Georg Friedrich Haas

Stille (Silence) brings together four very different attempts to deal with silence, audible or emotional, from the concert series Musikfabrik im WDR. Two works by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas frame a piece by the American Evan Johnson and a music-theatre work by the Greek Jani Christou. The booklet starts from John Cage's remark of 1957: "try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."

Ensemble Musikfabrik recorded all four works live in the Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal of the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne between 2009 and 2014, with a different conductor for each: Emilio Pomàrico, Christian Eggen, Rupert Huber and Enno Poppe. The soprano in the closing cycle is Sarah Wegener. The recordings are a production of WDR. Haas was born in 1953, Johnson in 1980, and Christou lived from 1926 to 1970.

Haas's "Ich suchte, aber ich fand ihn nicht." (2011) is a wordless piece of about 26 minutes, with harmonium among the instruments, quarter-tones and glissandi. Musikfabrik and the Kunststiftung NRW commissioned it, and the ensemble premiered it under Pomàrico in Munich in June 2012. Johnson's Die Bewegung der Augen (2011-12, revised 2013-14) for nine instruments works deliberately with breaks and pauses. Christou's Anaparastasis III "The Pianist" (1968) is a theatrical work for actor, conductor, ensemble and a taped continuum: the conductor leads the musicians towards a feeling of impending disaster, and the events build up to screams. Haas's ... wie stille brannte das Licht (2009) sets poems by Georg Trakl, Theodor Storm, August Stramm and Else Lasker-Schüler for soprano and chamber orchestra. This recording comes from its premiere in Cologne on 3 May 2009, with Wegener and Poppe.

Reviewing the disc for MusicWeb International, Dominy Clements heard in the first Haas piece "cloud-like interplays of overtones and hints of common chords amongst strangeness and darkly ominous sonorities". He called the whole "a superbly performed and intriguing collection of modern music". The cover and booklet poster show Gerhard Richter's Kugel I (1989); Richter has sat on the ensemble's board of trustees since 2009.

CD in digipak with fold-out poster, Wergo WER 6865 2, released in 2017 in the Edition Musikfabrik (77'34").