Mathias Spahlinger

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

No insert. | An essential portrait of one of the most uncompromising musical intelligences in contemporary Germany, and one of the most important LPs in the Edition RZ catalogue. Mathias Spahlinger (b. 1944) occupies a position in post-war German music that can only be described as deliberate solitude: a composer who has subjected every element of musical convention — notation, performance practice, the social role of the concert, the relationship between composition and interpretation — to a systematic philosophical critique, and whose music enacts that critique in the most direct possible way.

The six works gathered here span his output from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s and represent the full range of his concerns. Morendo (1974), for orchestra under Francis Travis with the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt, approaches the idea of dying away — not as an expressive gesture but as a compositional premise: what happens when music continuously tends toward its own extinction? Apo Do (Von Hier) (1982), for string quartet, pushes harmonic and timbral material to a point where conventional categorical distinctions begin to dissolve. Entlöschend — for a single large tamtam, played by Spahlinger himself — is among the most extreme and beautiful documents of extended percussion technique in the literature. The Schola Cantorum Stuttgart under Clytus Gottwald realize the choral work Sotto Voce with characteristic precision. An indispensable record. Edition RZ, Ed. RZ 1005, 1990.