The ensemble piano possibile, which numbers up to twenty members, is known for its work in music theatre but devotes itself just as much to music written for listening alone. From a repertoire of some eighty works at the time, thirty of which it had premiered, it assembles here a deliberately heterogeneous programme in which the aesthetic range of composing today asserts itself. What the five pieces share is that they do not stint on the pleasure of playing and rely on shifting expressivity, as far as powerful eruptions.
Carl Christian Bettendorf’s Nachtstück und Arie for soprano and ensemble in five groups was written in 1998/99 on a commission from the Haus der Kunst in Munich for the exhibition “Die Nacht”. It begins with distant rolling thunder, detonations like the noise of an approaching battle. The abrupt opening gestures already make clear, the composer writes, that this night piece is no idyll under a starry sky but a catastrophic nightmare of the kind Johann Heinrich Füssli treated in his paintings. After the night-mare has left the sleeper’s bed, the aria sounds from afar — Ingeborg Bachmann’s enigmatic poem Schatten Rosen Schatten from the collection Anrufung des Großen Bären.
Night, dream and pause are reflected too in Armando Gentilucci’s In alto, le stelle for nine instruments of 1981. The first pages of the score, the Italian composer said, were written in one go during a summer night under a starry sky of particular beauty; those impressions determined the whole arc of the composition — a meditation on time and space, on existence and on the mysterious life of sound.
Klaus Schedl’s Running Man of 1997 to 1999 opens the programme, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On All Fours of 1985 closes it, and between them stands Hans-Jürgen von Bose’s Befragung for clarinet and strings of 1988. The score of Schedl’s piece asks for “as quickly as possible”; in frequently changing metres it presses restlessly on until, shortly before the end, a passage senza misura feigns a sudden halt — the title alludes to Paul Michael Glaser’s 1986 film after Stephen King, only the happy ending is left out. Von Bose’s Befragung, commissioned by the Jürgen Ponto Foundation, refers, in the composer’s words, to nothing extra-musical but to the encounter of the solo clarinet with the strings. Turnage wrote On All Fours for a chamber ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass. The recording was made in February and May 2000 at the BAVARIA studios in Munich, supported by the Forberg-Schneider Foundation; the conductor is Christian Günther, and the soprano part is sung by Christin Molinar. With playing times between ten and almost fourteen minutes, the five works stand side by side as equals.