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| Editor’s Note |
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Plunge into the world of Franz Schubert one more time, compose lieder full of "Storm and Stress," drenched with longing for love and world-weariness – Wolfgang Mitterer, the much-praised organist and composer specializing in electronic music, has written songs after Schubert. Now his cycle of lieder for baritone, prepared piano and electronics, entitled Im Sturm, "In the storm," also rages on CD. Naturally, this is a storm intermingled with undercurrents of irony, and an understanding of Romantic lieder from today’s perspective. But it is also, and especially so, about genuine emotions: felt by a composer who passionately operates his keys and computer controls; sung by a baritone, Georg Nigl, who is familiar with all Schubertesk melody lines, while he is also able to contribute the experience of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which he performed at the Scala in Milan, to the broad range of emotions reflected in Mitterer’s compositions.
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| Lineup |
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Georg Nigl, baritone
Wolfgang Mitterer, prepared piano and electronics |
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| First Listener’s Note |
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By Eberhard Petschinka
AND
the composer says:
“I wanted to drag this ancient form of song with piano accompaniment
down from the attics of the 19th century wipe off the dust & prejudice
and find out
whether the old splendor can be polished up once again
whether the old lyrical element
and the music of missile defense systems
of bugging devices and large sewage plants
of high-speed trains & feelings
can be connected interlocked & overturned”
AND
romantic movements
AND
a love cantilena
AND
a lullaby
AND
an invitation to dance
AND a scream
AND
the singer says:
“a deconstruction / a dissolution
this lyrical bel-cant-esque singing
is carried away in a storm”
AND
a net of sounds is spread
through which the singer meanders like keanu reeves in matrix
turning his cartwheels & cutting his capers
like a surreal ballet russe acrobat
AND
his voice proceeds on tiptoe
as though a rope were stretched
from winterreise to massacre
& I pull out my opera glasses
& note: there is no rope
& I realize: the only link between these two towers
is the elegance
is the feeling
is the obstinate & unwavering desire
[...]
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| About |
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Wolfgang Mitterer
At the age of six Wolfgang Mitterer performed his first mass on a mechanical organ in his native village of Assling in East Tyrol. The organ has remained his preferred instrument to the present day; improvisation, an essential element in the organist’s musical practice, determined the course of his musical development. Both as a composer and as a performer he always combines sponta- neous inspiration with precise structures. The will to challenge the unforeseeable is an attitude Wolfgang Mitterer also expects from all musicians who perform his compositions.
Mitterer has studied in Innsbruck, Vienna (Hochschule für Musik) and Stockholm (Electronic Music Studio). As a composer and performer he mainly uses new sounds and rhythmic layers. His work can perhaps best be described by keywords like chaos research and the music of chance. A never-ending stream of commissions accounts for an oeuvre meanwhile comprising several hundred compositions, with the ever new as the only consistent element. Mitterer’s music expresses the joy of discovery, the sensuality of adventure, and the unpredictability of existence.
Traditional instruments are prepared and used for entirely new sound options. The combination with electronic sounds and structures as well as the application of his skill in sound engineering are a matter of course for the composer and instrumentalist in the light of today’s virtually limitless mechanization. The album “Im Sturm” is in fact the audible output of Mitterer’s holistic approach, which included the invention of the sounds as well as the actual recording and mixing and finalizing in his own studio. By way of minor shiftings, the de-clarification of the original romantic character through multi-layer playing on the piano, and the use of electronics the composer gets into the spirit of the distressed and distressing world of Schubert’s lieder.
