Ensemble Recherche

Portrait CD of the Ernst von Siemens Composer Award winner 2011, with Ensemble intercontemporain and Ensemble Modern.

A portrait-CD of the Ernst von Siemens composer award winner 2011, with ensemble recherche and Ensemble Modern.

Tiepolo painted the immense vaulted ceiling and “Staircase of Honour” in the Würzburg Residenz in 1752 and 1753. He depicted Olympus and the Four Continents and these compositions are based on Tiepolo’s images. Dufourt’s music is the “composition of sound”, but it does not celebrate sound in a cloistered-off reserve.

Hans Werner Henze’s compositional output is dominated by the larger genres with their richly differentiated palette of instrumental colors. This CD with the ensemble recherche allows room to, among others, chamber music works that had been unpublished so far, the manuscripts of which are in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. It collects a mixed bouquet of occasional pieces, dedicated to close friends and colleagues, spanning a time of approximately two decades: e.g. Yehudi Menuhin, Leon Fleisher, Paul Dessau or his patroness and friend of many years, Margaret, Princess of Hesse and by Rhine. Most pieces are first recordings.

“Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee is a wonder. How to say how? It is a sequence of aural images of snow, in some cases onomatopoeic (the swish of brushing off a wooden deck, the soft ease-crunch of steps through a fresh snowfall) but more often poetic, suggesting crystalline whiteness, cold light, gentle falling. It is a set of ten canons, ten systematic processes in which the same ideas are floating in slow spirals seen in mirrors. It is a study in melancholy (and joy). It is a succession of five pairs of movements, where the second in each pair repeats the first, as if the first had been music on glass and could now be overlaid on something else. It is simultaneously time standing still, splitting, revolving and accelerating away—standing still because we are held under the spell of a basic melody throughout, splitting because layers will move at different speeds, revolving because the same ideas are constantly being refracted and reformed as layers knock against one another, and accelerating away because the movements get shorter and shorter, from nine minutes down to one for a total length of just under an hour. A tune picks itself out right at the top of the piano as one of the string instruments keeps repeating a superhigh harmonic, almost pitchless, creating gasps of intensity, fire in ice. This is the pristine sound world, new and unforgettable, established at once. The tune is repeated and then overlapped, in the first intimation of the kind of interference pattern of past and present that is one of the most remarkable features of the work. On a larger scale, the entire first movement (for piano quartet, sounding as no piano quartet ever did) is embedded in the second (for the full ensemble, adding a second piano, percussion and three woodwinds), and on the largest, perhaps all the movements are doubles of one another. Certainly every listening, of which there will be many, brings new relationships into focus—though it is easy, too, to be snow-blinded by the beauty, which persists immovable, through changes of character, speed and tuning, adjustment to the last being accommodated in three short interludes.” Paul Griffiths

This release showcases the music of Norwegian composer Sven Lyder Karhs through eight of his recent works, played by some of the most acclaimed performers of contemporary music today, including Ensemble Recherche, and Ensemble Ernst.

As a composer, Kahrs belongs to a continental tradition, having studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Emmanuel Nunes. Based in Paris for the past 20 years, Kahrs have worked closely with outstanding performers like Ensemble Recherche, cellists Pierre Strauch and Anton Lukoszevieze. The eight works on the album are written over a ten year period, ranging from solo works to large ensemble pieces with electronics. For the work “Und fernhin, ehe es alles geschieht” the surround electronics were developed especially in the Heinrich Strobel Experimentalstudio in Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk, Freiburg.

The four works on this disc come from the first nine years of a compositional career that would span almost another half century.Yet today, one scarcely hears them as 'early Stockhausen', but rather as a series of essential cornerstones of the emerging post-war European avant-garde on which Stockhausen, as the youngest major composer involved, exercised a crucial influence. Each exemplifies a phase of Stockhausen's early development. The ensemble recherche is one of the most distinguished ensembles for new music.With more than 450 premières to its credit since it was founded in 1985, the ensemble has made a substantial contribution to the development of contemporary chamber and ensemble music.

New works from Spanish composer Elena Mendoza.