Six works by Jörg-Peter Mittmann, each built on music of the past, played by Ensemble Horizonte, the group he co-founded and directs. Bach chorales and passacaglias, Monteverdi's lament and Beethoven's Eroica are broken down, distorted or blurred. Texts by Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche and Klopstock are heard alongside them. The pieces date from 1997 to 2009.
Mittmann was born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1962. He studied composition, theory and oboe at the Detmold music academy with Giselher Klebe, Helmut Winschermann and Gernot Schmalfuß, and philosophy and history in Detmold, Bielefeld and Munich. In 1992 he took his doctorate in Munich with a dissertation on early German Idealism, and he taught music theory for many years at the Münster music university. Ensemble Horizonte was founded in Detmold in 1990. For the group, engagement with religious and metaphysical subjects and their musical tradition is "a question of identity". The soloists are soprano Katrin Bähre, alto Nicole Pieper and violinist Mareike Neumann. The recording is a coproduction with Deutschlandradio.
... mit Bach (2002) takes the chorale "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" from Cantata 147, breaks it into its smallest motivic cells and reassembles them. In Dona nobis pacem (1998), a concert scene for violin and ensemble, the "bizarre jagged sounds" grow from distorted quotations of the Eroica and of choruses from the Bach Passions. Lamento (2008) looks to Monteverdi's "Lamento della Ninfa" and to descending lament basses such as the "Crucifixus" of the B minor Mass. Kreuzgesang (1997) cuts texts by Nietzsche, Aquinas and others into fragments and joins them into one self-contradicting text for a female voice. In the Passacaglia (2006) the theme of Bach's organ Passacaglia in C minor passes through the whole ensemble like an out-of-focus photograph. Dem Unendlichen (2009), after Klopstock's ode, raises the question of theodicy. Its gongs, bells, shivering tremolos and fanfares praise the Infinite while recalling Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.
In der Freitag, Michael Jäger wrote that in this music "Gegenwart und Vergangenheit spiegeln sich ineinander" (present and past mirror each other). He singled out the violin piece Dona nobis pacem, and noted that quietness here means something shadowy.
CD, Wergo WER 6798 2, released in 2015 (total time 68'18").
