“I find the development of a so-called individual artistic language rather boring,” says Rolf Riehm. For the Fortner pupil, born in Saarbrücken in 1937, who taught composition and theory at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule from 1974 to 2000, composing means securing a “stock of emotional sensitivity” and relating each subject anew to the present. As Michael Rebhahn writes in the booklet, he gathers his material – current events, myths, fairy tales, poetry, music history – without any discernible system: “The soul does not feel things in order, but criss-cross.” The three pieces on this SACD are musical perceptions of literary finds in which language and sound remain autonomous.
aprikosenbäume gibt es, aprikosenbäume gibt es (2004) takes up the opening of Inger Christensen’s poetry cycle “alfabet” of 1981, an inventory of things ordered by the initial letters of their Danish names, whose poems grow according to the Fibonacci sequence, from one line for “a” to 610 lines for “n”. The piece for contrabass clarinet, violin, cello, trumpet, trombone and playback begins with the first strophe, read by Christensen; then the contrabass clarinet takes over the role of reciter, and the other instruments gradually take up its tone. In a parenthesis a foreign image intrudes, Bernhard Martin’s painting “Dans mes rêves je t’adore”, showing the daydream of a housewife with a vacuum cleaner, before Christensen’s voice returns. The work is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Stryi, whose Selmer contrabass clarinet Theo Nabicht has played since 2007.
The title of Ahi bocca, ahi lingua (1991-1994) for four vocalists comes from Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigal “Si, ch’io vorrei morire” of 1603, one of his most erotic pieces. Its textual basis, however, is a short dialogue by Rainald Goetz between “Warrior” and “Brain”, not a word of which is sung: “I have placed music where the text leaves space for punctuation.” The music fills the gaps after the punctuation marks and refers to the preceding text without doubling it; the “bocca” stands for singing in tongueless phonemes, the “lingua” for speech alone. David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, John Potter and Gordon Jones of the Hilliard Ensemble recorded the piece in 1994 in the WDR’s Kleiner Sendesaal in Cologne.
Schlaf, schlaf John Donne, schlaf tief und quäl dich nicht (1997) for violin, bass clarinet, accordion and keyboard was written for the 1997 Witten festival, whose theme was “Music – Language”. Its starting point was Jossif Brodskij’s “Great Elegy for John Donne” of 1963, which Riehm reduced to a single sentence. As a vocal sample, with the voice of Karmen Mikovic, it underlies almost the entire piece without determining its course semantically. At first the instruments play around the voice’s melismas; after a third of the piece the relationship is reversed, completely so after an inserted recording in which Brodskij recites one of his poems in Russian over a distorted techno beat. From then on the voice remains on the vowel “u” for more than eight minutes. Melise Mellinger, Uwe Möckel, Klaus Steffes-Holländer and Teodoro Anzellotti of the Ensemble recherche recorded the piece in 1998 at the Experimentalstudio Freiburg.
Theo Nabicht and Benjamin Spillner, Markus Schwind, Erik Borgir and Andrew Digby of the Stuttgart-based Ensemble ascolta recorded aprikosenbäume gibt es, aprikosenbäume gibt es in December 2006 and 2007 in the WDR’s Kleiner Sendesaal as a co-production with the WDR; the two older recordings are productions of the broadcaster. The SACD was on the Bestenliste 1/2009 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, was recommended by the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and received FonoForum’s Stern des Monats.