Scherben (Shards) gathers four works from the concert series Musikfabrik im WDR around love, light and breaking points. Three of them, by Jonathan Harvey, Kaija Saariaho and Emmanuel Nunes, appear here in their first recordings, alongside the piece by Enno Poppe that gives the disc its title. Its artwork comes from Gerhard Richter, a member of the ensemble's board of trustees since 2009, whose pictures comment on the theme of each programme.
Ensemble Musikfabrik recorded the four works live between 2005 and 2010, in productions of Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln with Michael Peschko as recording producer for most tracks. Each work has its own conductor: Peter Rundel leads the Harvey, Stefan Asbury the Poppe, Emilio Pomàrico the Saariaho and Siân Edwards the Nunes. The cello soloist in the Saariaho concerto is the ensemble's own Dirk Wietheger. The cover and booklet poster reproduce Richter's graphite drawing 4.10.1985 (1).
Harvey's Sringāra Chaconne (2009) takes its title from the Hindu idea that sringāra, love, is the beginning of all art, and its publisher lists it for fifteen players. It was written for the twentieth anniversary of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Musikfabrik gave its UK premiere at Huddersfield in November 2009. Poppe's Scherben presents its music in refractions, as through a prism, built from many very short blocks. Saariaho's Notes on Light is a cello concerto in five movements, from "Translucent, Secret" through "On Fire" and "Eclipse" to "Heart of Light", where silence prevails. Nunes' Chessed I takes up cabbalistic thought: "chessed" is God's loving devotion to mankind, turned here into a meditation on light.
Notes on Light was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its 125th anniversary and premiered in Boston in February 2007 by Anssi Karttunen, the cellist for whom Saariaho wrote it. Nunes, born in Lisbon in 1941, lived in Paris from 1964 and died in 2012; he wrote a whole cycle of works under the title Chessed. Poppe, heard here as composer, also works regularly with Musikfabrik as a conductor.
CD, Wergo WER 6862 2, released in 2015 in the Edition Musikfabrik (76'16").
