In the Vortex of Time

The »In the Vortex of Time« project places a late key piece of French spectralism – Gérard Grisey’s »Vortex temporum« – in the tonal context of three new compositions, which only seem to be of typical German or typical French composition at first glance: 

Niklas Seidl (*1983) explores the symptoms of depression in a »serious« and in-depth manner from the perspective of their aesthetic reception since the romanticism era in his premiere »In the Pit«. As a subtext, the first movement from Johannes Brahms' First Symphony can be heard, the epitome of German attitude to fate, with heavy use of the timpani. 

Kathrin A. Denner (*1986) uses two texts with a death wish (Viriginia Woolf) and near-death and after-death experiences from »Brücke über dem Strom – Mitteilungen aus dem Leben nach dem Tode« (Bridge Over The Current – Messages from Life after Death) in her piece »Epitaph«. She juxtaposes these two perspectives both musically and textually, so that a dialogue meets two paradoxical opinions.

On the other hand, the piece »Éloge de la plante« – Praise of plants – by Grisey’s student Jean-Luc Hervé sets (seemingly naively) botanical terminology to music, but the solo soprano, loosely based on Mozart’s figure of the “La finta giardiniera”, allows the public to escape to the gardens of imagination through the intrinsic poetics of the plant names. This is also possible due to a refined landscape of loudspeakers, in which the sound producer becomes the landscape gardener of the imagination. 

Only a piece like Gérard Grisey’s »Vortex temporum« can coherently summarize the dialog of such different aesthetic processes in its intoxicating vortex. This is not least thanks to the sound dramaturgy of its proportions, in which three main parts find compositional debate with [the aesthetics of] three diverging compositional approaches – namely his dedicatees Zinsstag, Sciarrino and Lachenmann.