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Encounters with Robert SchumannDie Meistersinger Vocal Ensemble, Klaus Breuninger Conductor
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Just as the idea of contributing something new to preexisting material has risen in importance in the grammar of popular music, so too classical composers have revived the idea of composing new music on top of, or among the sections of, preexisting works. Whether these trends will last remains to be seen, but this German disc provides a nice introduction to what's happening, with two dramatically different uses of the trope idea. The contrast is sharpened inasmuch as the two composers involved begin with similar Schumann works, sets of pieces for male chorus. These are not well-known works, and, as annotator Holger Schneider points out in a rather involved botanical metaphor, they come down to us as part of a genre not much valued these days. The two modern works take up aspects of the male-chorus legacy. Each alternates a Schumann song with a new piece. Uwe Kremp's ...tief im blauen traum... (the title, "deep in the blue dream," comes from a line in one of Schumann's songs) begins with Schumann and then expands on his musical and textual material in new pieces for male chorus and percussion. Mark Anton Moebius (don't invite him over for strip poker, or you'll never be able to get him to leave), by contrast, begins with one of a group of new settings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke on the theme of nature; his Schumann songs, which are for four voices and four horns, "break in like hunters in the forest at dawn"; they are intrusions from a past seen as barbaric. The Rilke settings oppose an English horn to a French horn, and Moebius intends to "illuminate the magic moment during which the hunter looks the animal in the eye and recognizes himself in it...," viewing hunting music as "a most astonishing attempt to hide the fact from the hunters that what they are actually doing is nothing but killing an animal." Kremp's work is more abstract and may have more appeal to listeners coming from the electronica side—not because he uses any electronic dance rhythms (he does not), but because he breaks the sounds of the Schumann songs down to individual components and uses those to build new percussion structures. Each of his short pieces begins, in the fashion of a mix, with a short reiteration of part of the preceding Schumann song, ranging from a syllable to an entire line; the percussionists gradually take over and open up a new sonic space. Both composers offer music that's engaging, good for starting a conversation, and easy to follow, giving the listener a fixed reference point but going in an individual direction. © James Manheim, Rovi
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© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
