Sol Gabetta / Patricia Kopatchinskaja SOL & PAT

 

SOL & PAT

 

Jean-Guihen Queyras / Pierre-Laurent Aimard / Isabelle Faust / Jörg Widmann OLIVIER MESSIAEN Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Video)

QUATUOR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS

Matan Porat CARNAVAL

CARNAVAL

 

András Schiff / Jörg Widmann JOHANNES BRAHMS Clarinet Sonatas

CLARINET SONATAS

 

Jörg Widmann / Denis Kozhukin / Irish Chamber Orchestra WEBER Clarinet Quintet - Concertino for Clarinet - Grand Duo Concertant

 CLARINET QUINTET

Rudolf Buchbinder THE DIABELLI PROJECT

                                                         THE DIABELLI PROJECT

Christian Tetzlaff / Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra JÖRG WIDMANN Violin Concerto - Insel der Sirenen - Antiphon

For this 2013 release from Ondine, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, conductor Daniel Harding, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra present three exciting works by Jörg Widmann, a German composer who possesses an impressive talent for orchestration. The Violin Concerto is the most imposing piece on the program, at nearly a half hour in duration and of an exceptionally wide range of techniques and sonorities, and it serves as a powerfully expressive vehicle for Tetzlaff. Long lines predominate, and the tonal inflections of the chromatic writing make it quite accessible to listeners who don't normally listen to contemporary works. Antiphon is a vivid display of the orchestra's sections in call and response, and the interplay of these groups is transparent to the attentive listener and fascinating on repeated listening. The closing work, Insel der Sirenen (Island of the Sirens), was inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and Tetzlaff's violin is pitted against 19 strings, often grouped in cluster formations, in an extraordinary competition of sounds. Because Widmann's music is uncompromising and decidedly adventurous, audiences may find it a bit challenging, though the coherence of his compositions and the freshness of his orchestral colors go a long way toward making this music appealing. (Blair Sanderson)

Christoph Poppen / Deutsche Radio Philharmonie JÖRG WIDMANN Elegie

Jörg Widmann (born 1973 in Munich), is widely acclaimed as both a composer of fierce originality and a soloist of great resourcefulness. As a chamber musician he frequently performs with artists including Tabea Zimmermann, András Schiff, Kim Kashkashian, Helene Grimaud and Heinz Holliger. A number of fellow composers – including Holliger, Wolfgang Rihm and Aribert Reimann – have dedicated works to him. Meanwhile his own works have been premiered by distinguished interpreters: Pierre Boulez, for instance, gave the first performance of Widmann’s orchestral work “Armonica” with the Vienna Philharmonic, and Mariss Jansons directed the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in a first performance of his Beethoven tribute “Con brio”.

Widmann, who studied composition with Kay Westermann from the age of 11, subsequently making further studies with Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm, has an expansive understanding of the structural and sound-colour possibilities of the music of our time. It has served him well both in his own writing and in his responses to the music of others.

After a well-received ECM debut as soloist last year on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s concerto “Noēsis” (where he was heard alongside his violinist sister Carolin Widmann) now comes a portrait album that addresses Widmann’s creativity as composer and player.

Christoph Poppen conducts the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie in two major works of broad scope: “Messe” for large orchestra and “Elegie” for clarinet and orchestra. In between are the Fünf Bruchstücke from 1997, fascinating miniatures that find Widmann the clarinettist in speeding dialogues with Heinz Holliger, the latter making his recording debut as pianist. The Fünf Bruchstücke belong among Widmann’s first published works and also among several he has written to explore and extend the potentialities of his own instrument.

With small or large instrumental forces, Widmann’s work retains its power. As Markus Fein has written, “Whoever encounters the music of Jörg Widmann for the first time is astonished at its directness and intensity…The music breaks like a raging torrent over the listener.”

Jörg Widmann has received many awards for his work including the Arnold Schoenberg Prize of the Vienna Schoenberg Centre, the Claudio Abbado Composition Award, the SWR Composition Award, the Elise L. Stoeger Prize of the Lincoln Center Chamber music Society, New York, and more.

