Wolfgang Rihm - Sphären

The Guardian 60

(NEOS)

The musical connection between the two substantial ensemble pieces that Rupert Huber conducts here, Sphäre um Sphäre, completed in 2003, and Séraphin-Sphäre, finished three years later, is one of many such threads that run through Wolfgang Rihm’s music, and provides some sense of orientation in his vast and ever-expanding output. In this case a wind-and-percussion work from 1990, –Et Nunc, served as the starting point for the pieces, and the style of Rihm’s music of the early 1990s, when the pared-back world of Luigi Nono’s late music became an important influence, seems to be have been carried through to the sparse textures of Sphäre um Sphäre a decade later.

In the second work, Séraphin-Sphäre, two of Rihm’s creative threads come together as material from the Sphären series is combined with ideas from Séraphin, the textless opera inspired by Antonin Artaud from the 1990s. The textures are less aphoristic, more continuous, and the instrumental writing is more rhetorical. Between the two ensemble pieces come Vier Male, four studies for solo clarinet that push the capabilities of the instrument and its player to their limits. In the context of Rihm’s output as a whole, these may be mere slivers from a vast creative block, but played so consummately by the clarinettist of the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik, Andreas Schablas, they make superb, fiesty showpieces.