The marimba has its origins in Africa and Indonesia; its main area as a folk instrument is Central America — Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico. On today’s concert marimba the rosewood bars are arranged in the manner of a piano keyboard, and beneath each bar a metal tube closed at the bottom serves as a resonator. Among all percussion instruments the marimba fascinates in a special way through the archaic, warm and immediate sound of wood — reason enough to present a broad spectrum of its literature in the form of a portrait CD.
Rolf Hildebrand studied with Joachim Schacht at the Folkwang-Hochschule, where he also founded a successful marimba and vibraphone duo; after his final examination he went on to study marimba with Robert van Sice. He appears with Christian Roderburg, in the Düsseldorf percussion ensemble and in a duo with the saxophonist Hugo Read. Christian Roderburg, born in 1954, teaches percussion at the Cologne Musikhochschule, Wuppertal department, and received the city of Düsseldorf’s promotional prize in 1982; he has appeared as soloist and ensemble player since 1978, alongside radio and record productions and music for stage and film. On this album Roderburg joins Hildebrand in Holzwege and Wooden Music, and Oskar Gottlieb Blarr takes part in his own Miel de Provence.
Keiko Abe, who has been writing solo and chamber works for the marimba for decades, tells of Wind in the Bamboo Grove how she stood in the morning mist in the middle of a bamboo forest and was enveloped in a magnificent rustling. Akira Yuyama, born in 1932, completed his composition studies at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1955 and received numerous national composition prizes; his Divertimento for Marimba and Alto Saxophone was completed in 1968 and written as a rondo in variation form — playing the two instruments together, the composer writes, calls for a special technique. Hugo Read takes the saxophone part here.
The programme stretches from the arrangement of a classic — Albéniz’s Asturias (Leyenda) — by way of the American percussion tradition with Paul Smadbeck’s étude and Rich O’Meara’s Wooden Music to Minoru Miki’s Time for Marimba and Hildebrand’s own Holzwege. At the close stands Oskar Gottlieb Blarr’s Miel de Provence, recorded in the Neander Church in Düsseldorf, while the other pieces were made in March and April 1995 in the church at Duisburg-Friemersdorf. Eight pieces, eight approaches to an instrument that only became at home in art music in the twentieth century. The CD runs to 60:25; the booklet has 16 pages in German, English and French.