The third volume of the Edition Musikfabrik goes from heaven to hell in three steps. Martin Smolka's Rush (Hour in Celestial Streets) imagines the music of the angels as an after-work traffic jam. Mauricio Kagel's Orchestrion-Straat stages a joyful resurrection of light music on earth. Louis Andriessen's Racconto dall'Inferno sets Dante and gives hell a sound of its own. Ensemble Musikfabrik plays all three, with soprano Cristina Zavalloni in the Andriessen.
The conductors are Peter Rundel for Smolka and Reinbert de Leeuw for Kagel and Andriessen. The recordings are productions of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the ensemble's long-standing partner in Cologne. Smolka, a Czech composer, was born in 1959; Kagel lived from 1931 to 2008 and Andriessen from 1939 to 2021. Two of the three works were written for the ensemble. Rush (2007) was commissioned by the Kunststiftung NRW and Musikfabrik, which premiered it in Cologne under Rundel on 18 August 2007. Racconto dall'Inferno (2004) was first performed by Zavalloni, Musikfabrik and de Leeuw at WDR in Cologne on 24 October 2004.
In the Hebrew Bible the praise of God was imagined as an overpowering roar rather than a euphonious affair, and Rush comes closer to that older idea. The scoring includes soprano trombone, horn, euphonium and tuba, and the piece takes a detour through microtonality to find entirely new harmonies. Smolka has described angels sitting in their cars and sounding their horns, like the trumpets of Jericho. Orchestrion-Straat (1995-96), 23 minutes long, is scored for an odd chamber orchestra with two tubas, alto saxophone, accordion, two cellos and two double basses. The label describes it as a very special music machine. Andriessen's piece sets Canto XXI of the Inferno, in which Malacoda gives Dante and Virgil an escort of ten devils, called one by one by name. Andriessen wanted Zavalloni to sing in her native Italian; he later called the piece a grotesque scherzo for her. Its repetitive loops make hell hard to escape.
Racconto dall'Inferno later became the second of five scenes in Andriessen's stage work La Commedia. Heard here on its own, it closes a programme that runs from celestial brass through a music machine on earth to the underworld.
CD, Wergo WER 6853 2, Edition Musikfabrik vol. 3, released in 2010 (total time 59'24").
