The second volume of the Edition Musikfabrik gathers four works in which, as the title says, visible things have left audible traces. Ensemble Musikfabrik plays Rebecca Saunders's a visible trace, Mauro Lanza's Vesperbild, Nicolaus A. Huber's Music on Canvas and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's score for an experimental film, Metamorphose. Three of the four pieces were written in the 2000s.
The Cologne ensemble was founded in 1990 and works mainly on new, often commissioned music. The conductors are Peter Rundel (Saunders), Etienne Siebens (Lanza and Huber) and Diego Masson (Zimmermann). Sound direction is by David Poissonnier, Olivier Pasquet and Melvyn Poore. The recordings are productions of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and the booklet is by Patrick Hahn. Saunders, born in London in 1967, studied with Wolfgang Rihm. Lanza, an Italian born in 1975, works at IRCAM, and Huber was born in 1939.
a visible trace (2006), for eleven soloists and conductor, was commissioned by Musikfabrik with the Kunststiftung NRW, the Konzerthaus Dortmund and the Ensemble intercontemporain. Saunders was composer-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Dortmund in 2005-06. Rundel and the ensemble premiered the piece at WDR on 7 July 2006. Its line-up includes electric guitar doubling banjo. The search is for a lost object, with Samuel Beckett as companion: "the thing alone, isolated by the need to see". Vesperbild (2006-07), for ensemble, toy instruments and electronics, takes the image of the pietà and distorts it to the grotesque. Lanza calls it the instrumental epilogue of his vocal cycle Nessun suono d'acqua on poems by Amelia Rosselli. It was commissioned by Musikfabrik and IRCAM and premiered at WDR in May 2007, with Ulrich Löffler on toy piano. In Music on Canvas (2003), for sixteen players and fixed sounds, Huber builds his "canvas" from everyday activities.
Zimmermann's Metamorphose was written for an experimental film by Michael Wolgensinger. The suite runs in six short movements, from "Introduktion (Vision)" through "Romanza", "Kanon" and "Habanera" to a closing "Gigue (Burleske)". Traces of many musical spheres are set against the images as a counterpoint.
CD, Wergo WER 6852 2, Edition Musikfabrik vol. 2, released in 2010 (total time 75'24").
