Nach innen (Toward the Inside) is the sixth volume of the Edition Musikfabrik, the series in which Wergo collects concert recordings by the Cologne Ensemble Musikfabrik. Three composers approach the idea of an inner world from three very different angles: the inside of sound, an old legend retold from within, and the mind of the man who discovered the unconscious.
The ensemble was formed at the end of 1990 and is the state ensemble of North Rhine-Westphalia. The disc gathers live recordings made in 2004, 2006 and 2007 in the Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal of the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne, produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk with Michael Peschko as recording producer. Each work has its own conductor: James Wood leads the piece by Ian Willcock, Rupert Huber the work by Mark Andre, and Peter Rundel the concerto by Kaija Saariaho, with Hannah Weirich as violin soloist.
Willcock, born in London in 1959 and a pupil of David Lumsdaine, opens the programme with Grave for ensemble, a thirteen-minute piece that visits Sigmund Freud on his deathbed. Mark Andre, born in Paris in 1964 and trained with Claude Ballif, Gérard Grisey and Helmut Lachenmann, wrote ni for 14 instruments. The title is an abbreviation of "nach innen", and the work's seven short sections search for what the label calls existential sound situations. Saariaho's Graal théâtre closes the disc: a violin concerto in two movements, Delicato and Impetuoso, that treats the genre itself as a Grail legend. Her music grows here from spectral harmony, the inner structure of sound that also concerns Andre.
Graal théâtre was first written for Gidon Kremer, who premiered it with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen at the London Proms in 1995. The version heard here is the reduction for chamber orchestra that Saariaho made in 1997, with the solo part unchanged. The Finnish composer, born in Helsinki in 1952, lived in Paris from 1982 until her death there in 2023. The booklet notes are by Patrick Hahn, who frames the programme with Augustine's advice to seek truth in the inner man.
CD, Wergo WER 6856 2, released in 2010, volume six of the Edition Musikfabrik (total time 58'53").