Concerts with Widmann’s music in 2011 include a programme of his works with the Collegium Novum Zürich at the Luxemburg Philharmonie on April 8. His music was chosen to open the Brahms Tage in Baden-Baden in May. Also in May, Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Cleveland Orchestra on a US tour playing Widmann’s Flute Concerto, with Joshua Smith as soloist.

Kent Nagano / Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg JÖRG WIDMANN Arche

Commissioned to write new music to inaugurate the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, composer Jörg Widmann drew inspiration from the shape of the building itself: “From the outside it resembles a ship. To me, the interior looked like the hold of a ship, an ark…Re-emerging into the daylight, the ark idea would not leave me alone. The inflection of the music I had to compose was clear….”  Arche, an Oratorio for soloists, choirs, organ and orchestra is a compendious work embracing the course of history in the west with a collaged libretto drawing upon a range of writers: from the unknown authors of the Old Testament to Nietzsche and Sloterdijk via Francis of Assisi, Michelangelo and Schiller. Arche looks at the tradition of the oratorio and transforms it. Dieter Rexroth in the liner notes: “What immediately stands out is above all the impression of paradox and the vast diversity of forms and musical resources. Everything happens at once, everything interlocks. Every moment transports us into another world.” Kent Nagano directs the massed musical forces with aplomb in this concert recording from the premiere performance in January 2017. (ECM Records)

Tillmann Höfs / Akiko Nikami AIR

For more than thirty years there had not been an individual prizewinner in the discipline of horn at the German Music Competition, that is, until Tillmann Höfs came from Hamburg in 2017. He won the hearts of the audience and literally blew the jury against the wall. His qualities, technical superiority, and great musical genius also distinguish his GENUIN debut CD, which was produced in the Primavera series in cooperation with the German Music Council. Höfs shows the entire breadth of his youthful, slim yet festive horn playing with works by Richard Strauss, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paul Hindemith and Jörg Widmann. Outstanding repertoire and interpretation!

GALINA USTWOLSKAJA Sinfonie Nr. 3 WOLFGANG RIHM Musik für Klarinette und Orchester BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN Photoptosis

This disc comprises three live performances from Munich’s Musica Viva Festival: the works by Ustvolskaya and Bernd Alois Zimmermann from the same concert in December 1998‚ the Rihm – a world première – from November 1999. The rather raw recorded sound reflects the constraints of these occasions‚ as do the rough edges of the orchestral playing‚ but the strong‚ and very strongly contrasted character of these compositions is arrestingly immediate. Zimmermann’s Photoptosis (1968) is the earliest piece‚ a reflection on the biblical phrase ‘and there was light’ which opens up an increasingly dazzling range of textures while – 1960s­style – incorporating a range of quotations and allusions on its way to a turbulently ecstatic conclusion.
Markus Stenz homes in on the music’s broad effects‚ and the result is far more than a mere revival. Photoptosis remains highly contemporary‚ and also offers the strongest possible contrast to the primitive yet forcefully characterised austerity of Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No 3 (1983).
Ustvolskaya’s music is unsparing in its refusal to elaborate‚ a quality which might earn it the label of ‘minimalist’ were the musical atmosphere less desolate. Named after the short‚ psalm­like poem which a reciter intones on two occasions during its 18­minute course‚ this plea to Jesus to ‘save us’ offers no spiritual consolation‚ but portrays a world from which salvation has been eternally withdrawn. The scoring is weird yet startlingly effective – five each of oboes‚ trumpets and double basses‚ a trombone and three tubas‚ various drums and a prominent piano – and‚ to me‚ the effect is the more unsettling for being utterly devoid of ambiguity.
Rihm’s music is rarely light­hearted‚ either‚ but this half­hour clarinet concerto‚ written in 1999‚ is constructed with skill and subtlety‚ the prevailing tone of lyric melancholy offset by more mercurial‚ agitated episodes. The tirelessly active solo line is challenged by the accompanying orchestra in various ways‚ creating a wordless drama that is all the more involving for Rihm’s characteristic tendency to evoke traditional shapes and modes of expression while leaving their precise provenance in doubt. Jörg Widmann is a charismatic soloist‚ and the evident tensions of the live occasion enhance the power of the experience on disc. All three compositions are guaranteed to get you thinking as well as listening. (Gramophone)

Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik / Rüdiger Bohn / Claudia Barainsky GYÖRGY KURTÁG Botschaften des verstorbenen Fräuleins R.V. Trussowa JÖRG WIDMANN … umdüstert …

In different ways the music of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be described as an individual, productive dialogue with musical stimulations of the past. This is evidenced in Kurtág’s works by the great breadth of musical forms that he references, extending from the traditional triad by way of highly diverse canonic techniques onto the use of noise – mostly articulated in fragment-like miniatures or in cyclical compositions consisting of such miniatures. In contrast, Widmann is gravitated to the musical expressions of Romanticism and tends to connect their possibilities to his personal ways of sound exploration. 

Kurtág’s cycle Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber orchestra, op. 17 (1976–1980), which treats of the failure of human relations, is based on the poems by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos. In language as grotesque as it is drastic and at the limits of self-respect, it lays out one woman’s ideas about loneliness, exhibitionism, and deprivation. 

Widmann focuses on the sculpting of sounds: individual instrumental textures of variable density alternate and thereby initiate a process of slipping in and out of different tonal qualities that grows ever thinner toward the end until it finally dissolves into quiet fragments. The word “umdüstert” occurred frequently in Romantic literature, and this fading out of the composition can certainly be read as an indication of an existential point of reference of the music.

Irish Chamber Orchestra / Jörg Widmann WIDMANN 180 Beats per Minute - Fantasie MENDELSSOHN Sinfonie 3 "Schottische"

Seldom has one heard one of the best known works of Mendelssohn, the brilliant Hebrides Overture, so wild, gruff and raw, so fissured even, as in this concluding installment of Mendelssohn symphonies with Jörg Widmann. This is without question a thoroughly contemporary interpretation; we get the now universal sense of hearing anew that comes with period instruments, even though none are being played here. It must have been a real stimulus to the composer at the conductor’s desk – a music analyst in the highest degree – to take this music tamed by over-familiarity and strip it of everything that is pseudo-obvious and safely middle-of-the-road. And it is that principle, faithfully followed in the earlier releases, of quite deliberately comparing and contrasting Mendelssohn’s works with the clarinet-playing conductor’s own that must have been what struck the spark and audibly kindled the music-making spirit of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. A drama otherwise reserved for the concert hall here comes across admirably: the well-known early-19th-century works sound like new, which is a compliment to their interpreters. Widmann’s two early works, now a part of his own history, turn out to be good, even exhilarating, listening; inspired by the young composer’s disco nights, “180 beats” goes well with the fascinating “Fantasie”, played by the composer himself, which effortlessly surmounts the limits seemingly set on the harmonies of a monophonic wind instrument. This is a spine-tinglingly new way to listen to Mendelssohn’s music. (Arkiv Music)

Emmanuel Pahud SOLO

Interweaving the Baroque era and the 20th and 21st centuries, the newest addition to Emmanuel Pahud's Warner Classics catalogue is an imaginative 2-CD collection of music for unaccompanied flute. Among the composers are Telemann, Nielsen, Honegger, Varèse, Berio, Takemitsu, Pärt, Pintscher and Widmann. "Most of the pieces are about exploring new paths," says Pahud. "The power of this music often lies in the contrast between a simple line and the most refined complexities, between a note so quiet as to be barely perceptible and the loudest, most extreme notes playable on the instrument."

Arcanto Quartett / Jörg Widmann WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Clarinet Quintet - String Quartet K.421

If you want a recording of Mozart’s Quintet on a conventional clarinet, Jörg Widmann and the Arcanto Quartet are up there with the best. Using a basset clarinet, with its treacly extra low notes, Romain Guyot or Matthew Hunt (with Ensemble 360) bring more Papageno-ish fun to the finale. But few performances I know rival Widmann and the Arcanto for mingled refinement, imagination and sensitive give and take.

