Search - Wolfgang Rihm, Siegfried Mauser :: Wolfgang Rihm

It works for me

brainpang@earthlink.net | New York Ugly | 04/12/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A fine, deeply effecting cd. Don't over-intellectualize, let it move ya, that's what Rihm is all about. Music for a wake. Melancholy. I'm almost scared of it."

The piano beats Rihm's compelling imagination

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 04/02/2001

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Wolfgang Rihm represents the Neo-expressionist strain within postmodernity,a deeply conservative one,which supposedly has a retrogressive dimension to it,tapping and exploiting already trodden aesthetic terrains. It is a deeply profound one expressionism,that has worked quite well.Painters Georg Baselitz,Anselm Kiefer, Arnulf Rainer,Sigmar Polke,Gerhard Richter,It has been a catchall like category,one also deeply developed this side of the Atlantic with the New York painters throughout the Fifties,Pollock,Kline,deKooning. But Rihm is a musician,he studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen but quickly found and discovered his own voice. This is a voice that has worked quite well with two major operas,as well as probing deeply into symphonic dimensions,concert arias,and chamber music.His patralinear decent begins with Albam Berg, then Bernd Alois Zimmermann,perhaps Karl Amadeus Hartmann,all great orchestral innovators with hardly a decent piano work to their name. In this scaled down chamber realm it has only been the string quartets that has captured Rihm's immediate,propulsive,grotesque at times imagination. In these quartets you will find a large pallette of deeply graphic music,with extended timbre,and an overwhelming and compelling violence.We come to the piano music,and we find no such voice anymore,the piano has brokened the constitution of many the great musical greats of any century.The conceit involving if music can be great one place it can be in another, it is not here!.But here Rihm's timbral and structural imagination seems reduced to etude-like proportions, with nothing really original,except possibly nice moments in "Nactstudie" of piano harmonics, that's where you silently depress a tone and savagely then play another tone to excite those depressed, thereby unleashing the overtones contained. Rihm seems silenced here, the piano truly beats Rihm's creativity. No work here captures what has worked so well for him elsehwere in his music, that deeply grotesque use of timbre,structural planning,form, and the evocation of some expressionistic image. At best some of this music should be considered sketches for orchestration projects.And the lengths as the "klavierstuck #6,almost 20 minutes of material that could have been easily compressed into half that. Since nothing is working for Rihm as the sometimes life to death narratives,or undefined abbatoir-like narratives in his other music, in terms of timbral diversity, as I have said easily found in his other masterworks,the piano doesn't allow these long durational lengths the narrative spaces. So the listener easily grows tired.There's no agenda,or whatever it was, is/has dissipated. Rihm also has no imagination for the piano. Listz and Reger,and, Webern,or Stockhausen easily find,entire cornocopias to tap. Rihm limits his pianistic vocabulary to the sustained tone, and harmonics, with violence that always seems gratuitous.Even the four memorial works dedicated to musical power brokers,friends all seem cut from the same timbral fabric. Nothing distinguishing a hovering personality of the dearly departed."