Walter Tilgner

Bezaubernder Frühling (Fascinating Springtime) is subtitled Riedkonzert, Wetland Wildlife Chorus. Walter Tilgner composed it from documentary recordings made mostly in spring over more than twenty years in two wetlands of Lake Constance. The dates run from 1984 to 2003.

Walter Tilgner is a German biologist and bioacoustician, born in 1934 in Olomouc, then Czechoslovakia. He studied zoology and botany in Frankfurt am Main in the 1950s and until his retirement worked at the natural history museum at Lake Constance, the landscape of this disc. He is also well known as a photographer of woodland and forest scenes, and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology made him an honorary member. For more than twenty years his main activity has been the documentary recording of natural sound, the making of what the label calls sound pictures, and he is author and producer of more than ten Natural Sound CDs for Wergo.

The first ten tracks come from the international nature and bird reserve of the Vorarlberg Rhine Delta, where the Rhine flows into the lake. The rest come from the fens and reedbeds of the Bodanrück, the hills between the Gnadensee and the Überlinger See. The disc opens with waves at the Riedspitz and the cries of black-headed gulls, then a morning in the reedbed. A lesser spotted woodpecker and a long-eared owl follow, a great reed warbler, a water rail, and a reed warbler singing through thunder and rain. The Bodanrück half belongs largely to amphibians: marsh and edible frogs, grass frogs, toads in the rain, an agile frog and tree frogs with thunder. Among the birds are lapwings, tawny owls with a bittern, a cuckoo, a greylag goose, and a little bittern calling "wruh... wruh".

The selection mixes single voices and choruses, and the frog concerts make the title literal. The 24-page booklet, in German and English, is by Tilgner himself.

CD, Wergo SM 9013 2, released in 2006 in the Natural Sound series. Total time 72 minutes 9 seconds.