Schleiermacher

The program of Vol. 3 of the successful and critically acclaimed Hanns Eisler project by Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher features songs from this composer's American exile. The Hollywood Songbook is a major work, even if measured solely by its length and total of thirty-two pieces. Moreover, the concentration and intensification of the content attained by Eisler while he was residing on the Pacific Coast make this rather loosely organised collection of occasional pieces what is certainly the most important song cycle of the twentieth century.

Hanns Eisler composed more than five hundred songs, and his very first extant compositions include songs with piano accompaniment. On the fourth and last volume of their selections from Eisler’s songs, Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher focus on his early works and bring to light an absolutely astonishing discovery: the young Hanns was an autodidact who had an incredible feel for the song part, and his artistic aspirations are also evident in the piano part.

Between the Great Depression and the Third Reich the committed communist endeavoured to exercise influence with his music as his medium. On the first volume of MDG's edition of Hanns Eisler’s songs, Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher present pieces from the years between 1929 and 1937 for which Bertolt Brecht supplied almost all the texts. A long-overdue rehabilitation of a composer who for many years was known above all as the German Democratic Republic’s artistic spokesman!

Kazuo Fukushima - Works for Flute and Piano - Eberhard Blum, Steffen Schleiermacher (1992) {hat ART CD 6114}
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© 1992 Hat Hut Records | hat ART CD 6114
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Avant-Garde / Chamber Music

These solo and duo works by the self-taught composer Kazuo Fukushima represent the influence of noh music and Buddhist dharma on his life's work. They are self contained universes where the notion of the infinite is contained within a single note and its interaction with another one or with silence itself. The earliest of these works here, "Requiem" from 1956, is a flute solo based in serial technique, a simple 12-tone row repeated over the course of five-and-a-half minutes. In his duo for flute and piano, "Ekagra From 1957," we see the influence of other composers such as Toru Takemitsu and even Varese come into play.

Philip Glass - How Now - Steffen Schleiermacher (2010) {MDG 613 1600-2}
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© 2010 Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm | MDG 613 1600-2
Classical / Minimalism / Keyboards

Besides having a flourishing career as a composer, Steffen Schleiermacher has made a name for himself as a pianist and conductor, focusing on new music. This MDG release features three very early works by Philip Glass from 1968 and 1969, Music in Similar Motion, How Now, and Music in Fifths. The works are stylistically closely related and come from a point in the composer's career when he was exploring the use of repetitive structures varied through additive and subtractive processes. Their tonality, limited pitch material, and constant rhythmic patterns gave rise to the popular misconception that Glass' music is about nothing but repetition.

John Cage - Complete Piano Music, Vols. 1-10 - Steffen Schleiermacher (2004) {18CD Set MDG 613 1731-2 rec 1997-2002}
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© 1997-2002, 2004 Musikproduktion Dabringhaus Und Grimm | MDG 613 1731-2
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Piano

Steffen Schleiermacher's monumental traversal of the complete piano music of John Cage will be essential for the collection of any fan of the composer's, unless he or she has already purchased the previously released ten volumes (a total of 18 discs) that are boxed together here and reissued in recognition of the composer's 100th anniversary in 2012. The 20-hour compilation is a testimony to Cage's hugely prolific output, and certainly constitutes one of the most significant collections of keyboard music of the 20th century. There could hardly be a more sympathetic and skillful interpreter of Cage's oeuvre than German pianist/composer Steffen Schleiermacher.