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GEORG KATZER THE LATE WORK Vladimir Jurowski to the music of Georg Katzener My earliest memories from my childhood connect me to the music and person of Georg Katzener. I was six years old when my father started ballet black birds by Georg Katzener, first at the Moscow Stanislavski Theater and later at the Komische Oper Berlin. In 1981 there was another ballet bykatzer at the Komische Oper Berlin, The new Midsummer Night's Dream, which my father premiered. In the summer of 1981 Georg came to Moscow with his wife Angelika, and that's how I got to know them both. Later, after my family moved to Germany (1990), there was still lively friendly contact between the two families. In 1994 I gave my first concert with the ensemble unitedberlin. were on the program Scene for chamber ensemble by Georgkatzer and the music of his pupil Lutz Glandien. We've had these ever since Scene performed countless times with the ensemble unitedberlin, including in a celebratory concert in Berlin on the occasion of Georg Katzener’s 80th birthday, and later in Moscow at the International Festival of New Music »Der Andere Raum« in autumn 2018. Georg also wanted to be there , his flight to Moscow was already booked, his participation in the composers' workshop confirmed. But then he had to go to the hospital instead, because his last illness was already setting in... We played that last time Scene at the Randspiele Festival in Brandenburg Zepernick in a memorial concert for Georgkatzer... However, he still had the opportunity to attend the world premiere of his last orchestral work, discorso: on December 30 and 31, 2018, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin premiered this piece together with Beethoven's ninth. I wanted to start a new tradition that the RSB at each of their annual performances of the ninth by Beethoven (always played just on New Year's Eve in the Konzerthaus Berlin) absolutely launches a new piece - as a kind of modern commentary on ninth. I immediately thought of Georgkatzer, and I was happy and relieved when, after a moment's thought, he agreed. He did a great job with the work – light, ironic, lively, permeated by a unique »Katzer« atmosphere, clever, but at the same time never »intellectual« or cranky ... What amazed me above all about this music - this was not the typical music of a 83 year olds! In spirit he remained a young man. Ten days after the premiere of speech George had turned 84. He lived five months after that. Here is a small excerpt from his letter to me of April 29, 2018, in which he presented the freshly completed score of speech accompanied: I have speech played a few more times in concert after the premiere – also WITHOUT the obligatory one Ninth (on which speech which she fortunately never quotes verbatim). I am now convinced that this wonderful piece by Katzener can and should be played independently of Beethoven! His funny and at the same time serious music definitely has its own power and draws a striking line at the end of a long and fulfilling life as a musician.
Discursivity as the dialectic language ability of music Like hardly anyone else, Georgkatzer, one of the greats among the composers of the former GDR, the true cosmopolitan, world traveler and cosmopolitan among them, sought discourse on many different levels. He was always turned to the cultures of this world, entered into a musical dialogue with the people and avoided colonizing other cultures, adapting them. This made possible his universal aesthetic, philosophical and literary education. The globalized world of the post-reunification period and the associated inability to engage in social discourse disturbed him more and more as he got older, so that the emphatic demand for discursiveness and perceived as well as intellectual heterogeneity is articulated musically in an ever denser, even more urgent way. This leads to a late, by no means clarified Passage work in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, most urgently in his late orchestral work speech, which we will discuss first. The 2018 composed just before his death speech for large orchestra had its world premiere, a key work whose »Dark Matter«-like, concentrated title touches the nucleus of his music and, in a compressed form, encloses almost his entire understanding of composition. speech, which, in terms of its musical morphology and aesthetically, is perhaps the most compressed work of his entire oeuvre, anticipates a reality that is the end, including his own includes death, and does so with an implacability that is almost disturbing. speech shows a reality that Georg Katzener perhaps did not even perceive himself and of which the recipient could hardly perceive anything. The discourse as such, the understanding among people, including the critique of the refusal of discourse as composed in this work, as well as the critique of the rapid loss of discourse in commercial Western societies, were of eminent importance to him. A quasi-thematic structure, consisting of a chromatic four-note ascending movement enclosing a major third, appears after a low-pitched rumbling prelude at the beginning. Its peak tone is repeated as the starting point of a