Released for Aribert Reimann's 80th birthday, this disc places a cycle of unaccompanied songs between two orchestral works. Each orchestral piece takes a song as its starting idea. At the centre is Eingedunkelt, nine poems by Paul Celan for solo voice, here in its first recording in the version for countertenor, sung by Tim Severloh. The NDR Sinfonieorchester is conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.
Reimann was born in Berlin on 4 March 1936 and died there on 13 March 2024. Wergo devotes a series of its own to his music. Eingedunkelt was composed in 1992 for the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender. Sung by a countertenor, the cycle takes on a completely different tone colour. Fassbaender herself appears on Wergo as a narrator, in Dimitri Terzakis's Visionen (WER 7331 2). The recordings are productions of Norddeutscher Rundfunk, licensed through Studio Hamburg.
The nine Celan settings run from Wirfst du den beschrifteten Ankerstein aus? to Füll die Ödnis, passing through Angefochtener Stein, Nach dem Lichtverzicht and the title poem Eingedunkelt. Between them stand Deutlich, weithin, Über die Köpfe hinweg, Bedenkenlos, den Vernebelungen zuwider and Vom Hochseil herabgezwungen. Without any accompaniment, the voice alone carries the line for some thirteen minutes. Reimann then wrote the same cycle again for orchestra without voice. The resulting Neun Stücke (1993) take a path wholly different from both the poems and the vocal setting, and form the longest work on the disc at almost half an hour.
Spiralat halom (Dream Spirals, 2002), for large orchestra, is based on Reimann's song Zomtei halom (Dream Knots), written on a Hebrew poem by David Rokeah. The title suggests an epic, calm approach, but the sound recalls a nervous and restless dream. Reimann described it as a dream that keeps turning and pushes into completely different regions and colours. Both orchestral pieces look back to the voice from opposite sides. One rebuilds a song cycle without the singer, the other spins a single song into twenty minutes of orchestral sound.
CD, Wergo WER 7337 2, released in 2016, in the series Aribert Reimann at Wergo.
