Percussion Today was meant, in Wergo's words, to give an insight into the broad spectrum of contemporary percussion composition and performance. The Hochschul-Percussion Trossingen, the percussion ensemble of the music academy in Trossingen, plays five works that range from a solo for eight congas to a twelve-part gallery for quartet, under the direction of Hermann Gschwendtner.
The composers come from different backgrounds. Leo Brouwer is Cuban, better known for his guitar music; Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) is the most widely known of the German composers here. Werner Heider, born in Fürth in 1930, and Wilfried Hiller, born in Weißenhorn in 1941, are both German composers. Most of the disc was recorded in October 1984 at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, with one session in April 1981 at Ulrich Kraus's studio in Munich; Kraus supervised and engineered the recordings. Regner, born in Marktoberdorf in Bavaria in 1928, died in 2008. He taught at the Trossingen academy from 1958 to 1964, then until 1993 at the Orff-Institut in Salzburg as professor of music education and elementary composition.
Hermann Regner's Changing Patterns opens with eight congas. Brouwer's Variantes for one percussionist dates from 1962, the year he turned to open forms and the avant-garde. Henze's Five Scenes from the Snow Country for solo marimba was written in 1978 for the Japanese percussionist Michiko Takahashi; Henze said a continuous snowfall gave him the idea, and the five movements move from a mysterious funeral march to a final Andante cantabile, by way of a whispered, extremely quiet slow section. Heider's Galerie is a cycle of twelve short pieces, I to XII, for percussion quartet, and Hiller's Katalog IV for percussion closes the programme.
Henze's marimba cycle was premiered in Stuttgart in October 1982 by Peter Sadlo, for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk; the copyrights on the scores run from 1976 to 1985. The disc is also a record of an academy ensemble working on music by composers of its own time, most of them German. Regner's link with the academy predates the record, and his work with Carl Orff between 1963 and 1982 shaped his output. Much of it is new music written to be playable by children, young people and amateurs, which suits a disc made by students.
CD, Wergo WER 60123-50, released in 1986. Total time 58'22.
