This portrait of Ulrich Stranz collects six works composed or revised between 1971 and 2001, from chamber music to a piece for piano and orchestra. Schott presents it as a rounded portrait in which the developments and the constants of his musical language become audible across three decades.

Stranz was a German composer, born on 10 May 1946 in Neumarkt St. Veit in Bavaria. Each work here comes with its own performers. nicht mehr - noch nicht is played by a chamber ensemble under Räto Tschupp, and Contrasubjekte by the Münchener Kammerorchester under Hans Stadlmair. The Musik für Klavier und Orchester Nr. 2 has Tzimon Barto as soloist with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Christoph Eschenbach. Tanzmusik is played by Banda Classica under Christian Siegmann, Anabasis by the pianist Gottfried Hefele, and Aus dem Zusammenhang by the Linos-Ensemble.

Contrasubjekte is a passacaglia on B-A-C-H for fourteen strings. Tanzmusik, taken from a Serenade, is scored for double wind quintet and double bass, while Aus dem Zusammenhang is music in three parts for nine instruments. nicht mehr - noch nicht (No longer, not yet), for an ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, piano, harpsichord, viola and cello, is the longest work at over 17 minutes. Anabasis is a twelve-minute solo piano piece, and the piano and orchestra work lasts almost fifteen. Schott describes a composer engrossed in a game with just a few notes, distrustful of routine tricks, drawn to introverted alternative worlds and to questions of time and its modes.

Schott also quotes the composer Wilhelm Killmayer, who places Stranz among a generation that in the early 1970s set out to free musical material from the ideological constraints that had governed it. In his view that greater freedom opened a wide field for musical expression, an achievement still waiting for historical recognition, and it also brought irritation, as always happens when the marked trails grow rarer. The range of performers on this disc, from Swiss and Munich orchestras to chamber groups, follows the variety of forces Stranz wrote for.

CD, Wergo WER 6688 2, released in 2007. Total running time 76'38".