Stoff collects chamber and ensemble works that Enno Poppe wrote for the Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, with which he has worked for many years as a conductor. Five pieces with one-word titles, from a solo for drumset to a work for seven brass players, show his method at its clearest. A handful of nondescript building blocks, quasi-motifs, are transformed in ways the listener can follow.
Poppe was born in 1969, and his works are among the most performed of any living German composer, in Germany and abroad. His way of dealing with tradition has produced an instantly recognisable style that reaches specialists and sceptics of new music alike. Here Musikfabrik plays under his direction, with two soloists: Dirk Rothbrust on drumset in Fell and Hannah Weirich on violin in Haare. The recordings come from three sources: Musikfabrik's own productions (Fell, Haare, Zug), a WDR production (Stoff) and one by Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Brot). The album was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW.
Stoff for nine players, written in 2015 for strings, woodwinds and brass, was first performed by Musikfabrik under Poppe on 27 February 2016 at the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne. The German word can mean fabric or any material, musical or literary, and the appearance and disappearance of motivic threads recalls the Nouveau Roman. Fell (Hide) runs for eleven minutes on drumset alone, and Haare (Hair) does the same for solo violin. Brot (Bread) for five players and Zug (Train, or Pull) for seven brass players complete the set. No matter how wild or chaotic the surface, the raw materials always remain audible, and the fascination lies in hearing them change.
Like the other titles, the names are both direct and ambiguous. The album belongs to Wergo's series devoted to Poppe's music and was nominated for the OPUS Klassik 2021. In 2018 Poppe also made a more homogeneous version of Stoff for nine string instruments, recorded by Ensemble Resonanz on the album Filz (WER 7399 2).
CD, Wergo WER 7395 2, released in 2020 in the Edition Enno Poppe series, total time 65'38".
