Hindemith’s string quartets - superbly interpreted by the renowned Juilliard String Quartet - has just been released. Samuel Rhodes writes in the liner notes of the CD: "My group, the Juilliard String Quartet, has been fascinated by the Hindemith quartets for some time. We are challenged by the depth of the musical content, the overflowing vitality, and the sophistication of compositional technique that exist in these works." German Record Critics' Award for the complete recording of Hindemith's string quartets by the Juilliard String Quartet! The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award!

This recording presents four important compositions by Arnold Sch�nberg, recorded by the Sinfonieorchester des S�dwestfunks conducted by Michael Gielen. The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, were epoch-making not only within Sch�nberg's oeuvre but in music history generally: they are among the first instrumental compositions to dispense with tonality as an artistic means. The CD also includes Sch�nberg's Cello Concerto with Heinrich Schiff as soloist.

The thirteen 'minor pentatonically' tuned strings of the long-necked Japanese floor harp sit like a mantra beneath my hands, Vetter writes. His koto playing is, however, more varied than a constantly repeated mantra, and more innovative in technique, which allows an underlying calm to vibrate through the many-layered structures.

The performer on this CD, concert organist Lionel Rogg of Geneva, is at home in the world's greatest concert halls. He began his worldwide career as a concert organist playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose works for organ he would subsequently record in full three different times. Since then, he has been much in demand throughout the world as both organist and harpsichordist. As professor for organ in Geneva, Rogg teaches young organists from all over the world. More than forty of his students have been awarded the Prix de virtuosit�. Recently, Rogg has been devoting more time to composition. Following the devastating fire of 1984, as a member of a committee of experts, he decisively influenced the specification of the new van den Heuvel instrument in his native city's Victoria Hall. For Lionel Rogg it was particularly important that this concert-hall organ should be optimally configured for the specifics of it's surroundings, whether as an emancipated - orchestral - counterpart or as a solo instrument. The high tonal standard for the characteristic foundation stops (fonds) with wide mensuration and the powerful intonation of the reeds combined with the attention paid to the specification of the (low) mixtures, give the organ in Victoria Hall the desired symphonic, French character. The extensive battery of horizontal reeds and the pedal stops of 32' pitch (labial and lingual) make the four-manual instrument just as appropriate for the music of the founder of the symphonic organ music of France, C�sar Franck, as heard on this Organ-CD, as it is for the effective presentation of Liszt and Bizet transcriptions, with their virtuosically pianistic, even orchestral character. The booklet of this fifth CD of the Organ series contains liner notes in German, English, and French.

John Cage’s occupation with the sound possibilities of the prepared piano became the dominant tonal feature of his music after he moved to New York in 1942, and for many years it remained his preferred form of expression. Works for Piano and Prepared Piano, Vol. II, is an exquisite collection of dynamic pieces that John Cage wrote before he developed an interest in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “book of changes,” or in atonality.

Bernfried E.G. Prove's music thrives on the adventure of surging forward to new compositional horizons and thereby achieving a highly personal response to the musical currents of our times. With a special fondness for spectral harmonies, Prove gives audible form to multi-layered vistas by adopting techniques that allow him to probe the "deep structure" of music. Whether he applies geometrical formulae from radiation physics as a means of shaping the proportions, density and form of his works, whether he bases their design on rhetorical patterns or the Golden Section, or whether he oversteps and even suspends the bounds of the humanly playable (as in his "Salto" for piano solo), the result is always music of extraordinary expressive power and superbly nuanced color.

Ernst Helmuth Flammer belongs to that generation of composers of the music of the 70s and 80s as idiosyncratic as haunting and multiform pulses owes. Peter Michael Hamel, Peter Ruzicka, Manfred Trojahn, Walter Zimmermann, Anton Plate, Reinhard Febel and Wolfgang Rihm What Flammer connects with this name, is the effort to reflect the compositional changes after 1950 critical and at the same time creatively continue, that is not about unthinking imitation serial and post-serial music nor a radical rejection of them, but the imitation of musical thinking, which itself recently also committed knows how it's open for future developments.

A central concept for Hamel was and is the "harmonic" thinking - the intention of the standardization of heterogeneous elements of conflict resolution, even healing with a new multicultural spirituality / clergy (the religious dimension of such musicality can not be misappropriated). Hamel's pursuit of harmony, conflict freedom, beauty... made on a new stage of development, repressed and unfinished designated... Hamel's music was richer, more complex, konfliktu�ser, she approached the avant-garde sound, without, however, the basic trust each harmonic whole to without.

The versatility of the composer Georg Katzer documented this CD. The "Open Landscape with obbligato tone e", a one-movement orchestral piece leads, consistently before tensions; she does not cease to always create new sources of conflict. The play "come and go" is the result of productive interaction between the wind association Berlin (wind quintet and piano) and composer. Katzer spent here it's specially developed "modes technique" which allows sounds that is beyond the scope closely layered chords and allows a wealth of nuances. "Imaginary dialogue 4 'breathing' 'is an interplay between the breathing players, his tone (bass clarinet) and what returns from the speaker and strikes back at the starting point of the noise and tone. The "String Quartet no. 3" in 1988 premiered by the Arditti String Quartet is full of diversity and the fissures of the quartet sound, as we know it since Anton Webern's Op. 5. The piece bears - so Katzer - traces the ups and downs of subjective moods. And finally "De Musica" can be interpreted as a biting musical treatise that will teach to adopt a critical attitude in sovereign affairs of the music.

The aestetic of this work is dedicated to clarity; simplicity accompanies, directs it. That is all. I wanted nothing more. This is the way Satie concluded a short text on his "Socrate", with which he presented the work he had finished in 1918 to the public. The text to this "symphonic drama" was compiled from three dialogues of Plato by Satie (Symposium, Phaedrus and Phaedo) which in some way represented Socrates' person and character biographically. The reproduction of the four male roles by one female voice suited Satie's aestetic purposes, because it helped to clearly limit the distance between text and listener, between past and present. The booklet of the CD is supplied with the complete texts of the three parts in French, German and English. John Cage, who has been propagating Satie's music his life long and who has repeatedly referred to Satie in his own work, created his "Cheap Imitation" in 1969. He subjected the entire score of "Socrate" to a type of metamorphosis with the aid of chance processes which had become characteristic for his compositions since the early 50s. The result was an almost completely one-voice composition, which in a certain way underlined Satie's striving for transparency, unadornment and clarity. Hilke Helling: alto / Deborah Richards: piano / Herbert Henck: piano.