Jörg Widmann, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Christoph Poppen

Elegie is an ECM portrait of Jörg Widmann, the Munich-born composer (1973) who also performs as a clarinettist. Two orchestral works from the mid-2000s, the wordless Messe and Elegie for clarinet and orchestra, frame the Fünf Bruchstücke for clarinet and piano of 1997, among his earliest published pieces. The programme moves from full orchestral mass to five short fragments and back to a concerto-like lament with the composer as soloist.

Widmann plays the solo part in Elegie. In the Bruchstücke he is joined by Heinz Holliger, another composer-performer, here in his recording debut as a pianist. Christoph Poppen conducts the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern, the orchestra formed in 2007 from the merger of two radio orchestras, which he led from its start. The orchestral works were recorded in Saarbrücken in June and July 2008, at the Congresshalle and SR Studio 1, and the duo in May 2009 at the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne. Manfred Eicher was executive producer of this ECM, SR and WDR co-production, and Paul Griffiths wrote the liner notes.

The Messe lasts about forty minutes and sets no text. Hubert Culot describes it as the last part of an orchestral trilogy after Lied and Chor, with the orchestra treated as if it were singing. A long Kyrie, built from a monody, interludes and two contrapuntal sections, leads to a Gloria with an echo chorale, a Crucifixus and an Et resurrexit that closes with an Exodus. The five Bruchstücke are tiny, none reaching three minutes, and use modern playing techniques on both instruments. In Elegie the clarinet dominates for nearly nineteen minutes, its line full of trills, multiphonics and microtones against the orchestra.

BBC Music Magazine found the album "superbly performed", praising the orchestra's response to Poppen's incisive conducting. Culot, reviewing it for MusicWeb International in 2011, called the Messe "a deeply sincere and strongly expressive work that clearly deserves wider exposure". In Musik & Theater, Burkhard Schäfer heard all three works as laments that trace a lost whole through memories and fragments. For him Widmann takes Romanticism, in its darker side too, radically further.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 2110, first released in March 2011.