Stirrings Still is a portrait of Rebecca Saunders through five chamber works from 1996 to 2006, played by members of Ensemble Musikfabrik, four of them in first recordings. The title comes from Samuel Beckett, whose work became very important to her, and the disc follows a music that strips away the inessential and ornamental.
Saunders was born in 1967 in the United Kingdom, studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe and lives mainly in Berlin. The players are soloists of the Cologne ensemble, among them Marco Blaauw on double-bell trumpet, the double bassists Michael Tiepold and Corin Long, Carl Rosman on clarinet and Juditha Haeberlin on violin. The recording is a coproduction with DeutschlandRadio. Saunders describes her starting point in these words: "What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds", from which she draws out and moulds sound and colour.
blaauw (2004), for solo double-bell trumpet, was first played by Marco Blaauw at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Blue and Gray (2005) sets two double basses against each other and was premiered by Long and Tiepold at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, which commissioned it. The Duo (1996) for violin and piano was first heard at London's Purcell Room in 1999. vermilion (2003), the longest work at over 15 minutes, joins clarinet, electric guitar and cello; it was commissioned by the Munich Biennale and premiered by the ensemble Triolog in 2004. The title work (2006), commissioned by Musikfabrik for alto flute, oboe, clarinet, piano and crotales, is described by Schott as music both inside and outside, mobile sound sculpture and a journey into the interior of a sound.
Colour runs through the programme as an idea. The Schott page sets quotations from Goethe's theory of colours, from Derek Jarman's Chroma and from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art beside the titles blaauw, Blue and Gray and vermilion. Beckett's Stirrings Still ends on "Oh all to end", and the sparseness of that language gives the clearest parallel to her recent music.
CD, Wergo WER 6694 2, released in 2008. Total running time 57'50".
