Scharlachrote Buchstaben (Scarlet Letters) surveys the piano music of Barbara Heller, played by Deborah Richards. Its eighteen tracks range from miniatures of a few seconds to a piece of seventeen minutes. The thread running through them, as the label puts it, is the idea of a game: the composer sets the rules, and the figures and sounds keep forming new constellations.
Heller is a German composer, born in 1936 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein. She studied in Mannheim and Munich and taught piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Mannheim. Her output includes piano and chamber music and Lieder. It also reaches toward graphic notation, tape collages, sound installations and collaborative compositions, on a path toward ever greater openness and formal freedom. Richards is the only performer on the disc, which runs to sixty-four and a half minutes.
The title work opens the programme at more than thirteen minutes, followed by Anschlüsse (Connections). Currants - Johannisbeeren is subtitled "Ein Sommertagebuch", a summer diary in six short entries. They include a twenty-second "Good Night", "Schwebend (schwankend)", "Triangel", "Verwirrung" and a closing "Erinnerung (Kindheit: schwarz-weiß)", a childhood memory in black and white. Das Quintenbuch is a book of fifths in seven pieces named after colours and states. Blue, yellow and orange fifths sit beside swaying and interrupted ones, and one is the memory of a water-lily leaf. MMM - Meer (mehr) Musik als Malerei puns on sea, more, music and painting in a piece of two and a half minutes.
The label describes this as sensuous, playful music, contemplative and experimental at once. The longest piece, Un Poco, closes the disc at over seventeen minutes, after the short Intervalles. Here Heller describes the space only "un poco", a little, and lets the material move in endlessly varied constellations. Across the programme, the titles show a composer who thinks in colours, pictures and wordplay as much as in intervals. She treats the piano as a field for rules and their variations rather than for display.
CD, Wergo WER 6610 2, released in 1997, total time 64'34".
