Three works for organ, alone and with partners, by Adriana Hölszky, played by Dominik Susteck with violinist Akiko Ahrendt and percussionist Jens Brülls. The title piece, ... und ich sah wie ein gläsernes Meer, mit Feuer gemischt ... (And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire), is an "apocalyptic" organ work from 1996/97. The disc was placed on the quarterly list of the German Record Critics' Award in 4/2014.
Hölszky was born in Bucharest on 30 June 1953 and studied piano and composition there before her family moved to West Germany in 1976. She continued her composition studies in Stuttgart with Milko Kelemen and began teaching there in 1980. After a professorship in Rostock from 1997 she taught composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg from 2000. Susteck, born in Bochum in 1977, was organist at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne from 2007, a church known for contemporary art and music. The recording is a coproduction with Deutschlandradio, with booklet notes by Ingo Dorfmüller.
Hölszky describes her works as individually structured "sound spaces". They expand and shrink, cut or fade into each other as in film editing, intrude on one another or are layered. Time, too, runs in several strands at once. In the title piece the two images of the title, glass and fire, alternate in quick succession. In her words, "vivid pictures of light and color alternate with calm and mysterious moments", like narrow openings into other dimensions. Efeu und Lichtfeld (Ivy and Field of Light, 2008) sets two worlds side by side. The violin moves in restless pinpricks, mostly in its highest register, while the organ sounds like pulsating sources of light. The longest work, ... und wieder Dunkel I (And Again Darkness I) for percussion and organ (1985/90), lasts 23 minutes. Each of its four movements is headed by a fragment from the second stanza of Gottfried Benn's poem "Ein Wort". The headings run from "Ein Wort" and "Ein Glanz" to the closing words of the title.
The programme spans more than twenty years, from the percussion duo begun in 1985 to the violin piece of 2008. It shows how far Hölszky's thinking in spaces and contrasts can be carried by one instrument that is usually heard as a single, fused body of sound.
CD, Wergo WER 6789 2, released in 2014 (total time 44'29").
