Zyklus / Kumi Ori / etc

"Aribert Reimann is most renowned for the adventurous spirit of his operas and for his "day job" as a Lieder-accompanist to a roster of singers that has included Brigitte Fassbaender, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Christine Schäfer. On this side of the Channel, Reimann's message has struggled to assert itself: the 1989 ENO perfortnance of his Lear (a work designed for Fischer-Dieskau) cruised for a critical bruising in the broadsheets and his music has been notable by its absence since. These two CDs make a powerful case for an individual voice that's ripe for rediscovery.

Reimann's output for solo piano has been small, but the four works documented on the first disc show a composer with awesome understanding of the DNA of the piano, especially the unerring "rightness" of his chord voicings and ability to exploit the possibilities of the instrument as a resonant sound-box. The First Sonata was written when Reimann was a student of Boris Blacher in 1958, and is rooted in post-Bergian harmonic principles. If the atonal Viennese-waltz atmosphere of the first movement is derivative, then Reimann proceeds to build confidence by the bar: the lyricism of the second movement shows an instinct for unusual but telling note-choices, and the fleet finale pursues spiky moto perpertuo figures through a labyrinth of taxing metre changes.

Spektren (1967) and Variationien (1979) are the work of a mature master. Both pieces are built around fastidiously voiced clusters, too harmonically methodical to be random blocks but too dense to be mistaken as harmonic function. In Spektren, spectra of colour and rhythm rebound out of clustered fundamentals. In Variationien clusters seed harmonic and pitch material that Reimann opens up into a dynamic, searching dialectical journey.

The Naxos disc contains three Paul Celan settings given sympathetic readings by baritone Jaron Windmüller. Reimann's rule of thumb seems to be that less is more, and his terse orchestral settings and understated melodic writing allow Celan's poetry the dignity of speaking for itself. The final piece, for voice and piano, combines starkly resonant piano sounds with dramatically astute vocal writing. What Reimann does best."
(Gramophone March 2008)