Apart from those who have already heard the album or attended a tour date from the past week – for example at the “Act-Jubilee” three days earlier in Berlin – hardly anyone in the Isarphilharmonie recognized the piece with which Michael Wollny and his trio with Tim Lefebvre on bass and Eric Schaefer on drums started the evening: George Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy” came across as almost unrecognizable, mysteriously floating and almost menacing despite its romance. A version that is due to Wollny’s new program. It’s called “Ghosts” and once again speaks for the unusual sources and ideas that inspire him. Spirits and ghosts of all kinds, friendly or evil, populate Wollny’s music this time, but also “haunting songs”, ie pieces that haunt him and which now, see Gershwin, reverberate enchantedly.
This has been the case with Wollny for a long time: First comes a sound idea, whether it was the emphasis on the melodic (even with completely unmelodic source material) in “Weltentraum”, the acoustic echo of loneliness and sense of time in his Corona solo “Mondenkind ” or finally the purely electronic mountains of sound from “XXXX”. The repertoire is subordinate to this according to Wollny’s very personal feeling. Here it ranges from a thundering high-speed variant of Schubert’s “Erlkönig” to the minimalist “Beat The Drum Slowly” by Timber Timbre (one of his favorite bands), Nick Caves “Hand Of God” reworked here as a bass synth vehicle or the delicately creepy “Willows Song” from the – also very funny – British horror film “Wicker Man” to original compositions like that in fact breathless “Monsters Never Breathe”, which seems to make fun of ghostly beings almost parodically.
In the end, of course, everything, the pieces and the concept, is just the quarry for what is happening at the moment and in the interaction. Even “Little Person” (also a film score), which has been played as an encore for a long time, sounds completely new, adapted to the topic and the moment. The well-prepared spontaneity, the consciously taken risky path is what makes this trio so unique, beyond their instrumental mastery. Last but not least, thanks to Wollny’s companion Eric Schaefer, who seems to read his mind, and the bass berserker Tim Lefebvre, who has rejoined the group and who once taught the two of them the missing, let’s call it American double boom in “Weltentraum”, there is in the Isarphilharmonie not a moment that is not surprising, overwhelming in some way, in any case emotionally arousing. Wow, what a wild ghost train ride!