Event(ualitie)s is a double album of solo and duo works by Gerd Zacher, the leading new-music organist of his time. He was also a composer whose own output long remained hidden. All the works are heard here for the first time on record, in a second posthumous portrait after his organ cycle Die Kunst der Fuge, released by Wergo in 1990 (WER 61842).
Zacher was born in Meppen in 1929 and died in Essen in 2014. He studied composition in Detmold with Günter Bialas. From 1954 to 1957 he was organist and cantor at a German Evangelical church in Santiago de Chile. He then worked at the Lutherkirche in Hamburg-Wellingsbüttel until 1970 and taught at the Folkwang school in Essen until 1991. Thanks to him, György Ligeti, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel and Isang Yun wrote much of their organ music. Most of the recordings were prepared with Zacher himself or with his longtime companion, the composer Juan Allende-Blin, who also plays piano here. The other performers are soprano Hasti Molavian, flautist Evelin Degen, organist Matthias Geuting, the piano duo Tomas Bächli and Gertrud Schneider, and the pianists Thomas Günther and Alfred Pollmann.
The pieces span more than fifty years, and they keep returning to Zacher's central question: the relation between composition and improvisation, notation and interpretation. Most are precisely notated, but some passages leave broad freedom to the performer. 75 Event(ualitie)s, dedicated to John Cage, is an organ piece played simultaneously with Allende-Blin's piano work Siebeneinhalb Dezennien, which comes from loudspeakers; it opens and closes the album in two different realisations. L'heure qu'il est is written for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. Das Gebet Jonas im Bauche des Fisches (Jonah's Prayer in the Belly of the Fish) sets soprano against organ, and Explosiva is for organ alone. The early Glossar op. 2 for flute and piano and the Fünf Transformationen op. 3 for piano show where it started.
The duo pieces in particular give a lively picture of Zacher's skill in staging a musical dialogue between spontaneity and reflection. Zacher is a fixed point in the history of the twentieth-century organ. This album sets out a quieter story, that of an interpreter who wrote for himself and his friends and kept most of it from the public.
2CD, Wergo WER 7394 2, released in 2020, first recordings, total time 104'10". Made with the support of the Kunststiftung NRW and E-MEX e.V.
