German recorder virtuoso Jeremias Schwarzer is one of the world’s foremost advocates for his instrument. This collection of four concertos, by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Liza Lim, Dai Fujikura, and Iris ter Schiphorst, reflects his persistent work cultivating repertoire for the recorder, here in an uncommon featured solo role. The four works are contrasting in character but serve to put the recorder’s remarkable versatility on display.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 62:04 | |||
| 01 | Madjnun | Madjnun | Jeremias Schwarzer, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Alexander Liebreich, conductor | 14:34 |
| 02 | The Guest | The Guest | Jeremias Schwarzer, recorders (Baroque alto, Tenor Ganassi, Bassett recorders), SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, Rupert Huber, conductor | 19:01 |
| 03 | Recorder Concerto | Recorder Concerto | Jeremias Schwarzer, recorders (Tenor, Sopranino and Bassett recorders), Bamberg Symphony, Jonathan Stockhammer, conductor | 12:59 |
| 04 | Whistle Blower | Whistle Blower | Jeremias Schwarzer, recorder, Ensemble Resonanz, Peter Rundel, conductor | 15:30 |
Recorder virtuoso Jeremias Schwarzer presents four new concertos for the instrument that reflect his intrepid advocacy for it as a solo vehicle. The recorder is not typically in the modern symphony orchestra, much less out front as the soloist in a concerto. And yet, the focus on unique timbres and textures in much of contemporary music makes the recorder an ideal instrument for this kind of repertoire expansion, and the four works on this first volume of recordings truly displays the powerful versatility of this instrument in the hands of creative composers.
Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s Madjnun is inspired by a book titled Leila and Madjnun, a story similar to Romeo and Juliet, written by the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi around the 12th century. Translated from the Arabic to “the madman,” Odeh-Tamimi’s music takes its cue from the story, exploring stark asceticism and the relationship between art and madness. The work is written for a Ganassi tenor recorder tuned at A=466 Hz, based on 16th century models, taking advantage of its relative power and its range of expression compared to other recorders. Madjnun unfolds in contrasts between explosive intensity and quiet, contained intensity, calling on the soloist and orchestra alike to produce timbres that push the boundaries of their standard sound production.
Liza Lim’s The Guest evolves with splashes of powerfully evocative colors of sound. The recorder often finds itself enveloped inside the orchestral texture, with Lim leaning in to the recorder’s unique capacity to imitate poignant, vocal wailing. The piece possesses a cinematic depth, not the kind that suggests on-screen narrative but instead the kind that depicts fantastical visual worlds. The recorder soloist navigates this landscape as a courageous protagonist who is nonetheless subject to its dramatic whims. Lim’s recorder writing is deft and sensitive to the subtleties of its possibilities, integrating growling multiphonics, flutter tongues, and various other extended techniques that further humanize the sounds the soloist makes.
Dai Fujikura’s collaborative process involves close work with the performer; short videos are exchanged via email back and forth between player and composer and Fujikura is as interested in discovering the essence of the performer’s musical personality as he is in excavating possibility on the instrument. A shorter solo recorder work of Fujikura’s, Pérla, preceded and served as a template for the writing of the Recorder Concerto, with a particular focus on exploring a broad vocabulary of articulation on the instrument. We hear the fruits of that exploration in the contrasting passagework in the solo line, between lithe, soaring legato passages to biting, punctuated bursts. Expanding upon that, the orchestra itself becomes a kind of amplifier for the articulations in the solo part, creating a blooming hyper-recorder.
Iris ter Schiphorst’s Whistle Blower establishes a multi-layered texture incorporating detailed figuration, audio samples, physical gestures, and vocalizations that encapsulates the experience of speaking up to power and the challenge it can represent to an individual. Mining a process she calls “performative composing,” ter Schiphorst provided Schwarzer with guidelines for improvisation workshops that were then recorded and deconstructed to create a vocabulary that would ultimately serve as material for a fully written out performance score. The virtuosic through-composed solo part plays out over an orchestral texture that is vigorous, rhythmic, and defiant, with extensive use of col legno and strident ponticello articulations in the strings that underscore the harsh circumstances of institutional untruth.
Schwarzer plays with passion and precision throughout, bringing requisite flair and subtlety to the solo role. Add to that his tireless championing of the recorder in these featured settings, and the weight of his contribution begins to take shape. And yet, each of these pieces are strong statements in their own right, independent of the significant additions they represent for this underserved instrument.
