Karola Obermüller

Untergegangen der Mond is the portrait CD of Karola Obermüller in the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, ten works written between 2006 and 2018. Her music is energetic and poetic at once, and it brings out hidden elements beneath many-layered material. Several of these pieces grew as work in progress over long periods, so the same idea is often looked at from several angles and in superimposed layers of sound.

The performers change with almost every track. Ensemble Musikfabrik under Warwick Stengårds plays the title work with Kai Wessel, countertenor and bass. The pianist Emanuele Arciuli plays the three Pulstastung pieces, and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart sing mass:distance:time. Camilla Hoitenga plays the bass flute solo, Ensemble Phorminx two chamber works, and Ensemble Modern under Johannes Kalitzke closes the disc. The recordings come from co-productions of the German Music Council with Deutschlandfunk, SWR and Musik der Jahrhunderte, BR-KLASSIK and RTV Slovenija.

Ancient poetry, above all Sappho, is a recurring source, for its essentials of human existence: light and night, eros and longing. Untergegangen der Mond (2017/18), Sapphic stanzas for countertenor or bass and ensemble, is the longest piece at twelve and a half minutes. ... silbern (2008/11), Sapphic stanzas for solo bass flute, is in five short sections. In the booklet Volker Blumenthaler writes that this music tries "to create moments of magic". Myrmecia (2015/16), for guitar, harp and hammered dulcimer, sets microtonal shifts against percussive playing. Daniel Lippel, Nuiko Wadden and Nathan Davis produce what the composer calls a "strange, crackling, and insisting stream of sound", like the wild activity of the primordial ant that gives the piece its name.

Zooming in on detail is another trait. In the Pulstastung cycle (2011-2017) the distances between musical events grow longer and longer, "with an increasing pulse at the same time", in Obermüller's words. The third part alone lasts ten minutes. The ensemble works range from reflejos distantes (2006) for bass flute, bass clarinet, violin and cello and Nichts Fettes nichts Süßes (2015) for five players to coiling and swaying (2014/15) for eighteen instruments.

CD, 77 minutes, WER 6424 2, released in 2018 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik.