Nikolaus Brass
Beten. Prayer
2015 release **
This really is a special one. Solo voice carries so many connotations, of speech, of song, of chant, of prayer. It’s the most directly human, personal, unmediated instrument of all. It’s the way we speak to each other, comfort each other, entertain ourselves, reassure ourselves, talk to our gods. There are elements of all on this CD; remarkably so, because on first listen at least all seven pieces inhabit similarly restrained, private and reticent soundworlds. There is a general …
String Quartets No. 1, 2 & 3
A Darmstadt composer and student of Lachenmann, Brass employs the vocabulary a contemporary composer of the middle-European avant garde, in two extended works which continuously ebb and flow, streams of musical consciousness with an apparent, though mysterious, narrative; a sense of unwillingness to be silenced, as though the event of the moment must be preserved at all cost. Microtonal and with much employment of extended harmonics, the music frequently has an unstable, shifting quality, though…
Chamber Music Vol. 1
It is the eternal questions that Nikolaus Brass mainly concerns himself with in his compositional work: the question of existence, of being, and first and foremost of all possible intermediate stages at the edge of what is conceivable, of what can just be grasped. In VOID (1999) he investigates the feeling left by loss, "structural empty spaces that bear the construction of sound while challenging it at the same time." For a due (2003), Brass has borrowed short captions from Yashushi Inoue's nov…