PRE-ORDER: Augen [CD]

The new album with works by Enno Poppe joins a series of it's own on WERGO, the albums of which are dedicated to the composer born in 1969, who has steadily developed into a permanent fixture among German composers of international renown.It is impossible, strictly speaking, to touch music. One wouldn't realize how fleeting, how intangible this medium is if one only read the titles of the works in this album, which might be translated into English as Eyes, String, Screws, and Peat. These are terms that stare at us like eyes, wrap around us like string, bore themselves into our imagination like screws, and emit the pungent, earthy fragrance of peat. Poppe's interest is not in illustration, however, but in planting a seed: the smallest musical impulse from which a piece can organically grow, like a plant. The four pieces in this collection were written between 2016 and 2022. They represent all of the large compositional formats with which Poppe was engaged in those years: a song cycle for soprano and chamber orchestra, a violin concerto, a percussion piece for thirteen musicians, and a large work for orchestra. We can observe a dramatic development from language to 'pure' instrumentation, from singularity to multiplicity, from melody to rhythm, and from rhythm to massive orchestral sound.