hij brings together the two works of that title by Mark Andre: hij 1 for orchestra (2008/10) and hij 2 for twenty-four voices and live electronics (2010/12). His music is introverted and fragile, yet it speaks with a shy intensity, and it trains the ear on the smallest nuances at the border between sound and silence. Both pieces are first recordings.
Andre was born in Paris on 10 May 1964 as Marc André and changed the spelling of his name in 2007; Schott calls him a German-French composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire from 1987 to 1993 with Claude Ballif and Gérard Grisey, among others, and wrote a master's thesis on the Ars subtilior. From 1993 to 1996 he worked with Helmut Lachenmann at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule, and in 1996 he won the Kranichstein Music Prize at Darmstadt. hij 1 is played by the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Mariano Chiacchiarini in a WDR production of 2015. hij 2 is a 2013 concert recording by the SWR Vokalensemble under Marcus Creed, with the SWR Experimentalstudio and Joachim Haas as sound director.
In hij 1, about 22 minutes long, intricate contrapuntal structures, subtly transformed, move through the orchestra like sound shadows searching for resonance. That resonance becomes the starting point of hij 2, which runs to almost 37 minutes and is divided on the disc into four sections by bar numbers. The vocal work was first performed in Stuttgart on 12 February 2012 by the SWR Vokalensemble and Creed, the same choir and conductor heard here.
Schott describes the music as fully contemporary yet open to inherited tradition in an authentic and unpretentious way, music that slips into consciousness and vanishes just as mysteriously. The two pieces form a pair: the second grows from what the first leaves sounding. Andre's link to the German new-music world goes back to his student years: he held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 1995 and 1996, and Lachenmann praised his former student publicly in 2006. Both recordings come from German public radio, the WDR in Cologne and the SWR.
CD, Wergo WER 7379 2, released in 2019, with recordings licensed from WDR mediagroup and SWR Media Services.
