Verbinden und Abwenden is a portrait of Zeynep Gedizlioğlu, born in Izmir, gathering five works written between 2013 and 2018. It moves from chamber music to large pieces for ensemble and orchestra, and it is played by some of the leading new-music formations in Europe. Her music shifts between fragile, harsh-angular and expressive moments, sometimes building to virtuoso climaxes.
Quatuor Diotima plays with the pianists Yukiko Sugawara and Tomoko Hemmi, and Klangforum Wien with Leonhard Garms. Ensemble Modern and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart also take part. The hr-Sinfonieorchester is conducted by Ilan Volkov and Jonathan Stockhammer, with Tamara Stefanovich as piano soloist. The recordings were made between July 2017 and December 2018 at Theaterhaus Stuttgart, the ORF RadioKulturhaus in Vienna, the Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Böblingen Stadtkirche. They are productions or coproductions of Südwestrundfunk, Musik der Jahrhunderte, Österreichischer Rundfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk and the German Music Council.
The title work, Verbinden und Abwenden (Connect and Reject, 2016), is a piece in three acts for ensemble and orchestra. It sets the individual against the collective and questions the roles of both. The members of Ensemble Modern are spread through the hr-Sinfonieorchester as soloists, placed like foreign objects among unrelated instrumental families. Kelimeler (Words, 2013-14, revised 2017), the only vocal work here, sets a Turkish text by the composer for five voices. It circles around darkness and the voice itself, which whispers, speaks, breathes heavily, bursts out or unfolds in long melismas. Sights of Now (2013-17) pairs two pianos with string quartet, while Blick des Abwesenden (2018) is a twenty-minute piece for piano and orchestra.
In the booklet, Dirk Wieschollek describes a music reaching out for the ineffable, where shapes solidify and contours emerge in barely perceptible shifts among things already heard, only to vanish again. The tension between distance and closeness, between relation and its absence, runs through the whole programme. Jetzt, mit meiner linken Hand (2014), a short work for ensemble, completes the selection.
CD, Wergo WER 6428 2, released in 2020 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, with a 34-page booklet in German, English and French.
