The magical is immanent in my psyche — Günther Becker’s sentence stands over this volume. Rainer Peters, a friend and colleague of many years, describes in conversation the contrast between Becker’s music and his outward appearance: polite, correct, well mannered, with changing fashions of beard and dressed in fine cloth — the music, by contrast, full of attack, aggression and noise elements, readily pushing beyond the limits of the instruments. Becker loved nonsense sentences as much as Greek dance music, solo piano no less than multimedia spectacle, pragmatic and precise work as much as mystery itself.
And he loved Greece: from 1956 to 1968 he lived with his wife Ruth in Athens. On the second SACD she speaks vividly of that time and of their life together — from their first meeting to his last hours — and sheds light on the political and social circumstances that accompanied those years. Many of Becker’s chamber works were premiered in Darmstadt; his orchestral piece stabil – instabil of 1965 counts as his breakthrough and was the West German contribution to the ISCM World Music Days in Warsaw in 1968. His work in electronic music eventually led to a professorship for composition and live electronics at the Robert Schumann Institut in Düsseldorf.
With this complete recording of the piano works Benjamin Kobler turns to a branch of that wide-ranging output that has received little attention. The Four Bagatelles of 1954 stand at the beginning; the Drei Phasen of 1965 work with augmentation and diminution, with diverging courses of motion and with a movement to be played as fast as possible. There follow the Studie über einen Akkord of 1970 and the four Mikrografien of 1973. The Zeitspuren for two pianos of 1987/88, which Kobler plays with Laura Alvarez, carry words from the psalms as movement titles: “Wünschet Jerusalem Glück”, “dir zum Volk in Ewigkeit”, “und die Seelen der Erschlagenen schreien” and “Friede sei über Israel”.
Becker himself is heard in sound documents of 1984 and 1999; the 1999 recordings were made at the home of Ruth and Günther Becker in Bad Lippspringe. It was there too that Mirjam Wiesemann talked with Ruth Becker in May 2011. She recorded the conversation with Rainer Peters in December 2015 at the Cybele Studios; a few days later Becker’s colleague and friend Oskar Gottlieb Blarr read his birthday letter for Günther Becker of 1994, with which the edition closes.
The piano recordings were made in July 2010 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, a co-production with the station.