Few student projects last longer than a few years. Hardly any can celebrate its 40th anniversary and continued success. That’s exactly what’s allowed now Modern string quartet. In the summer of 1983, the cellist Jost H. Hecker and the violinists Joerg Widmoser and Holger Jetter, all still students, were hired to accompany a slide show with free improvisation. What was still logical for Widmoser: He saw himself primarily as a jazz violinist, played in a blues band from the age of 16, then with the Munich jazz combo Tayoand from 1978 onwards with his own award-winning group up; the other two, on the other hand, came from classical music, with Jetter also playing a lot in rock bands and Hecker’s passion was modern music.
In any case, this meeting of different musical focuses became a key experience: “We smelled new territory,” described Widmoser. The supreme discipline of classical music, the string quartet, was to become the platform for something completely new. So they were still looking for a violist, who was quickly found in Andreas Höricht. Just like the philosophy of Modern String Quartet, as they called themselves from then on: to do “what we didn’t learn from our teachers” and to break new ground that had previously been almost forbidden in the respective genres. And that in a grassroots-democratic way: there is no Primus in the MSQ, everything is decided and represented together, the job description is that of the freelance musician, as a composer, arranger and soloist.
Accordingly, everyone has a life next to the MSQ. Widmoser in various jazz and crossover projects such as Radio Europe, from which the new album “Secret Sounds and Hidden Treasures” will be released soon. Hecker in theater music, where he also created groundbreaking works with Franz Wittenbrink at the Kammerspiele. Höricht, among other things, as a music teacher. Finally, Winfried Zrenner, who replaced Holger Jetter in 1991, writes music for feature films, TV series and documentaries.
But the jointly implemented idea of a “jazz for string quartet” (as their second album was called) remains the groundbreaking achievement of the four, with which they “opened up a new dimension to the genre”, as one critic wrote. And opened new doors: The MSQ played and plays in jazz clubs as well as in classical houses, on cabaret stages and as a cultural ambassador for the Goethe Institute; they accompanied it Golden Gate Quartet and Mercedes Sosa as well as Konstantin Wecker and the jazz musicians Joe Haider or Charlie Mariano. Their own projects were always unique, whether they dealt with Bach or Ellington, “Watermusic” or most recently “The Rite of Swing”.
The German Music Council supported the project with a grant
Something special should of course also be created for the 40th. Winfried Zrenner pondered, came from Broadway musicals to Marilyn Monroe and finally to Andy Warhol as a hook. Above all, the friendship with Monroe and the assassination attempt on him seemed to him to be the exciting core of a story. A conventional musical, of course, was out of the question, “because we don’t really like it that much with its number structure and dancing,” as Zrenner says. So it has now become an “anti-musical”. Because the libretto, which the culture journalist and biographer Adrian Prechtel was persuaded to write, is spoken and not sung. Because the music never stops, but runs through the whole piece, “like Wagner, sometimes accompanying, sometimes with dramatic blossoming,” says Zrenner. And because the setting is not contemporary, but contemporary.
Thanks to a grant from the German Music Council, it was possible to go all out and put on five performances in the Gasteig HP 8 start. Andreas Wiedermann, who works for many big houses, was won as director and brought an excellent team with him, including actors who were well-known from the Munich theaters. In addition to Ruben Hagspiel and the sisters Anina and Anoushka Doinet, above all Oliver Möller, “who plays the title role brilliantly and even looks like Warhol”, as Zrenner thinks. Another highlight is that after the first act, everything and everyone in the rehearsal room of the Gasteig, which has been converted into “Club 53”, moves to Hall E after the break in Warhol’s “Factory”. “The piece moves between concert and drama. Let’s see if it works,” says Zrenner with some understatement. Looking back over the past 40 years, one can be sure that the project, should it actually fail, will in any case fail in an exciting and glorious way.
Warhol: An Anti-Musical, Monday and Wednesday, May 8 and 10, Tuesday and Saturday, May 23 and 27, Tuesday, June 13, 8 p.m., rehearsal hall and Hall E, Gasteig HP8