In the first two movements the players balance autumnal lyricism with more than a hint of period-style astringency. Tempi – not least in the flowing Larghetto – are on the brisk side, textures crisp and lucid, with sparing string vibrato, dynamic contrasts unusually wide. In the Minuet’s second Trio, Widmann creates two distinct characters, yodelling blithely, then digging with a vengeance into his deep, chalumeau arpeggios. The whole performance combines illuminating detail with an unerring sense of the music’s larger shapes, whether in the mounting harmonic tension of the first movement’s development or the floating serenity of the Larghetto, clarinet and first violin locked in tender colloquy.

On their own, the Arcanto, lean and sinewy of tone, are no less eloquent in the D minor Quartet. In the opening Allegro they stress the music’s elegiac fatalism rather than its agitation. Rarely will you hear such intense pianissimo playing in the mysterious – and still shocking – remote modulations at the start of the development. Here and elsewhere their response to mood and colour is matched by their care for balance and contrapuntal clarity. Perhaps the Arcanto’s rubato in the Minuet’s serenading Trio totters on the edge of winsomeness. But their vivid characterisation of the finale’s variations, from the truculent cross-rhythms of No 2 to the chaste tenderness of the D major variation, sets the seal on a desirable Mozart coupling, recorded in an aptly intimate acoustic. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Antoine Tamestit / Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Daniel Harding WIDMANN Viola Concerto

Antoine Tamestit's recording of Jörg Widmann Viola Concerto is released on Harmonia Mundi on 23 February 2018. Tamestit gave the world premiere of the concerto in 2015 with the Orchestre de Paris and Paavo Järvi. “One of the most gifted French musicians of the era,” wrote Le Figaro, “the work is made to measure for Tamestit, his style of playing, his tone, his personality.” The work was co-commissioned by the Swedish Radio Symphony and Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks with conductor Daniel Harding, who play on the recording. 
As well as Widmann’s Viola Concerto, the disc features chamber works performed by Tamestit and Bruno Philippe, Marc Bouchkov and the Signum Quartet. 
The theatrical concerto sees the soloist exploring a range of positions on the stage. Initially seated behind the harp players the soloist moves towards the centre of the orchestra and eventually ‘front and centre’ assuming the traditional position for the soloist. 
Tamestit has already performed the concerto widely, and it has proved popular with audiences at subsequent performances with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Carolin Widmann REFLECTIONS

Music for solo violin is still mainly associated with Bach in the eighteenth century and Paganini in the nineteenth. Carolin Widmann, the distinguished German violinist, here provides a varied and vivid survey of such music from the twentieth century, from Ysaÿe in the 1920s to Jörg Widmann (her composer brother) at the turn of the millennium. There is nothing at all in the CD booklet about any of these pieces, though they are unlikely to be at all familiar to most collectors. I describe them below, partly because you need this information for a proper appreciation of the range of what is on offer on this disc, and partly in hope that it might pique your curiosity. 

Ysaÿe’s Six sonatas for solo violin, Op. 27, were written in 1923. Each one is dedicated to one of his contemporary violinists, No. 2 to Jacques Thibaud, and No. 4 to Fritz Kreisler. If that was a shrewd way to encourage world-class performances, one hopes it worked, for they are fine works and by no means unworthy of their Bachian inheritance. Indeed No. 2 actually opens with some Bach, the famously arresting first phrase of the E minor partita, no less. However, it is the plainchant Dies Irae that informs much of the work, including the noble variations of the Sarabande. Sonata No. 4 is hardly less compelling, and both are very well played indeed. 

If those sonatas are a homage to Bach, then another set of six, the Sei Capricci (1976) of Salvatore Sciarrino, pay homage to the 24 Caprices of his compatriot and forbear Niccolo Paganini. Each capriccio uses almost entirely the least substantial of all string sounds - harmonics. This includes some harmonics that – apparently – do not exist, since they do not lie on any of the nodes along the string that produce the overtones. They are notated and attempted nonetheless, and the sonic result is part of the soundscape. This near exclusive use of harmonics – normally an occasional coloristic effect – means every piece is filled with ethereal, whistling wisps of sound, evoking a world of shadows, as if some revenant from the great days of Ysaÿe and his dedicatees was playing for us, but his spectral status meant he could produce only a disembodied sound. Eerie it might be, but Widmann’s performance again makes us forget the incredible technical demands this music must make on the performer. 

Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes was commissioned for the 1991 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. The title is a hybrid of the French thèmes (themes) and the English "anthem". The four pages of score (free to download) employ a formidable-looking range of tempi (lent to rapide), expression marks (calme, agité, brusque), dynamics (pppp -fff) and very frequent metrical changes, all punctuated by frequent long trills and glissandi. Widmann manages to observe all this scrupulously, and in so doing, show us that it is a fine piece, by no means as challenging to listen to as it must be to play. Small wonder it is one of those pieces Boulez - as so often - expanded and developed further, as Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics. 

Jörg Widmann's solo violin Études I-III are autonomous concert pieces — premiered separately in 1995, 2001 and 2003. The composer wrote of them: “‘Étude' is taken literally here as a compositional exercise … but also as a violinistic study on a certain playing technique: for example, I is some sort of 'sounding out' of the instrument's resonance possibilities, II goes on a journey from a three-part chorale to spirited, unbridled virtuosity, and III is mainly a left-hand étude.' He, perhaps mischievously, does not remark on the element that will strike most listeners to Etude II – one line of the three-part chorale he mentions is for the violinist’s wordless voice. One would like to know what Isabelle Faust — dedicatee and first performer — made of that when she first encountered it, let alone its first audience at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival. The effect is certainly evocative here. Presumably we can take for granted the authenticity of the performance by the composer’s sister and dedicatee and first performer of Étude III, who even contributed the recommended fingering to the score. By the way, Schott’s website has this helpful note for prospective purchasers of the score “Difficulty: Very Difficult”. The only possible criticism of the performer on this CD is that she never makes it sound like that. 

Ysaÿe once wrote that a performer on his instrument "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing." I have no idea if Carolin Widmann has experienced all that in her life to date, but surely Ysaÿe would have applauded such virtuosity and expressive range – the playing is often frankly sensational. This recording was first published in 2006 on Telos, and won an award in Germany. It was Widmann’s debut disc, and as a solo violin calling card from a young player it recalls Perlman’s EMI Paganini Caprices from 1972. Its reissue is greatly to be celebrated. (Roy Westbrook)

Anu Tali / Nordic Symphony Orchestra ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR Strata

“My pieces are abstract dramas in sound, with individual characters and an extremely dynamic chain of events; unfolding in a space that is constantly shifting, expanding and contracting.” Thus Erkki-Sven Tüür, characterising his highly energetic recent works. The fifth New Series release dedicated exclusively to music by the Estonian composer presents world premiere recordings of two large-scale pieces for orchestral forces. “Strata” and “Noёsis” are played by the Tallinn-based Nordic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Estonian conductor Anu Tali. Both orchestra and conductor make their New Series debuts here.
“Strata”, Tüür’s sixth symphony, which was commissioned and premiered by the Nordic Symphony, consists of one massive 32-minute movement which, in accordance with the geological metaphor of the title, explores the gradual movements and shifting relationship of different musical layers. In the liner notes, fellow composer and musicologist Kerri Kotta emphasizes that for Tüür, who in his earlier work has played with contrasting and contradictory methods and styles, “the symphony is not a post-modern re-enactment of well-known models. Although Tüür carefully avoids direct musical quotations, the traditional aspects of his works become manifest through distinctive rhythmic, melodic, dynamic and affective qualities. These topics articulate the changing surface, where a key or a code gives rise to numerous voices which in their turn make up different textural layers.” Tüür’s compositions since 2002, indeed, follow a new path: “I have invented a method I call "vectorial writing", as the principle of voice-leading in the wider sense follows projections of vectors in different directions. At the same time, the basic material is given by a certain numerical code which acts like a gene in forming the whole composition with all possible mutations and transformations. This technique allows me to achieve much more harmonic variety.”
“Noēsis” was written in response to a commission from Neeme Järvi and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The solo parts of this concerto for clarinet, violin and orchestra are played on the present recording by Jörg and Carolin Widmann. While Carolin has won unanimous critical acclaim for her renderings of Robert Schumann’s violin sonatas and for her 20th-century music recital “Phantasy of spring”, Jörg Widmann counts among the pre-eminent young composers of our time, as well as one the finest contemporary clarinettists.