This pair of early works by Heinz Holliger (b. 1939) shows what could happen when a Boulez pupil sought to establish connections with early twentieth-century expressionism—a perfectly natural thing to do and, as both compositions prove, a highly effective strategy for the 1960s.
Der magische Tanzer (1963-5), using a text by Nelly Sachs, seems to aspire to match the psycho-spiritual drama of Schoenberg's Die gluckliche Hand, and—despite the story's strange mixture of realistic and magical features—it is the quality of purely psychic self-exploration that dominates, and counters elements which might otherwise be all too easily parodied—the significance of a cauliflower, for example. There are considerable musical strengths, especially when Holliger gives lyrical expansiveness its head, and the work's intense atmosphere is strongly projected in this riveting performance, with the young Philip Langridge sailing fearlessly above the stave.
Siebengesang (1966-7) is more fully-realized in musical terms, a tone-poem whose subject is the journey of the soul into the afterlife as described in a poem by Trakl whose closing lines, set for female voices, surface in the work's final stages. The text's reference to ''shimmering torrents'' is the key to Holliger's music: live, electronic but above all melodic. Linking it all together is the plangent voice of the oboe, and there are associations with other contemporary composers—Bernd Alois Zimmermann, even Henze—that Holliger's own later music has exorcized. In these fine performances and still-vivid recordings, his early music emerges with its distinctiveness enhanced, despite its various debts.'