A multi-talent

This music can hardly be reduced to a common denominator. Martin Jaggi composes impulsively, even manically to explosively, then again discreetly, meditatively introverted. The diversity corresponds to a tremendous wealth of means. Jaggi takes whatever helps and is useful - be it harmonic-tonal sounds, be it the dissonant-complex vocabulary of the 20th and 21st centuries, be it repetition, which the Basel native, born in 1978, is familiar with from minimalism or from rock and pop.

The chameleon-like transformation is not compatible with the demands for a distinctive personal style. But who can still demand that? Today, when the world is as complex as this Girgawhich Jaggi wrote for the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra in 2014. The percussion is dominant, while the rough brass mingles with the string attacks. Again and again, there are abysmal caesuras - precisely at those points where the material no longer offers much. No doubt: Jaggi has a sense of form.

There are six works on this exceptionally entertaining portrait CD from Musiques Suisses. In addition to two brilliant orchestral works, Jaggi shows his chamber music side in four ensemble pieces composed between 2006 and 2013. Plod on for violin, viola, cello and piano (2007) presents the Mondrian Ensemble, in which Jaggi himself plays the cello. As Michael Kunkel describes in the booklet, there is a "melancholy underlying tone". Indeed, extinction seems to be the theme. Again and again, the music gathers strength only to collapse resignedly. Jaggi once again shows himself to be a quick-change artist, and indeed a musical all-rounder. In addition to the dark, raucous, brutal and subtle, there is something else: virtuosity - on the part of the performers as well as the composer.

Portrait Martin Jaggi; Musiques Suisses (Grammont Portrait), CTS-M 146