Jürg Frey: Voices Exaudi Vocal Ensemble & James Weeks

• Jürg Frey (b. 1953): Out of Chorales:
• 1 Frey: Out of Chorales: I 02:58
• 2 Frey: Out of Chorales: II 02:43
• 3 Frey: Out of Chorales: III 02:01
• 4 Frey: Out of Chorales: IV 02:15
• Polyphonie der Wörter:
• 5 Frey: Polyphonie der Wörter 11:21
• Shadow and Echo and Jade:
• 6 Frey: Shadow and Echo and Jade 14:19
• Landscape of Echoes:
• 7 Frey: Landscape of Echoes 09:58
• Blue Bird's Tune:
• 8 Frey: Blue Bird's Tune 05:23
• Because I could not stop for Death:
• 9 Frey: Because I could not stop for Death 16:28
• Total Runtime 01:07:26

Info zu Jürg Frey: Voices

Sound. Silence. A quiet chord. A fragment of melody. Silence.

Listening to Jürg Frey’s music, a calm settles on us. Calm, but not a daze; rather, a heightened attentiveness, an expanded awareness of the world which lies around us and permeates us. The threshold of sound illuminates the threshold of the self.

The special qualities of Frey’s music have been recognised and celebrated for many years, but until recently the voice was a rare presence in his work. In 2016 EXAUDI commissioned its first piece from him, Shadow and Echo and Jade; immediately it revealed a unique emotional climate, the voices fragile against the backdrop of silence, then radiant and transfigured in the final, shimmering coda. Inspired by this, more pieces followed, the collaboration drawing both composer and ensemble deeper into this focused, intimate vocal world.

Each piece takes a distinct approach. Whereas Shadow and Echo and Jade inhabits an expansive, open terrain at the extreme edge of sound, Out of Chorales is a more compact suite of four short movements, each exploring a single texture, harmonic material or process. Landscape of Echoes is a mesmerically cycling structure of regular, seven-bar phrases, into which voices are added or subtracted with each repetition, conjuring the resonating spaces of its title. Both of these pieces use texts from Frey’s personal word-hoard, each line as evocative as its music:

Late lost colors
Traces in the borderland
Slight wind and summer light

Winterwhite
Winterwhite

By contrast, Polyphonie der Wörter – the earliest piece and the only one not to have its genesis in the collaboration with EXAUDI – takes a more ambivalent approach to text, seeking to dissolve meaning into phonetic sound by superimposing words on top of each other, until the music seems suddenly to coalesce into a single, sustained sound: pure voice, free of semantic association.

The final two works set Emily Dickinson, whose spiritual transcendentalism accords closely with Frey’s own temperament. Blue Bird’s Tune, written as an open-score work for amateur performers, overlays tonal harmony with a cloud of indeterminate pitch, gradually clarifying towards the centre before obscuring again in ‘cordial mystery’. More substantial is the most recent work, Because I could not stop for death, a slow-turning processional over a repeating ground. Both elements are articulated by different texts – the processional by Dickinson’s dreamlike cortège, the ground by a poem of Bai Juyi (772 – 846), concerning the repeated regrowth of grass. Here, Frey’s extraordinary ability to create unexpected, revelatory harmonic progressions from the most familiar materials is channelled into a deeply moving journey, freighted with the premonition of mortality yet – like Dickinson’s poem – suspended in lightness.

These pieces make exceptional demands on their interpreters, who must place themselves on a threshold, just as the music does: not only navigating the border between the softest possible sound and silence, but in so doing, also navigating the border of their individual technical and expressive vocal identities. With the voice, more than with instruments, one cannot remain invulnerable on that border: it is a place of risk, fragility, and self-exposure. But to take that risk, as Frey invites us in these remarkable works, is to encounter the world through new eyes and ears, a world in which these quiet voices, immanent and embodied, reveal our inextricable human indwelling – our Dasein, our being-there – within it. (James Weeks)

EXAUDI
James Weeks, conductor

EXAUDI
is one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles for new music. Founded by James Weeks (director) and Juliet Fraser (soprano) in 2002, EXAUDI is based in London and draws its singers from among the UK’s brightest vocal talents.

EXAUDI’s special affinity is for the radical edges of contemporary music, at home equally with maximal complexity, microtonality and experimental aesthetics. The newest new music is at the heart of its repertoire, and it has given national and world premières of Sciarrino, Rihm, Finnissy, Frey, Posadas, Oesterle, Crane, Dusapin, Ferneyhough, Gervasoni, Skempton, Pesson, Poppe, Mažulis and Fox among many others. Through its commissioning scheme, EXAUDI is particularly committed to the music of its own generation, and is proud to champion the work of significant voices including Aaron Cassidy, Evan Johnson, Bryn Harrison, Amber Priestley, Matthew Shlomowitz, Joanna Bailie, Cassandra Miller, Andrew Hamilton, James Weeks and Claudia Molitor.

EXAUDI is also strongly involved with the emerging generation of young composers, and regularly takes part in composer development schemes and residencies such as Voix Nouvelles Royaumont, IRCAM Manifeste Academie and Snape composer residencies, as well as workshops at universities and conservatoires throughout the UK. EXAUDI has particularly strong links with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and City, University of London, where it is an Ensemble in Residence. In 2019 EXAUDI was proud to sign up to PRS Foundation's Keychange initiative, committing it to gender-balanced programming across its own-promotion concerts and commissions.

An enduring feature of EXAUDI’s programming has been the mixing of contemporary music with the music of the medieval, Renaissance and baroque periods. In 2012 the EXAUDI Italian Madrigal Book project was launched to create new repertoire to stand alongside the masterpieces of Monteverdi, Gesualdo and others; to date major cycles have been commissioned from composers such as Finnissy, Gervasoni and Fox and the project has toured to Italy, France and Luxembourg as well as extensively within the UK. In September 2019 EXAUDI released its first exclusively early music CD, a disc of Gesualdo madrigals, on the Winter&Winter label.

EXAUDI’s many international engagements include Wittener Tage, Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Musica Viva (Munich), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), IRCAM (Paris), Festival d’Automne (Paris), Voix Nouvelles (Royaumont), Pharos (Cyprus), Musica (Strasbourg), MAfestival (Bruges), CDMC (Madrid), MITO Settembre (Milan/Turin), Fundaciò BBVA (Bilbao) and Quincena Musical (San Sebastiàn). The ensemble has also collaborated with many leading ensembles including musikFabrik, Ensemble Modern, L’Instant Donné, London Sinfonietta, BCMG, Talea (NY), Helsinki Philharmonic and Ensemble InterContemporain.

EXAUDI has appeared at many leading UK venues and festivals, including Spitalfields, BBC Proms, Aldeburgh, City of London, Bath, Manchester International Festival and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festivals, Wigmore Hall, Café OTO, Kings Place and South Bank. EXAUDI broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, and has released fourteen critically acclaimed recordings on the NMC, ÆON, Métier, Winter&Winter, Mode, Confront and HCR labels.

Current and forthcoming engagements include ‘Cummings ist der Dichter’ with Ensemble Contemporain at the Philharmonie de Paris, and returns to Wittener Tage, L’Auditori Barcelona, and de Bijloke in Ghent.

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet