Wolfgang Rihm

Enclosing the listener in sonic space: This is what Beat Furrer carried to extremes in his FAMA (col legno 20612), about 15 years after Rihm, by actually placing his audience in a “building of sound”. For Wolfgang Rihm, a sonic space was something less concrete and more indirect: “Organically sprawling strings of sound should be woven around the listener, circling her from different directions. In this way, the listener is not left to her own devices while opening up to it; the piece itself comes to her aid.”  (Anton Sergl) But this should not be taken as an attempt on Rihm’s part at “popularization”. Instead, it should be viewed as a chance for a new aesthetics. In sphere, dedicated to the pianist Siegfried Mauser, Rihm stages an entirely new production of the musical material of Ins Offene…. The result is not a new version of the original piece, but an independent piano concerto operating under different conditions of sound and tone color: The orchestra setting was drastically changed by expanding wind and percussion sections. And of course the piano now assumes a key role formerly played by the entire orchestra. Model interpretations of stirring and dense music.