Sunday 01. May 2022

CD with music by René Wohlhauser

173 / May 2022

By Manfred Karallus

"What is beyond space?" asks René Wohlhauser - but he does not ask an abstract question, but goes into the depths of galactic space with studies on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Telescope, you know, there, where it goes southwest of Orion towards the constellation of the Chemical Furnace. However, as Wohlhauser assured me, in his related piano piece “Mikosch … lost in the Ultra Deep Field” there was “no transfer of the data from the Hubble telescope into the composition, only a 'metaphorical' inspiration as a starting point. The piece follows its inner musical logic.”

Rarely have I listened to a compact disc from A to Z as curiously as this one. Everything is there, down to the last detail, sculpturally worked out, shapely, immediate, within reach - and at the same time so different from everything else. Music with the healthy taste of home-made, flowing from the composer like milk from a cow - "Mikosch" bears the work number 1646! – and a reception, understanding and understanding without aesthetic detours with a delayed aha experience. Listening, however, without the obligation to read texts that are supposed to explain what the music was unable to express.

In addition to the short introductions, the texts of the poems are self-made and, where they require a baritone voice, are also sung by the composer himself. Cheeky things at times, snotty songs to shame and bullshit poems - and a "Klumpengesang", which, neatly notated, is the unpolished finale to a highly remarkable CD.