Ensemble Musikfabrik, Brian Ferneyhough, Stephan Winkler, Oscar Bettison

Fall gathers three works about crashing, decaying and failing, each with a very different kind of fall behind it. Brian Ferneyhough sets the mythical fall of Icarus for clarinet and ensemble, Stephan Winkler turns to an all too earthly accident, and Oscar Bettison builds a large piece on the collapse of a supposed scientific sensation. The Winkler and Bettison pieces appear here in their first recordings.

The disc is a volume of the Edition Musikfabrik with highlights from the series Musikfabrik im WDR, produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. Ensemble Musikfabrik plays under three conductors: Diego Masson in the Ferneyhough, Clement Power in the Winkler and Emilio Pomàrico in the Bettison. The clarinet soloist is Carl Rosman, whose clarinet techniques have shaped years of collaboration with Richard Barrett. Winkler, born in Görlitz in 1967, studied composition and cello at the Hanns Eisler music academy in Berlin.

Ferneyhough's La Chute d'Icare (1988) for solo clarinet and chamber ensemble was commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation and refers to the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The clarinet is Icarus, and his fall is traced in a fiercely difficult solo part over about ten minutes. Winkler's Von der Gewissensnot der Insekten (Of the Insects' Pangs of Conscience) for 17 instrumentalists starts from a profane fall: too much alcohol, an open window, a fatal outcome. Its two movements bear titles such as "Heftig tremolierende Nervenschläuche" (violently trembling nerve tubes). Bettison's Livre des Sauvages for large ensemble is the longest piece on the disc, at more than half an hour.

Its background is a hoax. In 1860 the French missionary Abbé Emmanuel Domenech published a manuscript of pictographs as an ethnological discovery, the "livre des sauvages", whose origin was soon disputed. Bettison took three of its pictographs, described them and used the descriptions as titles: "Curious Fauna, Some of it Murderous", "Alchemy or a new Religion" and "Treasure Ships and Heretical Ceremonies". The work was commissioned in 2012 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Musikfabrik, and its percussion includes air pumps, wine bottles and desk bells. The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild (1983).

CD in digipak with fold-out poster, Wergo WER 6869 2, released in 2019 in the Edition Musikfabrik (61'28").