Two large works by Volker David Kirchner share this disc: the Symphony Totentanz (Dance of Death) and the Requiem Messa di Pace for soloists, mixed choir and orchestra. They look different in conception and in the way they treat their material, yet they rest on the same aesthetic creed, which Schott traces back to Byzantine thinking.
Volker David Kirchner was born in Mainz on 25 June 1942 and died in Wiesbaden on 4 February 2020. He was a violist as well as a composer, and in 1970 he founded the Ensemble 70 in Wiesbaden. His stage works include Die Trauung (1975), Die fünf Minuten des Isaak Babel (1980) and Gilgamesch, written for Expo 2000. Mainz gave him its Gutenberg Medal in 1992, and the Rheingau Music Festival its prize in 1994. The symphony is played by the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Peter Gülke. In the Requiem the soprano Maria Bayo, the mezzo-soprano Iris Vermillion and the bass Victor von Halem sing under Gerd Albrecht. He conducts the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg and the State Academic Choir of Riga, prepared by Imants Cepitis.
The symphony lasts about twenty minutes and runs as a single span through five sections, Reliquien, Dybuk, Kondukt, Golem and Katakomben. The Requiem is more than twice as long, at forty-four minutes. It follows the Latin text through Introitus, Tuba mirum, Rex tremendae, Recordare, Confutatis and Lacrimosa, then inserts a section called Golgatha before the Sanctus and Hosanna, and ends with a Conclusio.
The idea that joins the two scores is that a musical statement always contains its opposite. Each is a whole that includes singularity and multiplicity, "this-as-well-as-that" and at the same time "neither-this-nor-that". In the end, Schott writes, such music neutralises its own premise, its relation to tradition, and distances itself from that tradition to become an original phenomenon. In both works the inherited forms (the symphony, the Mass for the dead) are present and are treated from that double distance.
CD, Wergo WER 6206 2, released in 1991.
