On Gathering Thunders, her debut album, the percussionist Leonie Klein traces the solo repertoire of new music over six decades. She plays Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959), Iannis Xenakis's Psappha (1975), Helmut Lachenmann's Intérieur I (1966), Nicolaus A. Huber's Póthos (2010), Peter Eötvös's Thunder (1993) for bass timpani, and Gathering (2018) by Johannes Julius Fischer, heard here in its first recording.
The disc starts from a simple observation. The modern avant-garde turned noise into a legitimate element of music, and it did so not least through a growing use of percussion. Klein, a young multi-percussionist, chose works that mark different stages of that history. She recorded them alone on 9-11 May 2018, in a coproduction with Südwestrundfunk, SWR2. The recording producer and editor was Ralf Kolbinger, the balance engineer Rainer Neumann, and the liner notes are by the musicologist Rudolf Frisius.
Zyklus is written for an orchestra of percussion instruments played by one performer, and in Klein's hands it becomes a kaleidoscope of colours. In Psappha constantly changing rhythmic patterns give shape to a structured periodicity. Lachenmann's Intérieur I, the longest piece at almost nineteen minutes, brings to life exquisitely subtle sound events. Huber's Póthos joins contrasting elements to reveal, in the composer's words, "the longing of one note for the next". In Thunder, a solo taken from Eötvös's Triangel, rapid pedal changes keep the pitch of the timpani constantly moving.
The newest work closes the programme. Fischer's Gathering is written for prepared and extended vibraphone, in three movements marked energetic and rhythmical, noisy and mechanical, and free and spacious, and its repetitive writing stands for the present state of percussion music. Schott describes the disc as a representative exploration of an important area of new music. Klein's task, in Schott's account, is to bring out each work's own profile in the tension between the composer's intentions and the performer's freedom.
CD, Wergo WER 7375 2, released in 2018, a coproduction with SWR2, made with the support of the Vereinigte Volksbank Raiffeisenbank and the Adler Büttner Foundation.
