Музыка и песни WDR Sinfonieorchester / WDR Sinfonieorchester

Mark Andre’s music is introverted and fragile, but it speaks to the listener with a shy intensity: hij! This is the title given by the German-French composer to a pair of pieces recorded for this CD by the crème de la crème of avant-garde music ensembles: the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne conducted by Mariano Chiacchiarini as well as the SWR Vocal Ensemble and Experimental Studio with conductor Marcus Creed and sound director Joachim Haas. The music on this album is characterized by the unique nature of its sounds. It sensitizes our ears to the tiniest nuances and creates mesmerizing fields of tension on the borders between sound and silence.

Don't expect anything simpler from me!' Emmanuel Nunes (1941-2012) was an artist of almost intimidating ability and self-confident stubbornness much like his teachers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Apart from early works and large musical drama projects, his output consists primarily of two large-scale cycles. The first contains nine works, including Minnesang for twelve vocal soloists: a mystical and spiritual work that translates the medieval art of Minnesang into modern terms and whose musical effects are founded on the intelligibility of the texts. Nunes also composed a number of pieces not included in these cycles, among them the orchestral work Musivus, which was written for Expo 98 and premiered in a revised and expanded version in Cologne in 2001. Musivus is 'a monument of spatialization' that can make the listener dizzy with its tiny fields of musical activity that bloom into a gigantic visual and acoustical mosaic that is extremely changing to a traditional, process-oriented way of listening.