Foreground

Landschaft mit Urnenwesen

`Landscape with urn-creatures´ electronic music which begins as the audience arrives at the site of the performance, functioning as part of the transmuted performane environment, as a passage through which the ensemble-music is reached, beginning with:

Engführung I

`Narrowing´ or `Stretto´ for voices, ensemble and electronics, which contains a setting of the first half of Celan's poem of the same title, as well as abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben (`laden with reflections/written asunder´) for solo percussion and CHARON for solo bass clarinet---a backward glance at Greek myth: Orpheus' journey to the underworld in search of his lost past. This in turn dovetails into:

Largo

for soprano, koto and cello, the first of two `arias´ in which one of the vocal soloists takes the foreground, again setting Celan's poem of the same name, in a form which relates to the classical `song´ somewhat as does Celan's skeletal text to the Romantic nostalgia of Joseph von EICHENDORFF's Im Abendrot (set to music as the last of Richard STRAUSS's Four Last Songs). As this withdraws into inaudibility, it is replaced by:

Schneebett

`Snow-bed´ for voices and ensemble, in which flute and percussion soloists (playing a composition separately performable as inward) are surrounded by an almost static sound-environment contributed by the vocal duo and the delicate sounds of the bass recorder and hardanger fiddle; the music is as if frozen into suspended animation, at the deepest point of our inward journey. The first half of Celan's poem is sung by the vocalists, the second half simultaneously whispered into the flute by the flautist. A crescendo at the close leads to:

Zungenentwürzeln

`uprooting of tongues´ electronic music which invades the space like a rush of brutal memories. The music returns to the live performers in the form of:

Tenebrae

for mezzo-soprano, electric guitar, percussion and electronics, the second `aria´. Celan's poem adopts the mode of delivery of a prayer, inverted in all its dimensions: against a god who allowed his `chosen people´ to be exterminated, against a `Christianity´ which could be used over the centuries to justify such persecution. Celan's `distortion´ is paralleled in the music: extended singing techniques (devised and developed by Ute WASSERMANN), natural and `musical´ sounds twisted into new shapes by electronic means, and so on. As this continues it is intercut with:

Engfuhrung II

for voices, ensemble and electronics. Here the voices have the second half of the Celan poem begun earlier, and the ensemble is centred upon an interweaving of three solos: knospend-gespaltener (`budding-fissured´) for clarinet in C, air for violin and von hinter dem schmerz (`from behind the pain´) for 'cello, the last of which eventually continues almost to the end even as its music disintegrates. As the poem circles back to a varied repetition of its first lines, musical elements from earlier in the work begin to return in altered guises: the vibraphone chords of the opening, the whispered voices, the bass clarinet of CHARON now `written asunder´ into a contrabass clarinet (live) and a slowed-down version of itself (pre-recorded).

Richard BARRETT
Amsterdam, 6 January 1997

"Two elements bind it together. The first is simply the interpolation and progression of solo and ensemble pieces, each with highly individual and characteristic textures of their own  . . .  The second  . . .  the translation across a continuum from the electronic to instrumental to vocal sounds."
--Peter McCALLUM Sydney Morning Herald 11 March 1997

"Immaculate, intricate, precise, freakish and heavenly  . . .  a lyrical creation soothing enough to help you escape the turgid fish-heads  . . . "
--Stewart DAWES X-PRESS Magazine 525, 6 March 1997