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NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER
3-4 Weeks
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ARTIST
TITLE
Requiem For A Young Poet
FORMAT
CD/SACD
LABEL
CATALOG #
CYBELE 860501CDCYBELE 860501CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
11/10/2008
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"The Requiem for a Young Poet, a lingual for speakers, soprano and boss soli, three choirs, orchestra, jazz combo, organ, and electronic sounds, to texts from various poets, features and news reports, is a late masterpiece of its composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970). In the piece, Zimmermann, one of Germany's leading composers of the post-World War II era, arrives at a totality: a summation of his own biography and also a summation of the intellectual situation of his lifetime, the 50 or so years between the October Revolution and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. The Requiem, written principally between 1967 and 1969, is the sprawling realization of a grand oratorio project which had preoccupied Zimmermann since the mid-1950s, as well as the most intense incarnation of his 'pluralistic' way of musical thinking. At the time of its premiere, the Requiem could be compared to no other work. In our age, when cross-boundary explorations are quite familiar to us and many works no longer neatly fit into the categories of 'oratorio', 'cantata' or 'radio art', Zimmermann's 'lingual' seems all the more relevant. In an introductory text written for the premiere of his Requiem, the composer emphasized that while working on the piece, he had not thought in terms of cultivating a concrete artistic personality, but rather in imagining how the young poet himself would present to listeners the preceding fifty years and all of its multiplicity, seen from his own intellectual, historical and linguistic perspective and thus ours. Zimmermann arrived at the decision to use his own life span as the foundation of his Requiem at a rather late stage in the process and after varied earlier drafts. Although the composer listed the years of composition as 1967 to 1969, the Requiem should be seen in the context of larger thematic concerns which Zimmermann had been developing for some fifteen years and which found expression in many works leading up to, and stretching beyond, the Requiem. For this SACD recording, Zimmermann's own recommendation for the spatial distribution of the 250 or so participants was followed, which means that the three choirs were arranged in front of the auditorium (choir I), on the left respectively on the right (choir III) and behind the auditorium (choir II). The eight-track tape compiled by Zimmermann in 1969 has been painstakingly restored, so that the recordings of Papandreou, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and all others are again heard as they should be. The eight channels of sound heard on this SACD recording of the concert on 23 June 2005 in the Concertgebouw Haarlem (The Netherlands), were reproduced per the composer's intentions, via eight loudspeakers arranged throughout the hall. This SACD is the first surround sound recording of the Zimmermann Requiem. Owners of a home theatre system can thus enjoy the Requiem even outside the concert hall, as Zimmermann had originally conceived." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.
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