SWR Sinfonieorchester / Sylvain Cambreling HELMUT LACHENMANN Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern

Concertante recording of Helmut Lachenmann’s groundbreaking opera, and the first to feature the revised version, the so-called “Tokyo-Fassung” which the composer now regards as definitive. The opera, while loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale is not a work that admits of a single “meaning”, its plotline is multiple and diffuse, but an undercurrent of social criticism is implied as Lachenmann views the pauper (The Little Match Girl), the terrorist (Gudrun Ensslin)and the visionary artist (Da Vinci) all as outsiders, figures on the fringes of society, driven to the margins by circumstances and by society’s coldness, and, in consequence, playing with fire in their responses. Coldness, figuratively and literally, is one of the opera’s subjects. Extreme cold and burning desire, as attitudes and conditions, counterpoint each other in the music. The action evolves through the suggestibility of the sounds which Lachenmann deploys like no one else and with a poetry all his own. “Not only is ‘The Little Match Girl’ by far the biggest work of one of Europe’s most esteemed composers, but it magnifies the qualities of strangeness and intensity, of huge but frustrated power, that have given him his reputation” (Paul Griffiths, The New York Times)

HEINZ HOLLIGER Romancendres CLARA SCHUMANN

A fascinating concept album circling around the fragility of artistic sensibilities in German musical and literary romanticism. Two important pieces by Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939), both of them inspired by Robert Schumann, are combined with a chamber work by Clara Schumann. They all intersect in the year 1853, when 20-year-old Johannes Brahms first visited the Schumann couple in Düsseldorf. The initial piece, Clara’s three wonderfully melodic romances for cello and piano, is followed by Holliger’s imaginative and multi-faceted hommage to Robert’s “Romances” in the same scoring. Much to Brahms’ approbation they were burnt by Clara in 1893 as she feared her late husband’s reputation could suffer if compositions from the onset of his mental illness would be publicised. All that survives is a vivid description by violinist Joseph Joachim. Holliger takes this verbal account as a starting point for a music that subtly meditates upon the double character of love and death, music and silence, romances and cinders. “Gesänge der Frühe” first performed in 1988 is scored for choir, orchestra and tape. Schumann’s last piano work of the same title from 1853 is superimposed in a most visionary way with texts from the late period of Friedrich Hölderlin – another romantic genius who fell prey to mental illness. (ECM Records)