Jörg Widmann, Polyphone Schatten, Drittes Labyrinth. Sarah Wegener, Christophe Desjardins, WDR Sinfonieorchester, Heinz Holliger, Emilio Pomàrico. Wergo, WER73692. [Album review]

Abstract

The most remarkable thing – at least to my mind – about the handful of composers associated with the Neue Einfachheit label in the mid-70s to early 80s is that this music presented itself as New Music. The hallmarks of the style – post-Bergian angst, direct affect of a postexpressionistic hue, maintenance of historical forms – had already been present in German art music since the end of the second world war and, furthermore, had existed reasonably comfortably alongside the “official” New Music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, and, later, Lachenmann and Ferneyhough. Figures like Gunter Bialas and Aribert Reimann were rarely, if ever, at Darmstadt, but that did not prevent them from having active and lucrative careers in Teutonic musical life. With the advent of the Neue Einfachheit generation – most prominently, Wolfgang Rihm, but also Hans-Jürgen von Bose, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Babette Koblenz, Manfred Trojahn, Hans-Christian von Dadelson, and others – this tradition suddenly laid claim to the avant-garde. It was a fairly short-lived affair, and these figures have since almost entirely disappeared from the New Music scene – even Wolfgang Rihm hasn’t been to Darmstadt for almost a decade. Nevertheless, this brief association between a sort of (institutionally) German national neoromanticism and the (institutionally) international avant-garde has had lasting effects on the discipline. The scholarly attention to this tradition has only increased in recent years, with Rihm’s work in particular receiving impressive, indepth studies from Alistair Williams and Seth Brodsky. And a further generation of German composers, now established prominently, have seamlessly adopted this neoromantic/postexpressionistic/ Neue Einfachheitlich tradition as their own, including Detlev Glanert, Tobias PM Schneid, and Jörg Widmann. [excerpt]