chromatic bass line of great melancholy surrounding a minor third (crucifixus), which answers the upward movement. Once briefly introduced, a dense polyphonic structure immediately fans out as an answer, almost as an ideal form (utopia) of a dialogue situation filled with life, which immediately afterwards (in the sad reality) falls apart. Is of great density speech certainly. Again, at the end of his life, everything that was important to him (also musically) to say in life is compressed. That grew with me speech a work characterized by the classic (discursive) exchange of musical motifs. This compositional approach alone is enough speech appear timeless. The outstandingly orchestrated work intensifies the play of thesis, counter-thesis and replica through the increasingly profiled texture of counteractingly pointed motifs. It unfolds polyphony on the one hand, developing in a variety of ways, and on the other hand these erratically opposed instrumental blocks, as a sort of musical debate. Towards the end, this discourse is deconstructed in a delicately ironic way, it seems detached, not without a deep melancholy. This is generated in the form of polytonal bound and very softly played chords, created from the downward chromatic bass course of the constituent material, partly large but always quiet. »Forgiving« tones are struck in dialogue, and so the world disappears in farewell to it. The form resembles a passacaglia-like climax and at the same time a compression of the discourse situation. »Discorso« stands for a thoughtful and socially relevant discourse that wants to promote understanding and empathy for others. This waskatzer's central theme, the draft of an axiomatic that cathartically determined his life humanity. The fundamental critique of the prevailing discourse culture that is shown in this is implemented socially, if not even politically. The content determines in speech, as actually always with Katzener, the form, the truthfulness of the relationship between the two (form and content) to one another, the way of composing. He thus determines the style and not an individual distinctiveness that is independent of it, which is dialectical at best in the case of such important composers who shaped their time, of which he was one. The three bagatelles postscript to B., composed in 2017, referencing Beethoven. As interludes for cello and piano, they fit perfectly into the framework of Beethoven's correspondingly scored sonatas, such as Op. 17, 66, 69 and 102. Georgkatzer does not compose »music about music«, but contrasts his own contemporary view of Beethoven with this discursively. Formally very free in the cheerful playful serenity of their age, but sometimes very abrupt in the breaks, these three pieces are studies on Beethoven's "developing variation" (Erwin Ratz on Beethoven's way of composing), in which Katzener, as a master, indirectly in the sense rethinking his own logic Beethoven proves. In the first, by far the longest piece, a narrative ballad, freely atonal with a preference for a central tone b, a symmetrical structure peeks out from the background like a shadow, which seems to be evaporating into the »then«. Like some corresponding passages in late Beethoven, the world seems to have lost it. With a total of 159 bars, the retrograde part beginning in bar 267 seems to approximate the "golden section" in proportion to the antecedent. The harmonic layers of minor and primarily major seconds are formed in these three pieces, as well as in discorso, both in the melody and in the chords from configurations with frame intervals of the major third, the minor sixth and the tritone. The frequent Beethovenian rhythmic unison expands here, as it does again in speech and also in the cycle ... only blooms in song, to partially three-layered polyrhythms. Postscript 2, initially condensing radically, flows in the shorter second part out of time into the bodiless sphere, whereas Postscript 3 appears as a dense aphoristic study of the number 3 (which can certainly be interpreted symbolically). In percussion for percussion quartet (2017), not at all presented here as a late work, Georgkatzer has created the arsenal of noises and sounds in a highly advanced way, mostly through friction and not over the (traditional) beat. With numerous tiny instruments from the most diverse cultures - that was always important to him - he wanted to set an intercultural sign of respect, openly facing the other and different, against the culturally dominant Eurocentrism. In ... only blooms in song for soprano, violoncello and piano, composed in 2018/19 as one of his last works,katzer shows once again in a very concentrated way his entire aesthetic arsenal, which he has constantly developed throughout his life, his wide range as an expressive musician, with which he discursively, critically questioning, eminently politically, sometimes in the sense of Eisler and Dessau (the opera Einstein) bitingly tackles key contemporary issues that should be the focus of society, but often are not, depending on particular interests. He has a wit and a mischievousness that are paired with a very deep melancholy, a deep longing for the concrete utopia of a more humane world. Although this