Enno Poppe

Körper sets two works that Enno Poppe tailored for two leading new-music ensembles side by side. Körper, for the Ensemble Modern, explores a big band with the means of new music, and Gold, a purely vocal work for the SWR Vokalensemble on texts by Arno Holz. They sit at opposite ends of the range of possible sounds.

Poppe, born in 1969, wrote Körper for Ensemble Modern in 2021 and conducts it here. The 21 soloists of the ensemble form a formidable big band, with the right woodwinds and brass, saxophones included: Lutz Koppetsch and Martijne van Dijk on saxophone, Hermann Kretzschmar and Ueli Wiget on keyboards, among others. Gold is conducted by Marcus Creed. Körper is a co-production with Hessischer Rundfunk, Gold a production of Südwestrundfunk licensed by SWR Media Services. The engineers were Lisa Harnest for Körper and Burkhard Pitzer-Landeck for Gold, with Felix Dreher as sound designer for Körper.

In Körper (Body) Poppe explores and expands what a big band offers as a sound body: its colours and its dynamic and rhythmic possibilities. As so often in his music, the piece passes through repeated processes of intensification and collapse, and at the climaxes its physicality is almost overwhelming. Yet its core lies in the intimate, thinly scored moments. The electric strings slowly rise with the percussion, or a saxophone, a keyboard or a trombone steps out of the thicket for a few moments. Gold, a three-part a cappella work and one of only two choral pieces Poppe had written, is his first setting of the lustfully excessive verse of Arno Holz (1863-1929). Holz was a leading figure of German Naturalism and literary modernism, and his poems parody more solemn high literature. Its parts are Moderne Walpurgisnacht, Silber and Notturno, and the choir appears in changing combinations, at times fanned out into 24 voices as in old vocal polyphony.

The album continues Wergo's series devoted to Poppe and was nominated for the German Record Critics' Award in the quarterly list 4/2025.

CD, Wergo WER 7407 2, released in 2025 in the Edition Enno Poppe series, total time 70'00".