Many poets came to our house, Juan Allende-Blin recalls in conversation. The mere presence at home of a poet with a certain aura was already a reason to take an interest in his work. That early closeness to poetry still shapes his output: two of the four works recorded here start from texts — the Fragment after Hölderlin for soprano, trumpet and euphonium of 1984 and the cantata L’émigrant after a poem by Jules Supervielle for soprano, flute, clarinet, trombone, cello and piano of 2010.
Beside them stand two purely instrumental pieces from widely separated years: Distances for flute, harp, vibraphone and percussion was written in 1961, the Quartet for flute, clarinet in B flat, trombone and piano in 2007. All four works appear here on disc for the first time. The E-MEX Ensemble plays, with Jane Berthe (harp), Evelin Degen (flute), Martin von der Heydt (piano), Norbert Krämer, Igor Krasovskyy and Carsten Langer (percussion), Michael Pattmann (vibraphone), Andreas Roth (trombone and euphonium), Sebastian Schärr (trumpet), Joachim Striepens (clarinet) and Burkhart Zeller (cello); the soprano parts are sung by Silvia Weiss.
The second SACD belongs to the conversation with the composer: impressions of his childhood and youth in Santiago de Chile, his French-Spanish ancestry, the question of home — I only need my peace and quiet and a friendly atmosphere. On the third SACD the organist Gerd Zacher recalls his first encounter with Allende-Blin, their shared love of the organ and the unusual ways of treating it, the organ and the wind, and his own early years in Santiago de Chile.
The set closes with Gerd Zacher’s text “Über das Unsägliche in der Musik von Juan Allende-Blin” of 2012, read by the organist Matthias Geuting. It is fundamentally a torment to talk about music, Zacher begins — only attentive listening into the music creates clarity. The text deals with Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, with works with texts by Allende-Blin, with the means of craft that can bring forth the unsayable, and with how differently silence can be understood.
The chamber music was recorded in July 2010 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, a co-production with the station; the conversations with Juan Allende-Blin and Gerd Zacher were recorded on 21 July 2011 in their shared flat in Essen-Bredeney, Matthias Geuting’s reading on 24 June 2015 at the Cybele Studios. The edition appeared on the Longlist 3/2016 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in the category of contemporary music. The three hybrid SACDs run to 183 minutes in all (68:54, 56:29 and 57:45), in stereo and 5.0/5.1 surround.