Unsettling and opposed to any and all concessions to fashion, these are apt descriptions of Christfried Schmidt's music. For decades this composer, now over sixty years old, was subjected to massive and undisguised repressive measures by the East German cultural authorities. Yet, at the fall of the Iron Curtain, he was struck by indifference, particularly from those who do not want to grapple with the unsettling acoustical fantasies of a person which cannot be diverted from his artistic direction. Nevertheless, Schmidt's music is not avant-garde in an obvious sense of the term. On the contrary, Schmidt writes his music within the bounds of what we might call an open expressivity. He cultivates a seething, often beseeching idiom that obviously links him with the grand traditions of expressionist music from the turn of the century: with Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg no less than with Varese and Xenakis. Schmidt gives his listeners music that can be aggressively emotional even when it is quiet, whose underlying impetus perhaps thrives on the idealistic and utterly "nonmodern" intention of engendering a state of catharsis - true to Beethoven's maxim that the purpose of music is to improve mankind.