Heinz Holliger

Choral Utopia collects five works for choir by Heinz Holliger, from the early Psalm to pieces of the 2000s, all but Psalm in first recordings. The SWR Vokalensemble sings under Marcus Creed, with Holliger himself conducting the closing Utopie Chorklang. Holliger has said he needs a musical discourse. In his vocal works he follows the associations suggested by words, which in turn generate further connections.

Holliger is a Swiss composer, oboist and conductor, born on 21 May 1939 in Langenthal. He studied in Bern and Basel, notably composition with Sándor Veress, then in Paris, and took composition courses with Pierre Boulez in Basel. Unlike Boulez he does not build his works on charts and tables. Nor does he use the sound carpets of Ligeti or the Spectralists. The recordings were made between 2006 and 2015 in Stuttgart and at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, as productions of Südwestrundfunk and Radio France.

Shir Shavur (The Broken Song, 2004) sets twelve poems by David Rokeah for mixed choir and soloists a cappella, in both Hebrew and German. The choir is handled in antiphonal, double-choir and responsorial settings for solo and choir. It was premiered by the same ensemble and conductor at the ECLAT festival in Stuttgart in January 2005. It was an SWR commission, dedicated to Clytus Gottwald, who also wrote the booklet notes. Psalm (1971) is for sixteen solo voices. hölle himmel is a motet on poems by Kurt Marti for mixed choir with percussion ad libitum. Marti also wrote the four poems in Bernese dialect set in Rosa Loui. In Utopie Chorklang the choir is split into three groups of twelve voices, tuned like organ registers. The middle group sings as written, the first a third of a tone higher, the third a third of a tone lower.

In MusicWeb International Dominy Clements called the disc "this fine collection of choral works" and found Utopie Chorklang "a brief but impressive piece". He praised Holliger's keen ear for close-cluster writing, and warned that the programme suits listeners ready for long stretches of atonality.

CD, Wergo WER 7333 2, released in 2018.