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NEOS 11933CD
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This 33rd volume of the Musica Viva series on NEOS documents an extraordinary concert. The program comprises exclusively works by Peter Ruzicka, conducted by the composer himself, to commemorate his 70th birthday in July 2018. One of the CD's highlights is the world premiere of the fulminant trumpet concerto, "LOOP". One of the work's two soloists plays only piccolo trumpet while the other occasionally switches to flugelhorn. This way, the piece exploits the fullest conceivable extent of the instrument's range -- as well as the boundaries of what's technically possible. Other works presented here provide a multilayered insight into Ruzicka's orchestral works from 1984 to the present.
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NEOS 11808CD
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Peter Ruzicka has made a tremendous impact on the world of music for decades, not only as a general director (among others, at the Salzburg Festival, Hamburg State Opera and the Munich Biennale) but also as a high demand internationally as a conductor and composer. On July 3, 2018 Peter Ruzicka celebrated his 70th birthday. This CD, the seventh featuring his music in the NEO catalog, is being released to honor this occasion. The Minguet Quartet won the 2010 ECHO Klassik Award for its complete recording of string quartets by Ruzicka (Nos. 1-6 at the time). This CD is a logical and perhaps necessary continuation of the series: In addition to String Quartet No. 7 -- which, at over 40 minutes in length is far more extensive than its predecessors -- it includes "CLOUDS 2" for string quartet and orchestra conducted by the composer. Ruzicka says that in this work he was guided by the image of music that is searching for a sound which he has never himself heard before, and which has never previously occurred in all his works.
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NEOS 11521CD
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"Music has to learn how to sing again" - this was Peter Ruzicka's formulation as a way out of a creative crisis around 1980. Peter Ruzicka composed the works on Crossing The Border during three different creative periods. The cantata "...Der Die Gesänge Zerschlug..." (Who Shattered the Songs) was created halfway along the path towards his first opera, Celan. Alongside the violin concerto "...Inseln, Randlos" (Islands, Edgeless) and the orchestral piece "...Vorgefühle..." (Presentiments), it marks a significant predilection, in terms of both musical language and structure, for staged music. "Sturz" (Plunge) was written between the Celan opera and its successor, the music theatre Hölderlin, and went into the music of the second stage work via several metamorphoses. The cello concerto "...Über Die Grenze" (Crossing the Border), closely related to the ensemble piece "Trans", explored the expressive and structural terrain for a new opera before either its essential content or working title were known. Österreichisches Ensemble Für Neue Musik, performing all pieces on Crossing The Border, has dedicated itself to the performance of contemporary music for over 40 years and has established itself internationally as one of the leading ensembles of its kind. With over 300 world premieres since its founding and regular participation at numerous major festivals, the ensemble residing in Salzburg has meanwhile become indispensable on the world's great concert stages. Österreichisches Ensemble Für Neue Musik personnel on Crossing The Border is: Johannes Kalitzke - conductor; Dietrich Henschel - baritone; Peter Sigl - violoncello.
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NEOS 11406CD
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Neos presents the fifth release in a series of illustrious recordings dedicated to the music of Peter Ruzicka. As a composer, conductor, and artistic director, Ruzicka (born 1948) ranks among the most influential personalities of international cultural life. At the same time, his art constitutes an autonomous musical cosmos in itself, marked by impressive métier, auratic sound poetics, and a profound consciousness of tradition. In this third volume of his orchestral music, Ruzicka pays tribute to some of the leading cultural figures of history: Richard Wagner, Paul Celan, and Hans Werner Henze. A Wagner memorial composition by Franz Liszt provides the basis for Ruzicka's orchestral palimpsest as well as for a kind of compositional retracing for piano; Recherche (-IM Innersten) is a chorus scene from the heart of his confessional Celan opera; Spiral, for Hans Werner Henze, is a work for a quartet of French horns and orchestra, and a piece of anger and sorrow, according to Siemens Prize winner Peter Gülke's liner notes. Leipziger Hornquartett; Sophie-Mayuko Vetter, piano; MDR Rundfunkchor; MDR Sinfonieorchester; Peter Ruzicka, conductor.
