Pietà is the portrait CD of the Swedish composer Lisa Streich in the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik. Its five works, from 2012 to 2017, range from a duo to a large double choir and orchestra. The disc opens with whipping and humming sounds while the orchestra moves as if lost in reverie, and from there it swings between this world and the hereafter.
All five pieces were recorded especially for this CD. The Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra under Gregor A. Mayrhofer plays Segel, in a production by Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen at the Lucerne Festival. The ensemble hand werk plays Pietà with Niklas Seidl on motorised cello, and ensemble recherche plays Asche. The Vokalensemble Kölner Dom under Eberhard Metternich, with the boy sopranos David Isberner and Sebastian Kellner, sings Agnel. Stabat is sung by UT insieme vocale-consonante under Lorenzo Donati. The booklet essay is by Rainer Nonnenmann.
The production settings follow the variety of the music. Three works were recorded in regular venues, while the vocal pieces were taken down in Cologne Cathedral and in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Campitelli. Segel (2017) is for orchestra. The title work Pietà (2012/16) sets a motorised cello against the ensemble. Agnel (2013) is for twelve-voice choir, objects, choirboy and electronics, and Asche (2012) is a duo for clarinet and cello lasting over fourteen minutes. Stabat (2017), for 32 voices in four choirs, takes up more than a third of the disc at 27 minutes. It is a co-production with the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo.
Nonnenmann describes an inventive musical world whose unity grows out of apparent contradictions. "Lisa Streich's music has a captivating beauty, at once earnest and playful, strong and meaningful, physical, cruel and tender," he writes. In his view it is as fraught with contradictions as life itself: "It is music of this world, and yet it is not." The other recordings are co-productions of Deutschlandfunk and the German Music Council.
CD with a 44-page booklet in German, English and French, 76 minutes. WER 6425 2, released in 2018 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik.
