Rias Kammerchor Wolfgang Rihm Astralis & Other Choral Works

The traditional mode of composition for texts was violated in many ways in the twentieth century. Especially in the latter half of the century, one finds strategies for demolishing the text that are either intended to obtain syllables or phonemes as elementary elements of a related musical setting - a procedure that certainly reveals a certain proximity to the deconstructionist aesthetic - or that use collages and montages to produce intertextualities that go beyond the integral stock of a genre of text, a type of text, or even a single literary sketch. This broadening perspective, like the deconstructive techniques, permitted completely new compositional procedures for adapting texts. Such trends are found in numerous works by Wolfgang Rihm…

Siegfried Mauser, from the attached booklet

Col Legno's third volume of Wolfgang Rihm's string quartets is, like its predecessors, an album of vigorous and challenging works that defy easy descriptions, resist stylistic associations, and put listeners on their mettle. If the fragmentary gestures, sudden digressions, and unconventional sounds (wood blocks, voices) of the String Quartet No. 7, "Veränderungen" (1985), are signs of Rihm's restless search for a music freed of expectations, then the …..

Blair Sanderson @ AllMusic.com

… Born in 1933 in Stuttgart, Germany, Helmuth Rilling is an active conductor, pedagogue and ambassador for the music of Bach worldwide. From 1970 to 1984, Mr. Rilling was the first musician to record all of Bach's Cantatas, and was the guiding hand behind the Internationale Bachakademie's critically-acclaimed project to record the complete works of Bach (172 CDs), which was released in 2000 to coincide with the 250th Anniversary of Bach's death. Since 1970, he has been the Artistic Director of the Oregon Bach Festival. In 2003 he became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He won a Grammy® Award in 2000 for his recording of Krzystof Penderecki's “Credo” and was again nominated in 2001 for his recording of Wolfgang Rihm's "Deus Passus." In 2008, he was honored with the Sanford Award by the Yale School of Music at Yale University…

Albert Lortzing - Der Waffenschmied (Auszüge)
RIAS-Kammerchor / Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin / Christoph Stepp
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 239 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Deutsche Grammophon # 447 814-2 | Country/Year: Germany 1964, 1990's
Genre: Classical | Style: Opera, Spieloper

Gustav Albert Lortzing was a German composer, actor and singer. He is considered to be the main representative of the German Spieloper, a form similar to the French opéra comique, which grew out of the Singspiel. (…) Der Waffenschmied (The Armourer) is an opera (Singspiel) in three acts by Albert Lortzing. The opera was eventually successful enough that Lortzing was offered the post of Kapellmeister at the theater which he held until the revolution of 1848, when he had to return to Leipzig. Arnold Schönberg, arranged Lortzing’s "Waffenschmied“ for piano for 4 hands…

.. attempts to find a musical language free of prescribed sequential and elaborative procedures. What is involved is the free setting of the individual event, not caused, without consequence in the stricter sense – the free procreation of an imagination space; the quest for sound objects, for sound signs, a sound writing.

Wolfgang Rihm

Wolfgang Rihm has had a long and varied career, which Hanssler's Rihm Edition aims to document by exploring the archives of German radio orchestras. This disc here focuses on the period when he first came to prominence in the European contemporary music scene. In the 1970s, Rihm was writing in an effusive expressionistic style, often going with the white-hot inspiration of any given moment instead of an elaborate preconceived form. The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg perform three works in this vein…..

Christopher Culver @ Amazon.com