Wilhelm Killmayer

Published for Wilhelm Killmayer's seventy-fifth birthday in August 2002, this disc collects piano works the Munich composer wrote between 1975 and 1999. They are played by Siegfried Mauser, who made the recording in close cooperation with Killmayer, his former teacher. At over seventy-six minutes it is a generous portrait of his writing for solo piano.

Killmayer was a German composer, born in Munich on 21 August 1927 and died in Starnberg on 20 August 2017. The label calls him a multiple prize-winner. Mauser, born in Straubing in 1954, is a German pianist and musicologist and the only performer here. He had already recorded a Killmayer piano programme for Wergo in 1997, for the composer's seventieth birthday.

An John Field is a set of five nocturnes addressed to John Field, about twenty-eight minutes in all. Each carries a key and a wry title. "Glimpflicher Absturz" (a fall that ends lightly) is in A minor and "Der Schrecken kommt nicht weit genug" (the fright does not get far enough) in D major. "Am Grat" (on the ridge) is in B flat, "Ausflug aus dem Karzer" (an outing from the lock-up) in A flat, and "Im Schlupfloch" (in the hideout) in F sharp. The Vier neue Klavierstücke, numbered IV to VII, form the longest group at thirty-one minutes. They are an Impromptu, an "Etude de Figaro", a Choral and a "Phantasie-Paraphrase", which alone lasts sixteen minutes and is the largest single piece on the disc. The Klavieralbum mit Sphinxen closes the disc with nine short pieces in seventeen minutes, from "Frohgemut" and "Innig" to an "Abendgebet" (evening prayer), "Nächtlich" and "Lebhaft, mit Freude".

As on the earlier disc, the music works through historical forms: the nocturne, the impromptu, the album of character pieces. Killmayer treats them with humour, and his titles keep an ironic distance from the Romantic models they recall. The keys named in the nocturnes, unusual in new music of these decades, are part of the same play with inherited forms.

CD, Wergo WER 6619 2, released in 2002, total time 76'13".