Wolfgang Rihm, Vol. 39 (Live) Various Artists - Wolfgang Rihm

• Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952): Sphäre nach Studie (Live):
• 1 Rihm: Sphäre nach Studie (Live) 24:45
• Stabat mater (Live):
• 2 Rihm: Stabat mater (Live) 15:26
• Male über Male II:
• 3 Rihm: Male über Male II: I. Frei, nicht schnell (Live) 06:51
• 4 Rihm: Male über Male II: II. Sehr langsam, wie aus weiter Ferne (Live) 03:53
• 5 Rihm: Male über Male II: III. In drängender Unruhe (Live) 01:45
• 6 Rihm: Male über Male II: IV. Langsam (Live) 05:25
• Total Runtime 58:05

Info for Wolfgang Rihm, Vol. 39 (Live)

Wolfgang Rihm is one of the most important contemporary composers of our time. The musician, professor of composition and author from Karlsruhe, Germany is a larger-than-life personality, and the contemporary music scene is impossible to imagine without him. His knowledge of music is all-encompassing, as is his mastery of the arts, literature and philosophy – all of which serve as sources of inspiration for his composing. With more than 400 compositions, he has created a universe that cannot easily be defined. Rihm has written New Music – the titles of his compositions have come to symbolise the musical history of recent decades. Other works by him refer to music history – they include, for example, oratorios inspired by Bach, orchestral works based on Brahms, or chamber music inspired by Schumann. His stage works enrich the programmes of opera houses.

Rihm’s piece Sphäre nach Studie (1993/2002) for chamber ensemble received its world premiere on March 13, 2002 in Karlsruhe, and was also the opening work at the concert of the Bayerische Rundfunk musica viva series recorded live on December 8, 2020 in Munich’s Prinzregententheater. That concert concluded with Male über Male 2 (2000/2008), a commission by WDR that was premiered by Jörg Widmann in Witten in 2008. The origins of both works lie in solo pieces that Rihm has painted over and commented on several times. In them, he sends the piano as well as the highly virtuosic clarinet on journeys through new landscapes.

Between these two instrumental works, the baritone Christian Gerhaher and the violist Tabea Zimmermann perform Rihm’s haunting Stabat Mater (2020) – they gave its first performance less than ten months earlier, on September 23, 2020, in the Berliner Philharmonie (a commission from the Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin and the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker). In this work, the reduction to the unusual constellation of voice and string instrument creates a sound space in which much, perhaps everything, is possible. The direct confrontation of the baritone with the inner singing of the viola gives rise to a wordless song, a breathing line.

Christian Gerhaher, baritone
Tabea Zimmermann, viola
Tamara Stefanovich, piano
Jörg Widmann, clarinet
Members of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Stanley Dodds, conductor

Wolfgang Rihm
was born on 13 March 1952 in Karlsruhe, a city near the French and Swiss borders, at a stone’s throw from Strasbourg and Basel, two of the many places where he and his music are at home. He lives there to this day in a spacious apartment not only full of books and scores – those one takes for granted – but also of paintings by contemporary artists, mainly by Kurt Kocherscheidt, the Austrian painter with whom Rihm was befriended and to whom he has dedicated a number of works.

Rihm is a composer, professor of composition at the Music Academy of his native city (where his students included Vykintas Baltakas and Jörg Widmann), a remarkable writer on music with several books to his name, including collections of his articles and interviews. He also sits on a number of influential committees in Germany and has a say in decisions affecting the working conditions of his fellow musicians.

No doubt about it: Wolfgang Rihm is a unique phenomenon, larger than life. His knowledge of music (the art and craft of composition as well as of music history from ancient times up to the present day) is vast. But he also seems to know everything worth knowing about literature, painting, architecture, philosophy and he freely draws on those as sources of inspiration. A look at the texts he has set to music is an indication of the breadth of his culture: from Homer through Hölderlin and Goethe to Rilke, Botho Strauss and Durs Grünbein.

The world he has created with his compositions which now outnumber 400 works is a veritable universe. As such, it cannot be pidgeonholed. To paraphrase the title of a well-known British film on Thomas More, he is a composer for all seasons. Rihm has written 'new music' as it is commonly called and some of his titles have become signposts in the history of post-war music. Soloists, chamber groups and orchestras programme these works as a matter of course now, they have become an integral part of the repertoire (Jagden und Formen, Chiffre-cycle, Pol -Kolchis -Nucleus). Of similar significance are the compositions which take their cue, as it were, from music of past centuries: oratorios with Johann Sebastian Bach as a point of reference (Deus Passus), orchestral pieces of Brahmsian sound and gesture (Ernster Gesang, Nähe fern 1-4), chamber music in the wake of Robert Schumann (Fremde Szenen).

Already at the age of 25, he composed a chamber opera (Jakob Lenz) that has since proved itself as probably the most often produced piece of contemporary music theatre in Germany. Jakob Lenz has been followed by a series of large-scale operas (Die Hamletmaschine, Die Eroberung von Mexico, Das Gehege, Dionysos).

Wolfgang Rihm is one of the foremost song composers of our times; his string quartets are often presented in cycles by a wide range of groups.

Rihm is a composer who puts a giant question-mark over whatever he is doing. Each new work is an answer to the question raised by the previous piece; each new work poses questions which he will seek a reply to in the composition to be written next. There come about work cycles, work families which form a web with other cycles and individual pieces. Everything is in permanent growth, work never stops, new compositions are produced, brought into intriguing relationships with other works, revised and supplemented.

If you consider that he is also a remarkable draughtsman and if you read the poem he has written for/about the trumpet concerto Marsyas, you will have to admit that Wolfgang Rihm is indeed larger than life.

Booklet for Wolfgang Rihm, Vol. 39 (Live)