These six pieces of chamber music by Benjamin Schweitzer, written between 2005 and 2008, mark a new phase in his work. The search they document could be called a search for beauty: a plausible structure of sounds in time, and in a space that allows a particular kind of aesthetic experience. The condensation of musical material is one of the main traits of his writing.
The performers are courage, the Dresden ensemble for contemporary music, conducted by Titus Engel. The recording was made from 5 to 8 December 2011 at the Studio Gärtnerstraße in Berlin, with Henri Thaon as engineer and Frank Kämpfer as producer, in co-production with Deutschlandfunk. Stefan Drees wrote the liner notes. Schweitzer, a German composer born in Marburg in 1973, founded the ensemble himself: courage was formed in Dresden in 1997 on his initiative, as a self-run group of young players for contemporary music. Engel, a Swiss conductor born in Zurich in 1975, became its musical director in 2000, and the ensemble has given more than fifty premieres.
Abgesang is a concert version of a scene from Schweitzer's chamber opera Dafne, a lament on leave-taking and on the inevitability of one's own fate. It frames the disc in two versions, a duet for two sopranos with violin, viola and drums, and a solo version for soprano with clarinet, violin, viola and drums. The sextet Anfänge/Netze (Malbork II), for flute, clarinet, string trio and piano, borrows the narrative strategy of Italo Calvino's Wenn ein Reisender in einer Winternacht (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller), where each chapter seems to start again while the characters and plot form a network. Schweitzer plays a similar game of beginnings and continuations over seventeen minutes.
In entschlackt, for oboe, trumpet, cello and piano, rhythmic pulsation alternates with sustained tones of varied dynamics, and the title points to a "purified" music stripped of anything superfluous. achteinhalb is written for ensemble without percussion, yet its tone is, in the composer's words, "sometimes dry, harsh, and rough": the percussive sounds come from the other instruments. The wind trio dull roots & spring rain, for flute and bass flute, oboe and bassoon, starts from the image of an April landscape freed from winter. Here Schweitzer leaves out melody and virtuoso figuration in favour of "extremely fine gradations of a few chosen sounds and textures".
CD, Wergo WER 6753 2, released in 2012, 56 minutes.
