CROSSING PATHS (Kreuzende Wege)
WETTSTEIN Ritornello
KELLER Pentalog
BARTSCHI Feathertop
GASSER Pastaccio
SIGRIST Incrociando
Sinfonietta Wetzikon/Howard
Griffiths
Grammont Portrait CTS-M
54 [77.43]
You will never encounter a more unusual experiment, nor one completed with
such remarkable success.
The five colleagues of the Zurich Composers' Group, used to meeting
for administrative concerns, felt a need 'to expand their verbal dialogue
into a musical one, by interaction on a compositional level'. The resulting
project was a serious and demanding musical game, each piece to incorporate
foreign material supplied by all four others! The outcome was five quarter-hour
compositions, recorded live at a 1996 concert by the excellent Sinfonietta
Wetzikon under its English-born, RCM trained conductor Howard
Griffiths, long resident in Switzerland and devoted to furthering Swiss
composers.
Some of the works incorporate prescribed procedures, others quote recognisable
melodic phrases by their colleagues; the compositional solutions are described
in fullest detail in a note by each composer. Peter Wettstein's
'colourful, gaudy' Ritornello is immediately attractive. Max
Keller's four movements are perhaps the most complex; Werner
Bärtschi's Feathertop is a scarecrow cousin of Dukas's
apprentice, suitably using only those percussion instruments made of wood.
Ulrich Gasser assigns specific instruments to his colleagues' quotations
from their earlier pieces, and Martin Sigrist constructs a 'witch's
kitchen' from dark to brilliant light, with 'apparitions' from works by his
fellows. This, and the whole project, makes for a heady brew, and if the
five composers became closer friends as a consequence of this collaboration
(and the Group still exists in similar form?) there could be a basis here
for an entertaining and educative contribution to a contemporary music festival
such as Huddersfield's.
Peter Grahame Woolf
