OLGA NEUWIRTH ...miramondo multiplo... - Remnants of Songs ... An Amphigony - Masaot / Clocks without Hands

OLGA NEUWIRTH

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)

ICI Ensemble OLGA NEUWIRTH Who am I? - No more

The title ‘Composer in Dialogue’ stands for a biennial cooperation between the ICI Ensemble and a contemporary figure, the aim of which is to create a kind of ‘work in progress’ through composition itself but also by involving improvisational forms. Performances of pieces thus created remain the intention. The present recording documents an ICI concert with the composer Olga Neuwirth. 

Olga Neuwirth began her musical career on the trumpet, before she embraced composition as her favoured means of expression. She remains one of today’s most important protagonists in the field. She can thank exchanges with Adriana Hölszky and Luigi Nono, studies with Tristan Murail, and a befriended author, Elfriede Jelinek, for the path her professional life took. 

Olga Neuwirth meets an ICI Ensemble whose calling card is a kind of improvised music that draws on Afro-American roots. Here we must look to Vinko Globokar, Barry Guy, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and George E. Lewis for any explanation. NEOS will now release, after the duo CD JOMO (Johanna Varner & Mary Oliver), the second recording in the ICI Edition. 

The most exciting thing about this meeting of musical minds is the feeling that opposites impinge on each other. Here, that which is composed comes into head-on conflict with what has been – or can be – improvised. This simultaneity of determination and random coincidence, the inherent paradox of which is something that especially interests Olga Neuwirth, guarantees friction. As for the medium of live electronics and the use of samples, which have such an important bearing on the way instruments actually sound, these too point in this direction. 

Olga Neuwirth likes to describe her music as ‘music for catastrophes’, because just beneath the surface with its confusing patterns of sound – ones which resemble a series of labyrinths – there is a dark undertow that suddenly takes the music in new and unexpected directions. This is how she enables the listener to take part in a virtuosic deconstruction, and experience how sounds are perceived. What are called into question are our aural habits. And what is born is the impingement of possible associations. 

Two works emerged as joint projects and were premiered: the first, Who Am I?, is a composition that uses musically heterogeneous material and fragments of Kafka’s Letter to his Father, these excerpts read, however, by a woman. In the second work, No More, Olga Neuwirth incorporates her own writings with lines from the songs of Frank Zappa as well as providing us with an instrumental song, one that “continues to return and which is ‘worked through’, as in the process of Psychoanalysis”, to quote the composer. At the end, only vague reminiscences of The Long Rain remain. (Gunnar Geisse)

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.