Reimann Vocal Works

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Aribert Reimann

Label: Orfeo

Media Format: Cassette

Media Runtime: 0

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: M212901A

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Unrevealed Aribert Reimann, Composer
Aribert Reimann, Composer
Cherubini Qt
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Baritone
Shine and Dark Aribert Reimann, Composer
Aribert Reimann, Composer
Aribert Reimann, Piano
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Baritone

Composer or Director: Aribert Reimann

Label: Orfeo

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 58

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: C212901A

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Unrevealed Aribert Reimann, Composer
Aribert Reimann, Composer
Cherubini Qt
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Baritone
Shine and Dark Aribert Reimann, Composer
Aribert Reimann, Piano
Aribert Reimann, Composer
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Baritone
I do hope I'm not beginning to sound like the Chairman of the Aribert Reimann Depreciation Society. He's a fine musician and a composer of obvious imagination and resource, but I find it really very difficult to tune into his wavelength. Most of the works of his that I've heard have been vocal, and part of the problem may be that his attitude to word-setting is one that sets my teeth on edge. He does not so much underline an expressive word or set it in effective relief as try to find a musical gesture that conveys all the violent force of the word in question. It is as though he were writing for emotional illiterates who could not possibly understand the meaning of 'anguish' or 'fear' unless the voice or its accompaniment illustrates the concept by making anguished or fearful noises.
When the music is specifically written for an artist well-known for his histrionic utterance of song-texts (in excellent voice, I should say, and very directly recorded) the result is often bludgeoning in the extreme. And when the texts in question are as familiar to an English-speaking audience as (in the cycle Unrevealed) Byron's Stanzas to Augusta the roaring gestural vehemence of it all is hard to take. Oh, that it were sung in German! But it is not. It is sung in an English that is almost equally inflected by German and by American vowel-sounds, and when in the third song of the cycle (a setting of one of Byron's letters to his half-sister) song gives way to speech, or to melodramatic ranting, rather, consonants expectorated, single vowels wailed over an octave's span, the image of Byron that is projected (a Teutonic King Lear, howling on the heath) is so false as to be ridiculous.
It is such a pity. Deprived of the vocal part the quartet writing (admirably played) often seems interesting and effective (the lamenting textures and motivic unity of the first song, the tormented single lines and duets of the second, the resigned simplicity of the very end of the cycle). And in the other set (also in English: texts by James Joyce with accompaniment for piano, left hand only) there is an often striking use of unexpected piano sonority (darkly opaque chords, glissandos on the strings of the instrument, angular toccatas) set alongside the wearisomely frequent use of mournful florid melismas, the switchback vocal lines and the wilful refusal to take up Joyce's obvious cues for particular musical images. Who could resist the promptings of a quotation from the Requiem Mass, or lines like ''I intone the high anthem'', ''Faster and faster!...I fear that this dance is the dance of death!'', ''Play us a jig...on the creaky, old squeaky strings of the fiddle''? Aribert Reimann could, I'm afraid. ''The distant music mournfully murmureth.'' Not in this cycle it doethn't.'

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