Modern Lied - Holliger, Lachenmann, etc

The Guardian 80

Sun/Schulze
(Mode)

Soprano Sarah Maria Sun’s collection of songs with piano is, she says, the result of her attempt to “find out what some of the path-breaking composers of our time think about voice and Lied”. Because of the dominance of pop music today, she thinks, there’s no longer any common ground among composers for presenting the complex music and texts that Lieder has traditionally dealt in. Certainly there is very little that’s shared stylistically between the settings by the six composers that she includes in this anthology, which ranges from the late 1950s to 2015.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the earliest songs here, Heinz Holliger’s six settings of poems by Christian Morgenstern, composed while Holliger was still in his teens, come closest to what one thinks of as the mainstream of the Lieder tradition. Their language seems rooted in Alban Berg, though there are also echoes of Debussy and Ravel. Salvatore Sciarrino’s Due Melodie are relatively early pieces too, dating from 1978, though the fluttering, trembling style of vocal writing that’s so typical of Sciarrino’s later music is already apparent, as is the equally nervous piano writing.