Search - Matthias Pintscher, Christoph Eschenbach, Dietrich Henschel :: Pintscher - Music from Thomas Chatterton / Barainsky · D. Henschel · Eschenbach

Currently composer-in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra, 30-year-old Matthias Pintscher was born and trained in Germany. He has written more than a dozen vocal and orchestral works; the first two on this disc, both from 1999, are world-premiere recordings. Hérodiade, a long dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra on a text by Stephane Mallarmé, requires the singer to negotiate huge skips in an enormous range, to scream as well as sing, changing mood and expression constantly, while the orchestra provides color and atmosphere with sound effects of great variety. Part of a cycle using words by Rimbaud, Départ turns six lines of text into 16 minutes of music. The women's chorus produces whispers and shouts, the orchestra whistles and crashes; indeed, noises are integral to the text. The opera Thomas Chatterton (1998), on a text by Hans Henny Jahnn, is about the unfortunate, enigmatic English 18th-century poet who, frustrated by his inability to gain recognition, committed suicide at the age of 17. Pintscher's arrangement of excerpts from it for baritone and orchestra is probably the most accessible piece on the disc. Like the other two, it is punctuated by long silences; the dynamics range from barely audible to deafening. Eerie chordal passages alternate with wild outbursts from both singer and orchestra; there are echoes of Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps underlined by the baritone voice. Dietrich Henschel sounds a little like the young Fischer-Dieskau; he creates a real character and his diction is exemplary. The booklet quotes from a correspondence between Pintscher and Hans-Peter Jahn (who is not identified). Discussing his working method, Pintscher says the stimulus for a composition is often literary, which these pieces seem to bear out. However, though understanding the words would greatly help in understanding the music, the texts--unlike the correspondence--are not translated. --Edith Eisler