Mitterer distils music from everything the world has to offer in terms of sound: whether they be sounds from nature (animals, hunting sounds, etc.) or from modern everyday life (mopeds, soccer fans, vacuum cleaners, etc.) – they are all put in a musical context. Mitterer makes and invents music for all imaginable genres and spheres: pieces for organ solo, jazz trios, quasi-ethno music including a shakuhachi player, open air performances with dulcimer players, woodworkers and actors speaking in dialect, music for cartoons and silent movies, radio plays, stage and theater scores, pop songs, operas for children and grownups, orchestral pieces and mass-communicative projects for thousands of choristers or legions of brass bands. What fascinates Mitterer most in these projects is the opening of a musical work for the sake of the sympathetic interest of the musicians involved, as well as the combination of electronics (often generated live) and traditional instruments or vocals. Baroque orchestras as well as experimental musicians interpret Mitterer’s music; it is performed at major festivals and venues, including Donaueschingen (concerto for piano, orchestra and electronics), Wiener Festwochen (world premiere of his opera “Massacre” after Christopher Marlowe), Inventionen Berlin (“labyrinth 4” for electronics), Wien Modern (e.g. music for Murnau’s silent movie “Nosferatu”), Tiroler Festspiele Erl (“horizontal noise” for woodworkers, brass band, children, women, moped, actors, 3 sopranos and 19-channel feeds), Philharmonie Köln (organ concertos), Zurich Theaterspektakel (fashion show “Bienen”), Serapionstheater, Wiener Taschenoper (children’s opera “The brave little Tailor”) or steirischer herbst (music theater “white foam” with La fura dels baus). Ensemble Modern Frankfurt, Klangforum Wien, SWR-Chor Stuttgart, Remix Porto and many other renowned ensembles have performed Mitterer’s compositions. He has been awarded e.g. the Preis der Stadt Wien für Kunst and the Prix Europe.
Georg Nigl (*1972)
Georg Nigl, as the former soprano soloist of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, has been familiar with music, and especially the Viennese Classic, from his boyhood. When his voice changed it was evident that he would develop into a baritone; he became a student of Hilde Zadek at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik. Quite early on in his career Nigl started to expand the range of music in his repertoire, and today he is internationally renowned both as a specialist for Old Music and as a highly proficient interpreter of New Music; nevertheless he also regularly performs works of the late 18th and the 19th century as well as Classic Modernism.
When asked to name his favorite opera parts, Georg Nigl comes up with three without a moment’s hesitation: Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Mozart’s Papageno, and Berg’s Wozzeck, all of them human characters with an inherent brokenness. Nigl’s ability to lend a highly specific personality in terms of both voice and expression to certain roles accounts to a large extent for his success at major opera venues, e.g. the Scala in Milan, Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Salzburg Festival and Wiener Festwochen. In addition to his skill as a vocalist his exceptional talent as an actor is also greatly admired and has even earned him an engagement at the Viennese Burgtheater. His interpretation of Wozzeck has been praised as “very human and very distinct both verbally and in terms of powerful expression” by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The singer Georg Nigl feels as though not only the music but the lyrics as well, in all lines of his repertoire, transformed him into a state where he has no choice but to sing. The vocal part that supports the text is to him the point of intersection of all styles and kinds of music. His interpretation of new opera parts has earned Nigl special praise, e.g. the title roles in Pascal Dusapin’s “Faustus the last Night” and Wolfgang Rihm’s “Jacob Lenz.” On opera stages the baritone collaborates regularly with distinguished directors such as Andrea Breth, Frank Castorf, Jürgen Flimm and Peter Mussbach, and at both opera and concert venues he performs under renowned conductors like Daniel Barenboim, Daniele Gatti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, René Jacobs, Thomas Hengelbrock and Giovanni Antonini.
In selecting his New Music repertoire Nigl takes care to focus on a chosen few among the immense variety of compositional languages, e.g. Georg Friedrich Haas (the prisoner in the opera “Die schöne Wunde”), Olga Neuwirth (Eddy in the opera “Lost Highway”) and Wolfgang Mitterer. The latter was also the one whom Nigl approached with a request for a composition for voice with piano accompaniment, a combination that seems to have rather gone out of fashion in contemporary music. This was the impulse for Mitterer to create “Im Sturm.” The new and unusual musical texture, which is extremely demanding in terms of vocal technique, is realized by the baritone in a positively bel-cantesque style. Two pieces that include improvisations also give him the opportunity of acquiring new experience in a vocal technique that had nearly sunk into oblivion since the Baroque. An aspect on which Nigl places particular emphasis is that the voice in the CD recording is always his original voice and has not been manipulated electronically in any way. The intense and productive collaboration between Georg Nigl and Wolfgang Mitterer will be continued at the Wiener Konzerthaus with a performance of the Bach cantatas. |
1CD | Vocal | Lied | Contemporary | PRIME colors Edition |
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| Recommendation |
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What a cheek! So Wolfgang Mitterer can do that, too: and writing a children’s opera really is no picnic, with or without jam. (Or flies.)  |
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| A single (and singular) CD documents the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik 2004: Wolfgang Mitterer’s electrifying pieces for organ and electronics. |
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| The exceptionally gifted organ-ist, composer and specialist in electronics Wolfgang Mitterer has been thinking about pop music: Sopop, featuring Birgit Minichmayr! |
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