Klaviersonate / Symphonie für Orchester / Divertimento di „Ferne Nähe“ / Streichquartett / Velouria (II)

This portrait CD presents works by the composer Daniel Smutny who was born in Mannheim in 1976: “To me, composing means integrating various heterogeneities and seeing what comes out as intermediate space, as friction”. Smutny reshuffles the history of music; his allusions are like branding irons searing the listener's memory, like reminiscences jammed together higgledy-piggledy like interlocked hinges.

His “Symphony” is the expression of what Smutny the composer pursues obsessively: romantic considerations, calculated expression with recourse to music history, to tonal complexities, with the rich pathos, however, becoming frozen.

In Smutny's “Divertimento di 'Ferne Nähe'”, the breaks constitute the formally structuring principle between direct allusions to Beethoven, Schubert, Varèse and Zimmermann: “'Ferne Nähe' (distant proximity) is a detailed and experimental study of interpersonal modes of behaviour in a world striving for perfection and maximisation, of the mental dynamics between four figures representing human characteristics, of love and the loneliness of modernity.” (Smutny)

“Piano Sonata” invites the listener to look for its characteristic style poised between Chopin, Skriabin or Rakhmaninov. On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that assumption, association, allusion are all shattered in the course of comparison.

Smutny composed “String Quartet” as Beethoven, if you like, who adopted the language of Brahms und Janácek, in order to gallop alongside the fissured edifices and unsystematic twists of Wolfgang Rihm.

The CD ends with the vocal composition “Velouria (II)”.