Gifts of a special kind

You can listen to music at home. But it sounds different live, especially this expansive Le Temps Mode d'emploicomposed by Philippe Manoury. The fantastic pianists Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher play at the front and their parts come from loudspeakers at the back with a time delay. The virtual and the real merge to create an impressive spatial soundscape full of bursting energy. Philippe Manoury, born in 1952 in Tulle, France, is very present at this year's Wittener Tage. As part of the composer portrait dedicated to him, this piano work will be accompanied by orchestral Funeral marches and a string quartet called Melencolia (d'après Dürer)which is inspired by Albrecht Dürer's famous copperplate engraving from 1514. In the work premiered in Witten Le Temps Mode d'emploi the tonal opulence was impressive, in Melencolia Manoury wrote very finely chiseled music. Structured by bell tones, new, interesting soundscapes emerge again and again. Tension is guaranteed - Manoury keeps it, almost casually, for over 40 minutes.

Gifts and Greetings
Such delicate pieces can only be adequately developed when top-class performers play them. Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sargsyan, Ralf Ehlers and Lucas Fels are among them. With all their almost provocatively relaxed mastery, one sometimes forgets the enormous difficulties of the works. In Manoury's Melencolia it becomes clear once again why the Arditti String Quartet (with changing line-ups) has enriched the contemporary music scene for 40 years. There is no such thing as unplayability for the "Ardittis". They are always in control and certainly never lack presence, radiance and energy. The 40th anniversary of the quartet was the occasion for a special party for Harry Vogt, artistic director of the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik. 14 composers sent the quartet presents in the form of five-minute miniatures. The performance of the "little pieces" was met with a small smile from the experts, but musical humor is not the forte of New Music. The laborious events under the so casual title Gifts and Greetings revealed a considerable "Beethovenbartókardittiangst factor", as the young composer Philipp Mainz once put it. Indeed, string quartet composition is no child's birthday party - especially when such a constant companion of the Ardittis as Brian Ferneyhough appears as a guest. The New Complexity, for which Ferneyhough became famous (and infamous), obviously leaves little room for anything like a cheerful musical serenade.