Ensemble Musikfabrik

Kreuzungen (Crossings) collects four works in which something from outside music, historical, physical or ethnological, gets in the way of the composing. The programme runs from a classic of spectral music, Gérard Grisey's Partiels, to three works by composers of later generations who cross material, memory and cultures. It is a volume of the Edition Musikfabrik drawn from the concert series Musikfabrik im WDR.

Ensemble Musikfabrik recorded the four works live in the Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal of the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne, in productions of Westdeutscher Rundfunk with Michael Peschko and Stephan Schmidt as recording producers. Emilio Pomàrico conducts the Nicolaou and the Grisey, Peter Rundel the Schöllhorn and Enno Poppe the Mack. The booklet text is by Michael Rebhahn, and the poster reproduces Gerhard Richter's Stadtbild SL (1969).

In Farbenmaschinen by Vassos Nicolaou, born in Cyprus in 1971 and trained in Thessaloniki, Cologne and Paris, structurally different layers of sound interact without pause. Johannes Schöllhorn's Pièces croisées is a set of nine bagatelles for large ensemble whose titles come from François Couperin's harpsichord pieces: "Les tours de passe-passe", "La ténébreuse", "Les idées heureuses", "La lugubre" and others. The label calls it a musical shell game of memories. Grisey's Partiels (1975) for 18 musicians, the third part of Les espaces acoustiques, opens with the spectrum of a low trombone E, which the ensemble rebuilds partial by partial until sound and notated noise collide. Dieter Mack's Kammermusik V for chamber orchestra deals with the problems of intercultural communication, up to speechlessness.

The crossings are also biographical. Mack, born in Speyer in 1954, studied with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg, spent a year in Bali in 1981-82 and founded a Balinese gamelan group at the Freiburg Musikhochschule. Nicolaou has received the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Prize of the City of Cologne. Schöllhorn was born in 1962. Partiels was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and first played by L'Itinéraire, and it is widely regarded as a founding work of spectral music.

CD in digipak and slipcase with fold-out poster, Wergo WER 6866 2, released in 2018 in the Edition Musikfabrik (74'10").