Masteclass Keller

This CD from 2002 delivers 68 minutes of dense electronic music by Detlef Keller (whose frequent collaborations with Mario Schönwälder have made the pair's music a mainstay in the European electronic music genre and concert scene). Here, we get to hear Keller's solo accomplishments, which are purely and respectfully cut in the Berlin School of Electronics mode. Densely layered textures emerge from darkness, drenched with somber sentiments and languid tonalities. The music gradually evolves power and structure with vibrating pulsations that lend rhythm, while the keyboard cycles accelerate with sportive determination. Light and airy tuneage grows more mature with each turn, becoming almost frenzied by the time E-perc appears to lend complexity to the driving sequencing. This release features only three tracks (two of which exceed 25 minutes each), allowing the melodies to flourish to incredible intensity.

Schnittke's Piano Quintet, a creative response to his mother's death, is an austere, haunting work full of grief and tenderness that marks one of his early ventures into polystylistic writing. The opening piano solo is unique, a spare statement of puzzlement in the face of tragedy. It gives way to a waltz, as if recapturing a lost past, then the graceful dance melody literally disintegrates as the strings venture off into other regions, vainly trying to reassemble the theme and failing. At the end of its touching five movements the music's despair is transformed into serene, hard-won acceptance. Shostakovitch's 15th Quartet, his final statement in that form, premiered just months before his death. It's six slow movements are shot through with contemplative sadness and regret. The music is so rich in texture and substance that attention never flags.

The thirty-two polyphonic madrigals by Michelangelo Rossi, which are preserved only in manuscript in a score and a set of partbooks, have only recently become known. These pieces are unusual in a number of ways: on the one hand, for music from the second quarter of the seventeenth century, they seem "conservative", composed in five parts with two tenor voices instead of two sopranos.

Keller & Schönwälder is the fusion of melodious movements with hypnotic spirals. In solo, they are very good and together they are even better. Released in 1998, two after the debut of the duo, Concerts shows that the chemistry between the two friends was already at its peak. Originally released on Manikin Music, Concerts is reissued on SynGate Music. As a bonus, we are entitled to nearly 30 minutes of EM recorded in concert in 2006.
It is some big EM with long, sometimes a little too much, evolutionary courses where the art of improvised music and the mastery of instruments converge in very good musical moments. The duo has the art of assembling unpredictable musical structures, which mesmerize and captivate with a superb game of percussion and solos as heartbreaking as delirious…

On Hallgató, recorded live in the Grand Hall of Budapest’s Liszt Academy, Ferenc Snétberger and the Keller Quartett, respectively Hungary’s outstanding acoustic guitarist and its foremost string quartet, are heard together and separately in a moving and organically unfolding programme, with compositions by Snétberger, Shostakovich, John Dowland and Samuel Barber. Snétberger’s “In Memory of My People”, dedicated to his Sinti and Roma forebears, is a powerful and spirited piece, both threnody and celebration. Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet, also dedicated to the victims of war, is played with great sensitivity and feeling by the Keller musicians. Subtle arrangements of John Dowland find Snétberger with the Keller Quartett for “I saw my lady weep” and in duo with cellist László Fenyö for “Flow, my tears”.

This release from 2005 offers 56 minutes of calming electronic music recorded live at the Liquid Sound Festival at the Toskana Therme, Bad Sulza on November 8, 2003. Mario Schönwälder, Detlef Keller (both on synths) and Thomas Kagerman (on violin) are joined by “friends”: Bas Broekhuis (on percussion), Gerd Wienekamp (from Rainbow Serpent) and Chris Lang (both on synths), and Andrea Saphira Leonhardi (on ethereal voice).
Employing gradually building strains in an improvisational milieu, the performers generate a distinguished dose of soothing sonics that steadfastly mounts in density and passion. Languid textures coalesce while percussion lurks with subtle presence…

Bartók's Duos are triple-threats: progressions of very brief practice works for violinists from students to skilled artists; transformations of folk dances and songs into art works; and pieces for concert performance, either piecemeal or complete. The Keller-Pilz duo makes its own sequence of the 44 primarily to heighten contrasts and sustain interest, a practice sanctioned by Bartók since the published order progressing from easiest to most difficult doesn't complement the pure listening experience. This revised order certainly works in these spirited performances.