This disc offers a view of Detlev Müller-Siemens's music for ensemble from the 1990s, through three works played by the Ensemble Phoenix Basel. One cycle even shares its name with the group: Phoenix I-III for thirteen instrumentalists. With Light blue, almost white and Cuts it makes a programme of 67 minutes.
Müller-Siemens is a German composer, born on 30 July 1957. He has been professor of composition and music theory at the Music Academy in Basel since 1991. For his opera Die Menschen, also released by Wergo as WER 6253 2, he received the Liebermann Support Prize for Opera Composition from the Körber Foundation. The Ensemble Phoenix Basel was founded in 1998 by the conductor Jürg Henneberger, the flautist Christoph Bösch and the percussionist Daniel Buess, and Henneberger leads it here. The saxophone soloist in Cuts is Marcus Weiss, and Manuel Bärtsch plays piano in all three works. The recordings were made from 28 August to 1 September 1999 in the Grosser Saal of the Musik-Akademie Basel, with Robert Hermann as sound engineer.
Phoenix I, II and III date from 1993, 1994 and 1995. A freely chosen starting material is mapped out of itself, according to a rule, until the initial state returns, and each piece moves between compact sonorities and melodic lines tangled like lianas. Light blue, almost white (1998), for eleven instruments, refers to a text by Samuel Beckett. "Light blue" stands for a melancholy the composer associates with cool jazz and Japanese art, "almost white" for a region of noise, the breath. Cuts (1996-97) for alto saxophone and ensemble is the one concertante piece. The title means both incisions in time and longitudinal sections. In the second movement a quarter-tone cantilena of the saxophone is surrounded by weightless circling lines, murmuring voices that do not notice each other.
The three works show a composer writing for mid-sized formations, between chamber music and orchestra, in the years he was teaching in Basel, played by a group from the same city.
CD, Wergo WER 6648 2, released in 2001, total time 66:55.
