A portrait of Tom Sora in seven works for voice and instruments, written between 1994 and 2016 and all recorded here for the first time. The line-ups are small and often unusual: string trio, two guitars reciting Kant, soprano with percussion, electric guitar with drums, and two singers with a crank music box. The music is clear in structure and almost physical in its materiality.

Sora was born in Bucharest in 1956 and studied music theory, organ and piano at the music academies of Stuttgart, Munich and Bucharest. He took a doctorate at the Sorbonne (Paris 1) on modular constructivism and published a study of the idea of the Klangfläche in Ligeti's Atmosphères. Commissions have come from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the musica viva festival and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, among others. The performers are Sarah Maria Sun (soprano), the TrioCoriolis, the guitar duo of Martin Steuber and Johannes Öllinger, Andreas Skouras (piano) and Thomas Hastreiter (percussion). Sora sings baritone and turns the music box in Wechselspiele. The disc is a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk, with liner notes by Michaela Fridrich.

Sora builds each piece on a simple musical or extra-musical idea and trusts intuition in the working. Heavy Metal (2015), for electric guitar and percussion, has nothing to do with the genre. The borrowed line-up serves a consistent dramaturgy of his own. The Zweites Streichtrio (2015) gives no clue in its title, yet its events are so clearly shaped that one feels a story is being told. Gruppenzwänge (2011), the first string trio, was commissioned by the TrioCoriolis. In frei sein (2014) the two guitarists recite a text by Immanuel Kant as they play.

Several of these works were first played by the same musicians. Gruppenzwänge was premiered at the Klangspuren festival in Schwaz on 22 September 2011, and frei sein in Poznań on 26 March 2015 by Öllinger and Steuber. Stahlbauten, the Zweites Streichtrio and Heavy Metal were all first heard in Munich on 23 January 2016. The TrioCoriolis is Heather Cottrell (violin), Klaus Peter Werani (viola) and Hanno Simons (cello).

CD, Wergo WER 7350 2, released in 2017 with the subtitle Music for Voice and Instruments.