Sophie Schafleitner / Lorelei Dowling / Klangforum Wien / Peter Rundel / Stefan Asbury LIZA LIM Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus

EXTINCTION EVENTS AND DAWN CHORUS

FRIEDRICH CERHA Bruchstück, geträumt - Neun Bagatellen - Instants

Two things have happened to Cerha's music in more recent years; a conscious avoidance of rigorous structural elaboration of musical ideas in favour of small episodes of 'spontaneous inspiration'; and a decidedly autumnal feel, a sense of time running out. Old habits die hard; the harmonic thinking is still very much that of his beloved Second Viennese School, and the small disparate fragments - such as the very diverse movements that make up the Bagatelles - nonetheless form a convincingly unified whole. Bruchstück is very quiet, static, with bells and the imitation of the ticking of clocks marking the inexorable passage of time. Instants begins in compete stasis, from which a sequence of more active 'moments' of greatly contrasting character - vigorous and motoric; ethereal and calm; echoes of pastoral romanticism from far away - arises. The Bagatelles are strongly differentiated miniature character pieces which form a sequence with a convincing dramatic shape, while each fragment, however brief, has its on internal narrative.

LSO / Pierre Boulez / Klangforum Wien / Emilio Pomàrico OLGA NEUWIRTH Clinamen / Nodus - Construction in Space

Olga Neuwirth 's faible for grotesque themes and her occasional vegetative proliferation of pieces ensured her a permanent place in the repertoire. As brilliant growths of an undomesticated artist.

Many-facetted, vigorously arranged scores with the most heterogeneous influences and styles, far remote from any of the false glamour characteristic of postmodernity. With the conductor Pierre Boulez she has found herself a genuine ally. (Wolfgang Fuhrmann)

Klangforum Wien / Sylvain Cambreling OLGA NEUWIRTH Vampyrotheone - Instrumental-Inseln aus "Bählamms Fest" - Hooloomooloo

Music lives in the opera, at times rather dis- agreeably, since the house is too small. It will not leave of its own accord, since those who feel and think must be given a text and plot and there are people who sorely disturb our contentedness, as when Isolde dies her Liebestod. Olga Neuwirth’s opera Bählamms Fest observed the figures it sent onto stage for a while and then threw them out although the text prison attempted desperately to hold on to them with bars to the final moment. So this opera had to let go some of its parts, which were then permitted to drift away as islands. How far do the ice/snow islands jut into space and what remains submerged under water to hold the islands upright and, if necessary, to tear ships apart? Olga Neuwirth’s islands have much to tow along underneath as the centreboard of these ships, which can be dimly descried in contours rather than recognised, but it is often difficult to say what is more important, what you see/hear or the other. This music has submusics (subtexts) it trails along as a ghost the tatters of its sheets. Usually it then becomes unhomely, and one is filled with dread. The opera Bählamms Fest stands in the tradition of gothic romance (and the surrealists’ dreamlike unlogic), plays with it, alludes to it in irony, and similarly plays with the time that passes by, the homely plays with the unhomely (in this case the home with the outside, and both flow into each other incessantly), and when you are supposed to be afraid, then you must release that which threatens you from beyond the bounds of reason, and you must let in that which in future might beco- me a threat, so as to recognise it, before being able to fear it at all. Otherwise, there would be nothing unhomely. he ironical in music and the unhomely.