FRIEDRICH CERHA Bruchstück, geträumt - Neun Bagatellen - Instants

Two things have happened to Cerha's music in more recent years; a conscious avoidance of rigorous structural elaboration of musical ideas in favour of small episodes of 'spontaneous inspiration'; and a decidedly autumnal feel, a sense of time running out. Old habits die hard; the harmonic thinking is still very much that of his beloved Second Viennese School, and the small disparate fragments - such as the very diverse movements that make up the Bagatelles - nonetheless form a convincingly unified whole. Bruchstück is very quiet, static, with bells and the imitation of the ticking of clocks marking the inexorable passage of time. Instants begins in compete stasis, from which a sequence of more active 'moments' of greatly contrasting character - vigorous and motoric; ethereal and calm; echoes of pastoral romanticism from far away - arises. The Bagatelles are strongly differentiated miniature character pieces which form a sequence with a convincing dramatic shape, while each fragment, however brief, has its on internal narrative.

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)

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)

Klangforum Wien / Sylvain Cambreling OLGA NEUWIRTH Vampyrotheone - Instrumental-Inseln aus "Bählamms Fest" - Hooloomooloo

Music lives in the opera, at times rather dis- agreeably, since the house is too small. It will not leave of its own accord, since those who feel and think must be given a text and plot and there are people who sorely disturb our contentedness, as when Isolde dies her Liebestod. Olga Neuwirth’s opera Bählamms Fest observed the figures it sent onto stage for a while and then threw them out although the text prison attempted desperately to hold on to them with bars to the final moment. So this opera had to let go some of its parts, which were then permitted to drift away as islands. How far do the ice/snow islands jut into space and what remains submerged under water to hold the islands upright and, if necessary, to tear ships apart? Olga Neuwirth’s islands have much to tow along underneath as the centreboard of these ships, which can be dimly descried in contours rather than recognised, but it is often difficult to say what is more important, what you see/hear or the other. This music has submusics (subtexts) it trails along as a ghost the tatters of its sheets. Usually it then becomes unhomely, and one is filled with dread. The opera Bählamms Fest stands in the tradition of gothic romance (and the surrealists’ dreamlike unlogic), plays with it, alludes to it in irony, and similarly plays with the time that passes by, the homely plays with the unhomely (in this case the home with the outside, and both flow into each other incessantly), and when you are supposed to be afraid, then you must release that which threatens you from beyond the bounds of reason, and you must let in that which in future might beco- me a threat, so as to recognise it, before being able to fear it at all. Otherwise, there would be nothing unhomely. he ironical in music and the unhomely.