condition (record/cover): NM / EX (import sticker on back)

Gatefold sleeve with booklet attached inside. 

The most comprehensive single LP document of Jürg Wyttenbach's compositional voice, and one of the more unusual artifacts in the Bärenreiter catalogue. Born in Bern in 1935 and trained at the Bern Conservatory under Sándor Veress and subsequently at the Conservatoire de Paris, Wyttenbach arrived at composition by way of a piano career of exceptional distinction - he premiered more than a hundred contemporary works as a pianist and conductor before his retirement in 2002 - and the music he composed bears the mark of that dual life: a command of instrumental idiom that comes only from the inside, combined with a compositional intelligence formed by his work with the Ensemble Modern, the Klangforum Wien, and the ensemble recherche.

The seven works collected here - De' Metalli, Claustrophonie, Nachspiel, Vier Kanzonen, Two Nonsense Verses, An Epigram And A Madrigal, Three Piano Pieces, and Ad Libitum - map the full range of a composer the Swiss Federal Office of Culture described, at the time of his 2017 Swiss Music Prize, as "a master of the burlesque": a characterization accurate but incomplete. The burlesque is present - the wit, the delight in the scurrilous, the use of theatrical gesture as a compositional tool - but so is a profound seriousness about what music can do and mean. Wyttenbach's concept of "instrumental theater," developed across all these works, redefined the boundaries of chamber performance practice with consequences felt well beyond Switzerland. He died in Basel in December 2021. Bärenreiter, BM 30 SL 1728.