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Nikolaus Brass |
the structures of echo – lindauer beweinung (2002) [01] 08:32 I. SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart
VOID II (2001) Benjamin Kobler, piano
total time: 63:39 Samples and Download: It is rare to find composers who can use sounds to tell stories of absolute void and who manage, conversely, in passages of virtual silence to give some sense of the richness of overriding entities. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is one such artist – a quiet, reflective, and, in the profound sense of the word, friendly man. Because he has never been at the center of the scenes that set the tone, he has, unforgivably, been scarcely noticed by the very people to whom he has essential things to offer. His music does not seek to shine artistically but is rather the result of a search for the essential core of things that is as truthful as it is intensely probing. Nikolaus Brass began composing early. During his medical studies, his many years of practice as a doctor in a hospital, his bread-and-butter job as the editor of a medical journal, he never lost sight of his horizons as an artist, never allowed his true path to be to be fenced in. On the contrary, the concrete confrontation with the fragility of human existence, with new beginnings and happiness but also pain, infirmity, and death function as his compass in his search for expression. Sure the most lasting influence was his intense, almost self-identifying encounter with Morton Feldman in the early 1980s. Suddenly he had met someone who wrote music nourished from a metaphysical source. Brass was marked by the closeness that both felt. The styles of other composers – for example, Luigi Nono or Giacinto Scelsi, and naturally Helmut Lachenmann or György Ligeti – are presences in his consciousness, as quietly echoing melodies of musical thought in his work. Even so, he was able to break free of all these energy fields and establish the necessary distance to cultivate something in truth completely his own. VOID II: A visit to the then still vacant extension to the Jewish Museum in Berlin affected Nikolaus Brass existentially – in 1999, the penultimate year of a century of horrors. The bizarre chambers concealing the sheer nothingness and the niches conceived to be dead ends in the interior of this building inspired by deconstructionism in turn moved Brass to compose his piece "VOID" for solo piano. Tracing and knowing the resonances in the mute and muting, so that something like a wealth of voids is produced, Brass expanded his piece for solo piano of 2001 – the first year of the new century – into "VOID II", a concertante work for saxophone, piano, percussion, and orchestra. the structures of echo – lindauer beweinung: Related to "VOID II" and, for all its autonomy a kind of dialectic counterpart to it, is the composition "the structures of echo – lindauer beweinung" for thirty-two voices and orchestra from 2002. The work is inspired by expression and significance of a late Gothic panel painting that shows Christ scourged: the "Lindau Lamentation" of 1420.
Ein neues Label präsentiert Werke von Nikolaus Brass Man muss Karlheinz Stockhausen nicht immer zustimmen, doch seine These, dass die Konzentration auf Interpretation von Musik der Vergangenheit das Symptom einer unkreativen Epoche sei, ist triftig. Zur Kunst-Sterilität kommt das ökonomische Schwächeln, die Majorlabels der Klassikplattenindustrie klagen über sinkende Umsätze, viel zu wenige wollen die soundsovielte Fassung der Standard-Serien kaufen; unverständlich ist das nicht. Wie es anders geht, zeigen kleinere Firmen: Abseits von Stargepränge und Repertoire-Einerlei lässt sich nicht nur leben, sondern dies sogar auch auf eine künstlerisch profitable Art. Sogar Label-Neugründungen sind zu bestaunen. Gerade hat Wulf Weinmann das Label "col legno" verkauft und dafür "Neos" lanciert. Wobei - nomen est omen - das griechische Wort für "neu" sowohl den Markt-Frischling als auch das avancierte Programm charakterisiert. So unterschiedlich die Brassschen Werke auch sind, es lassen sich doch Materialanalogien entdecken. "VOID II", angeregt durch das noch leere Jüdische Museum von Libeskind in Berlin, lebt vom Widerspiel des Leisen, erst allmählich Entstehenden und krasseren Klangverfremdungen. Die Stuttgarter und Berliner Aufnahmen unter Rupert Huber und Roland Kluttig sind vorzüglich. Noch bei "col legno" erschienen ist eine ebenfalls fabelhafte CD des Münchner Auritus-Quartetts mit drei Brass-Quartetten (1994-2004). Am 14. Dezember wird Hans Zender in der Münchner musica viva sein "L'inferno" dirigieren. Dann wird man noch mehr über Brass wissen.
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