Wolfgang Mitterer
Nine In One

All the themes from all of Beethoven’s symphonies, played live by an orchestra, concentrated into one hour and supplemented with electronics – that’s “Nine in One”. Or: a wild rollercoaster ride through the twists and turns of Ludwig van Beethoven’s brain. In the front carriage: Wolfgang Mitterer. He has a reputation, as a musician many’s the time he’s tormented the big concert organs of the continent, as well as composing for important orchestras, ensembles and opera houses, rocking it in jazz clubs or writing film music in his studio in Vienna. Off we go! Radial acceleration. Centrifugal force. Looping. The whole programme. And then what makes riding the rollercoaster so much fun suddenly happens: we can’t feel our own mass anymore, and we experience a moment of weight- lessness. A similar condition may also appear after listening to this album. But what’s certain is that from this point onwards, you hear the ‘New Testament of Music’, as Beethoven’s symphonies are also known, in a completely new way.

Beethoven Bashing
By Hans Platzgumer

Two people – two men, let’s say, sitting together in Café Jelinek – are chatting about Wolfgang Mitterer’s “Nine In One”. One of them is ‘younger’, the other ‘older’. What younger or older are supposed to mean is up to the reader to decide. At any rate, one of them, the older one, let’s call him Hans, has already listened to this CD. The other one hasn’t. They are both, however, familiar with Ludwig van Beethoven, to a greater or lesser extent.

“All nine of Beethoven’s symphonies in one?” asks the younger one. “Yes, merged together as it were. It’s a coup.”
“But didn’t Beethoven write ten symphonies?”
“Almost. He didn’t live long enough to finish the tenth.”
“So you write almost ten symphonies, and that’s all that’s left of you: five hours of music.”
“Wolfgang Mitterer has turned that into one hour now.”
“That’s practical.”
“Practical?”
“Yes.”
“Contemporary, is it? An optimization, ‘the essential Beethoven in less than an hour’? If that’s what you think, you’re really on the wrong track!”
“They broke up the Ring des Nibelungen into a trilogy last year, too.”
“And shocked the Wagnerians with it. But that’s not what it’s about. The aim is not to cater to the ever shorter attention spans we smart phone junkies havefor all cultural media, but instead to make something new from the old, and that works better in Nine In One than almost anywhere else.”
“Am I hearing the sound of general cultural pessimism there? Ugh!”
“I know this is actually electronic music – but do you listen to classical music at all?”
“Sure, why not? I listen to everything.”

“Everything, as long as it doesn’t last longer than two minutes.”
“Maybe I‘m not old enough for classical music?”
“When is someone old enough for classical music?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Already as a teenager, when I began to reject the music academy, I kept hearing this sentence: ‘You’ll like classical music too, when you’re old enough.’ That was in the Tyrol, up in Innsbruck, where I grew up, at the start of the 1970s. Wolfgang Mitterer was already pottering away on his organ keys, also in the Tyrol, down in Lienz. Maybe he had already begun to lay his hands on Beethoven back then? At any rate, Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven had come out years before Mitterer was born, and even today those lyrics are stuck in our heads: ‘Roll over Beethoven – Tell Tchaikovsky the news – Roll over Beethoven – And dig this rhythm and blues!’ In 1972 Jeff Lyne produced an eleven-minute-long extended version of the song for his Electric Light Orchestra, and a new round of Beethoven bashing began. Then today, or should we say, finally! Nine In One. Wolfgang Mitterer swung into action. Directed by Gustav Kuhn, the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento has recorded all of Beethoven’s symphonies for col legno, and Mitterer uses this material freely and unashamedly, as if it had been written for his purposes alone. [...]

Wolfgang Mitterer studied organ, composition and electroacoustics in Vienna and Stockholm. He is not only one of the Austrian specialists for electronics as well as being equally brilliant on the keyboard and on the slide controls, but is also one of the most innovative composers. His work oscillates between composition and open form. Apart from music for organ and orchestra, a piano concerto and an opera he has produced electronic pieces, conceptualized sound installations, and engaged in collective improvisation with diverse groups, developing a language of extremes, tension and complexity. The pleasure he takes in experimenting leads him to combine contrasting elements in the creation of unpredictable musical events. In one major composition, for instance, he juxtaposes musical bands and children’s choirs with specialized instrumentalists and singers, while filling the hall with surround sound created by live electronics. But his work transcends the merely spectacular, precisely because of his musical presence and the high – deeply moving – intensity and complexity of his compositions. Listening intensely to low sounds has its place just as much as the ‘installing’ of exploding sound fragments in the listeners’ minds. Far from being smoothly pleasurable, Mitterer’s music is still uncannily beautiful at times.

2018 is an exceptional exciting year in the career of Wolfgang Mitterer: In addition to the release of his latest album »Nine In One« he is award winner of the Österreichischer Filmpreis 2018 in the category ’Best Music’ on occasion of his compostion for the documentary »Untitled« (2017, directed by Michael Glawogger (†). Furthermore he composes and conducts the music of the revivial of »Jedermann« at the Salzburger Festspiele 2018.

Echo Chambers
By Andreas Schett

1
I’m writing these notes as a proxy for Wolfgang Mitterer, and will try to keep them as short as he himself would do. Although this aim is destined to fail from the start. Mitterer just said four words: “You write the notes.”

2
We can talk to each other like that. We’ve known each other for a long time. And we both come from East Tyrol, a remote district in southern Austria. In 1994 I was able to persuade him to compose a “Woodland music for a Venetian saw mill” for the Innervillgraten valley head. At the time, workmen from the rural valley were restoring a water-powered saw – which also represented an impressive percussion instrument, so we thought. At the premiere, it poured with rain, and there was thunder and lightning, causing not just the audience of several hundred to fear for their lives under their umbrellas, but the sound technicians to fear for their equipment. Everyone hung on until the last note. Mitterer’s soundtrack rang out from the woods all around, three loggers sawed strictly according to the musical score, a dialect speaker swore with a vengeance, 17 dulcimer players sat inside the saw-mill as if on a ship.

Something like that builds a relationship.