music, which can be attributed to a lucid type of applied composition, is close to the ear and also to the eye of the recipient, it avoids any semblance of illustration and boldness of banal and at times violent stylistic allusions or adaptations of foreign music. The foreign and with it the allusion peep out of the background as lucidly and cleverly as they are despondently only when these, prefixed by "wrong" content - which opens up space for parodies - are semantically reinterpreted for a musical commentary level. Katzener has mastered this practice as virtuosically as few others whose approach to discursiveness can be called dialectical. The externally perceived plateau enters into a fruitful mutual discourse with the surreal (Katter is also a master of parody, irony and alienation techniques here) and virtual levels. As such, the seven tableaus of the song cycle prove radically realistic. It is precisely here that it is made visible how important the reference to tradition is for Georgkatzer to legitimize his composition. The texts of the seven-part cycle (seven here also symbolic), characterized by fine poetry, were written by Georgkatzer himself. The individual tableaus are overwritten with Expensive utopias, Lausitz, event, de pace, fake news, conclusion, Nitschewo. La scuola dell'ascolto 5, the fifth piece from the cycle La scuola dell'ascolto (The School of Hearing), like the other pieces in this group of works, is intended to lead amateur musicians and inexperienced listeners alike to New Music, i.e. socio-culturally intended. Even in old age, Georgkatzer bore witness to the fact that he was a genuine pedagogical music mediator with a high level of socio-cultural competence and was highly committed. His pedagogically intended music is never bold, simple or even trivial, but has a stylistic peculiarity that is comparable to hardly any other music and is unique for functional and committed music. La scuola dell'ascolto 5, composed in 2018, is a late work without the character of a late work, fresh, lively, yet marked by the "experience" of life. The five sections lead vividly into various forms of reception of new music, explaining them without teaching: Part 1 leads from unison to rhythmic and melodic diversity. Part 2 leads to free, experimental composing with voice and percussion. Part 3: The instruments and finally the ensemble introduce themselves. For example, the trumpet shows "open" and "stopped" tones and their differences. Part 4 is dedicated to the discourse between soloist (percussion) and ensemble. Part 5 introduces the symphony of an ensemble, first held structurally in unison, then showing the possibilities of splitting up (diversifying) the individual elements. The present CD shows kaleidoscopically singularly how emphatically, arising out of an inner necessity, Georg Katzener turned to all the very different approaches of his wide compositional spectrum during the last two years of his life, condensing his compositional self-image in an impressive way, and at the same time extremely concentrated . Ernest Helmuth Flammer program: george katzer (1935-2019) postscript to B. Three pieces for cello and piano (2017) 20:20 [01] Postscript 1 13:06 Jörg Ulrich Krah, cello ... only blooms in song Song cycle for soprano, cello and piano(2018 / 19) * 19:13 Elizabeth trio [11] speech for orchestra (2018) * 15:05 Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB) [12] percussion for percussion quartet (2016) * 11:25 Bremen percussion ensemble La scuola dell'ascolto 5 for flute, alto saxophone, trumpet, percussion, accordion, piano and violin (2018) * 11:25 [13] 1. 02:27 Georg Katzer Ensemble Berlin
Total playing time: 77:59
Press:
Georg Katzer, who died in 2019, was one of the most interesting voices of the older generation of composers even after the “reunification”. The remarkable versatility of his work is documented in a compressed form on this CD with pieces from Katzer's last two years of life. They demonstrate (largely in their first recordings) a compelling economy and condensation of their means of expression. […] Dirk Wieschollek
Georg Katzener (1935-2019) left behind a wide range of works, chamber music, orchestral works, solo concertos, three operas, two ballets ... This CD brings together late works, composed between 2016 and 2019, the year of the composer's death. His music is avant-garde, but not cerebral. The listener feels addressed by a compositional fantasy that dominates the form. This is shown very well in the works compiled here, for example in the very rhetorically formulated 'Postcriptum zu B.', played with great commitment by Jörg Ulrich Krah and Bernhard Parz, where B. stands for Beethoven. Katzener also dealt with this in his orchestral work Discorso, more precisely with the Ninth Symphony and without quoting from it. Conductor Jurowski describes the work as "funny and at the same time serious music". Also very interesting is La scuala dell'ascolto, i.e. The School of Listening, with which the composer wants to get listeners who are inexperienced in dealing with new music to learn to listen. An interesting programme, a brilliant homage to Katzener, with excellent interpretations and good sound recordings. Norbert Tischer |
