When you sit in the new Schwere Reiter for the first time, you feel like you are in a film set, because the room is a one-to-one copy of the old one, which is occasionally used next to it, but will soon be demolished. Only the smooth, light parquet floor is noticeable, and that the acoustics are a little different.
The Munich ensemble “The Yellow Sound” invited the “Ensemble Fokus” from Hanover to a joint concert and crowned it with Vito Žuraj’s great “Runaround” (2014) under the direction of Armando Merino. Anyone who knows it from the CD is surprised to be sitting directly behind the contrabassoon player with the violin and clarinet behind him, in the middle of the orchestra. The other three duos are placed somewhere else in the stands far away, the four brass players on the stage. The result is a peculiarly shifted sound, but the music is so speaking and clearly contoured, at the end it drifts wonderfully into free jazz and weird waltz idiom that it is pure joy to listen. Please do it again the next time – in a different place.
Trombonists move rhythmically around their own axis
The concert started no less lively with Żaneta Rydzewska’s “Rubik’s Cube”, played by the “Ensemble Focus”. It was instrumental theater à la Kagel and also a wonderfully humorous piece of contemporary music: Matthew Brown and Matthew Sadler (trumpet) flanked Mikael Rudolfsson and Janne Jakobsson (trombones) with Cecilie Marie Schwagers (horn) in the center and, according to the title, not only made fine music scattered, but symmetrical tones, but also moved rhythmically around their own axis, which not only looks very funny with two sweeping trombones.
Jakobsson then played the world premiere of Jarkko Hartikainen’s “Embodied” for tuba solo. Unfortunately, with its many tones at the lower end of the possible tone spectrum of this instrument, it was not much more than a less than exciting compulsory piece for the corresponding subject at the ARD music competition.
Liza Lim’s “Ochred String” (2008) for oboe, viola, violoncello and double bass also remained somewhat arbitrary and without a recognizable goal, which the whole thing could be aimed at, while Sara Glojnarić’s “sugarcoating (v3.0)” from 2017 for woodwind plus baritone saxophone , three strings, percussion and piano ingeniously mixed, concisely rhythmic homophonically structured sounds offered. Unfortunately, this principle was exhausted after two thirds, while Carola Bauckholt’s “Treibstoff”, composed as early as 1995 for almost the same line-up, was an excitingly filigree, finely translucent masterpiece. Here, too, the optics complemented what was heard, or rather: counteracted it. Because not only the tones of the bass flute and the prepared grand piano were hardly compatible with what you saw.