Ensemble Modern, Josef Bierbichler

Eislermaterial is Heiner Goebbels's homage to Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), the composer whose works and writings drew him into music in the early 1970s. Built entirely from Eisler's material, it moves between the songs of exile written with Bertolt Brecht, rearranged chamber and orchestral movements, unpublished fragments and two collages of Eisler's own speaking voice. Goebbels adds new arrangements and passages worked out in rehearsal, so that the hour-long sequence plays as one continuous portrait.

The piece was made for the Eisler centenary and premiered in Munich on 23 May 1998 by the Ensemble Modern and the actor Josef Bierbichler, who sings the songs. This recording was taped live at the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin in October 1998, in a co-production of ECM, Ensemble Modern, Südwestrundfunk and Deutschlandfunk. The players work without a conductor in an unusual spatial layout, with Ueli Wiget on piano and sampler and Wolfgang Stryi on bass clarinet and saxophone among them. Goebbels mixed the album with Max Federhofer, and Manfred Eicher was executive producer.

Bierbichler sings with a thin voice and a shy reserve that German critics compared to Eisler's own performances. His songs range from the festive Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe, which opens the disc, to the four Wiegenlieder für Arbeitermütter and Über den Selbstmord. Between them come movements from the Kleine Sinfonie, the Septet No. 1 and the Fünf Orchesterstücke, and Die Fabriken from the Third Orchestral Suite, whose manic energy encloses a fragment of an unpublished string quartet. The two Hörstücke rework Eisler's radio conversations with Hans Bunge, layering his voice until speech turns into rhythm. At several points the ensemble opens Eisler's lines into free jazz.

In The Guardian in 2002, Andrew Clements called the album "simultaneously a tribute, a disinterment and a deconstruction". For Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone it was "less a portrait of Eisler than a journey through his musical sensibility". The disc entered the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (4/2002) and was a Star of the Month in Fono Forum. The stage version has stayed in the Ensemble Modern's repertoire, with more than 65 performances in cities from Edinburgh and Paris to New York and Lisbon.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1779, first released on 9 September 2002.