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NEOS 11101CD
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German composer and conductor Peter Ruzicka holds a professorship at Hamburg University of Music and Theater, is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Hamburg Free Academy of the Arts, and is artistic director of the Munich Biennale for New Music. He also served as artistic director of the Salzburg Festival. On this CD, Ruzicka conducts the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, playing three of his large orchestral works: "Über Unstern," "Trans" and Mahler|Bild -- all composed between 2009 and 2011. Ever since creating his earliest works, Peter Ruzicka has been acutely conscious that composing occurs within a place in history in which the past serves not merely as a breeding ground, but also as a part of the present and as an enquiry of it. The dialectic of adopted, suppressed and violated history has assumed a particular role in this reflexive creativity. Time and again, quotations from Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg, but also earlier masters such as Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Thomas Tallis and especially Gustav Mahler have appeared in his works, serving as a critical mirror or catalyst of his own musical language. Now, after almost five decades of musical creativity, his own quality has also acquired its own specific historicity and has become, like foreign elements, an object of his late style.
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NEOS 10822-3CD
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Performed by Minguet Quartett: Ulrich Isfort, 1st violin; Annette Reisinger, 2nd violin; Firmian Lermer, viola; Matthias Diener, violoncello; Mojca Erdmann, soprano; Christoph Bantzer & Peter Ruzicka, speakers. "Literary fixed stars spur Peter Ruzicka to continue on to make new musical observations. He reflects in his quartets the verbal scepticism of Celan, Hofmannsthal and Hölderlin, which allows the composer to examine his own thinking and feelings. He remains acute, too, and is therefore able to risk a glimpse into the depths of the human spirit. Heavy emotional outbursts are tempered by an ethos of reasoning, of reflection, and a certain urbanity if one will. In his later works, Ruzicka allows 'the word' to rest on a firm foundation, one no longer mute, but explicit -- what emerges are sensitive speech and music pregnant with meaning." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.
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NEOS 11045CD
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"The bulk of Peter Ruzicka's catalogue of works is taken up by pieces for or with orchestra. For an artist whose intellectual purlieus have always centered on modernism, this is nothing to be taken for granted. The post-war avant-garde found its preferred vehicle in works for small ensemble and struggled to come to terms with large forms and forces. That Ruzicka turned to the orchestra from a sense of inner necessity has to do with the peculiar make-up of his creative imagination, which takes sound as its point of departure." Featured artists: Jeroen Berwaerts, trumpet. NDR Sinfonieorchester, Peter Ruzicka, conductor.
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NEOS 11044CD
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2010 release. 'Funf Szenen (Five Scenes)': In 2009, during a new production of his opera Celan, Peter Ruzicka noticed that several crucial moments in the large orchestral score could be 'mapped' in new aesthetic guise onto a linear piano texture. The opera shed fresh light on and defamiliarised many traumatic experiences in the life of the eponymous poet and Holocaust survivor. 'Parergon': this six-piece cycle originated in 2006/2007 in parallel with Ruzicka's second opera, H'lderlin. Here the events are communicated through music alone rather than stage action. The opening piece appears in several scenes of the opera in rich string sonorities. Once it has faded away, this same phenomenon is clearly audible in the next piece, which represents a distillate of two scenes: 'Expulsion from Paradise' and 'Fear, nothing but fear, the trembling collective.' Composed in 1987, the 'Preludes' cycle can be viewed as the piano piece in which Ruzicka identifies most closely with the idiomatic properties of the instrument. Here the piano can function as a 'percussion instrument' in the best sonic sense of the term. 'Ausgeweidet Die Zeit...': This set of three nocturnes composed in 1969, is among the works in which Ruzicka found his own distinctive idiom. As he writes in the preface, 'The three nocturnes took shape during my encounter with the poetry of Nelly Sachs' cycle GlüHende RäTsel (Glowing riddles). They are reflections of internalized motions and draw their force by communicating with central layers in these poems.' Like the words themselves, the music that mirrors them appeals to the listener's sense of synaesthesia, as if creating a painting with brushstrokes of sound. 'Compensazione': This roughly two-minute serial study, dating 1966-2009, owes its existence to a strange twist of fate. The manuscript vanished after the premiere in 1970. In 2009 Benjamin Fenker reconstructed the musical text from a live recording made of the premiere. This text was in turn rearranged by the composer with regard to tempo, dynamics, phrasing and rhythm. In this way the piece underwent what might be called a journey through time, being at once Ruzicka's covert opus 1 and his most recent work for the piano. Performed by: Sophie-Mayuko Vetter (piano).
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