infotext:
It is rare to find composers who can use sounds to tell of absolute emptiness and, conversely, who, in places of virtual silence, succeed in hinting at the abundance of higher-level entities. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is such an artist – a quiet, thoughtful and, in the deepest sense of the word, friendly man. Because he was never at the center of key scenes, he could unforgivably hardly be noticed even by those to whom he had the essentials to offer. His music does not want to shine artistically, but is the result of a truthful and intensely digging search for the essence of things. Nikolaus Brass began composing at an early age. In addition to studying medicine, working for many years as a doctor in a hospital, and earning a living as editor of a medical journal, he never lost sight of his artistic horizons, and his actual path was never really narrowed down. On the contrary: because the concrete confrontation with the existential fragility of human existence, with new beginnings and happiness, but also pain, illness and death, acted like a compass in the search for expression. The most lasting impact in the early 1980s was the intense, almost identifiable encounter with Morton Feldman. Suddenly there was someone who wrote music, fed from a metaphysical source. Brass experienced the mutually felt closeness as formative. He is also aware of the styles of other composers – such as Luigi Nono or Giacinto Scelsi, of course Helmut Lachenmann or György Ligeti – as a space of consciousness, as ways of musical thought that quietly resonate in his work. But he was able to detach himself from all fields of force and create the necessary distance to cultivate what was really his own. VOID II: A visit to the extension of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which was still empty at the time, had had an existential impact on Nikolaus Brass; 1999 - in the penultimate year of a century of horrors. He was inspired to compose his piece “VOID” for piano solo by the bizarre serenity that harbors sheer nothingness and the dead-angle conceived niches inside the deconstructivist-inspired building. In 2001 – in the first year of the new century – Brass traced the resonances in the mute and the mute and knew that there is something like an abundance of emptiness and orchestra. the structures of echo – lindau lamentation: Related to "VOID II" and in its independence at the same time a dialectic counterpart is the composition "the structures of echo - lindauer beweinung" for 2002 voices and orchestra, written in 32. The work is inspired by the expression and meaning of a late Gothic panel painting showing the flayed Christ: the "Lindauer Lamentation" from around 1420. |
program:
the structures of echo – lindauer lamentation (2002)
Piece for 32 voices and orchestra
Playing time: 27:00
[01] 08:32 p.m I.
[02] 09:30 p.m II.
[03] 08:59 p.m III.
SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart
Rupert Huber, conductor
VOID II (2001)
Music for piano, saxophone, percussion and orchestra
Playing time: 36:29
[04] 10:26 p.m I.
[05] 06:01 p.m II.
[06] 13:49 p.m III.
[07] 06:14 p.m IV.
Benjamin Kobler, Piano
Sasha Armbruster, saxophone
Pascal Pons, percussion
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Roland Kluttig, conductor
Total: 63:39
Press:
14.06.2012
13.12.2007
25.08.2007
A new label presents works by Nikolaus Brass
whistling, glistening
You don't always have to agree with Karlheinz Stockhausen, but his thesis that the concentration on interpreting music from the past is the symptom of an uncreative era is valid. In addition to the sterility of art, there is also the economic weakness, the major labels in the classical record industry complain about falling sales, far too few want to buy so many versions of the standard series; That is not incomprehensible. Smaller companies show how it can be done differently: not only can you live away from the star trappings and repertoire monotony, but you can also do so in an artistically profitable way. Even new labels can be admired. Wulf Weinmann has just sold the “col legno” label and launched “Neos” instead. Whereby – nomen est omen – the Greek word for “new” characterizes both the newcomer to the market and the advanced program.
Neither with “col legno” nor now with “Neos” did Weinmann stand for what was comfortable and pleasing. Significantly, he produced an album with music by Nikolaus Brass on his old and new labels, once again drawing attention to a composer who, at some distance from the established company, is following his own path in an overarching way. Brass is a doctor and works as a specialist magazine editor; he doesn't have to and doesn't want to make a living from composing, nor from teaching. As a quasi-leisure composer, Brass is in good company with Mahler and Ives. And the problem-conscious nature of his work gives the works their own individual face: this music has a radically individual expressivity.
But nothing would be further from Brass than the unabashed recourse to the sonorous emotional conglomerates of the 19th century. His pieces bear witness to pain and uncertainty. He is not a material fetishist; the greater his aversion to the structurally approximate, precisely because he likes to be moved by visual impressions. This double perspective is impressively demonstrated by the title “the structures of echo – lindauer beweinung”, which refers to a moving Gothic image of Christ from the year 1420, but as Threnody avoids anything ostentatiously sacral and rather focuses on lamentation as “mutual inner reverberation”, choir and orchestra swap roles almost osmotically in the sense of permanent echoes: the vocal I is followed by the instrumental response and vice versa, but both simultaneously. Whistles and gleams oscillate into one another, harsh piano beats set almost ritualistic accents. This is harsh, haptic music that can be experienced physically, despite all the micro and overtone oscillations.
As different as Brass's works are, material analogies can still be discovered. “VOID II”, inspired by the still empty Libeskind Jewish Museum in Berlin, thrives on the contradiction of quiet, gradual emergence and blatant sound alienation. The Stuttgart and Berlin recordings under Rupert Huber and Roland Kluttig are excellent. Another fabulous CD by the Munich Auritus Quartet with three brass quartets (1994-2004) has also been released by “col legno”. On December 14th, Hans Zender will conduct his “L'inferno” at the Munich musica viva. Then we will know even more about brass.
GERHARD R. KOCH
08/2007