– Dan Lippel
Introduction by Jeremias Schwarzer
This album presents four extraordinary works for solo recorder and orchestra composed by Liza Lim, Iris ter Schiphorst, Dai Fujikura and Samir Odeh-Tamimi—internationally renowned contemporary composers from different countries and cultural backgrounds. In their music, they all present the recorder as a highly versatile and dynamic solo instrument and juxtapose it with four very different orchestral ensembles.
The 'recorder concerto' is an unconventional format, even in contemporary music. Since the recorder no longer played an equal role among the wind instruments in the 19th century, when the orchestra was given its current instrumentation, it is typically an infrequent presence in the modern symphony orchestra and even more rarely the protagonist of a virtuoso and expansive contemporary work with orchestral accompaniment.
During the instrument's heyday in the 17th and 18th centuries, recorder players were not limited to this instrument alone; they often also played the oboe, for example, and alternated between the two instruments as wind players in the Baroque orchestra (e.g. in Handel's opera orchestra or Bach's cantatas).
In the pioneering specialist ensembles for contemporary music, which were founded in Europe from around 1980, modern orchestral instruments were primarily represented. Through the groundbreaking work of these ensembles, profound research and instructions on contemporary playing techniques for almost all orchestral instruments have been developed.
The fact that the recorder's presence in this network of orchestral instruments and composers was significantly less even as a “guest instrument” than, for example, the accordion or guitar, might be due to the fact that its musical home is seen primarily in early music and that there are far fewer recorder players who concentrate their work on new music than, for example, in the field of guitar, saxophone or accordion.
On the other hand, the recorder's role as a somewhat marginal phenomenon in the contemporary music scene may also have something to do with its symbolism in the collective perception: it is often misjudged as an unloved beginner's instrument that can be made fun of, with a “ludicrous” (T.W. Adorno) sound that, within the (questionable) narrative of the gradual evolution and further development of instruments, represents at most a preliminary stage to the “fully developed” transverse flute. In addition, it was known to be a widely used group instrument during the National Socialist era.
A consistently positive image in the 20th and 21st centuries is quite different.
So although many people know the recorder and some of its baroque repertoire and there are now a few outstanding solo works for it by contemporary composers, it is still a “fairly unknown” instrument in orchestras, in specialist ensembles for contemporary music and in the European contemporary music festival scene, which represents the “main market” for the results of collaborations between specialist ensembles, orchestras and contemporary composers.
This position as an outsider naturally offers significant potential for intriguing explorations, for example when the recorder moves beyond its 'traditional' realm of early music and pedagogy and ventures onto new and less familiar paths.
In this case, for example, it enters the podium with the assembled symphony orchestra and takes – playfully- the place next to the conductor that is traditionally reserved for the heroically athletic solo virtuoso, whose quality in the narrative of this setting is superior to all others in the accompanying orchestra.
But the recorder's status as the 'underdog' compared to the orchestral instruments did not play a role for the works presented here: the composers approached the instrument with great respect and care.
However, the contrast between the individual and the collective was an important theme in every piece: and the fact that the soloist’s instrument is not represented in the orchestral apparatus was always approached with great awareness.
In this setting, the contrasting dynamics of attraction and repulsion, contrast and fusion, “home” and “foreign” formed a central component of the musical narratives.
On the collaboration with the composers
The collaboration with Samir Odeh-Tamimi
In two previous pieces, Lí Sabbrà for recorder and percussion and Nami for soprano and ensemble, Samir Odeh- Tamimi had already opted for a tenor recorder at A=466 Hz, based on 16th century models. This instrument has a very strong and powerful sound, which met the composer's desire for high energy and intense expression of the wild and ecstatic states of the work's protagonist Madjnun, the heartbroken poet in the desert.
His attention to trying out and rehearsing material during the process was always focused on the constant presence of a very high state of intensity—musical phenomenons like overblowing processes and the spectrum of multiphonics for him were not defined by pitch but always emerged out of a highly charged flow of energy. Breathing played a crucial role: the power of the piece unfolds almost entirely from the physicality of the breath and from its movement “outwards” through the instrument.
Experiencing the very demanding explosive passages, one might also notice that many parts in this work are not loud at all but follow very finely graded dynamic contexts. The solo instrument is the “lone wild singer” also in its fragility, the orchestra maintains its distance from it in its unyielding sound. Right at the beginning, the orchestral instruments also perform percussion sounds which surround the soloist with their hostile and defensive attitude. Despite attempts at dialogue in the course of the piece, nothing ultimately changes—especially in the vulnerability of the delicate breathing lines with which the piece ends, the protagonist remains alone.
The collaboration with Liza Lim
The collaboration for The Guest, a work commissioned by Donaueschinger Musiktage for the opening concert in 2010, was preceded by a meeting on Liza Lim's solo work The Weaver of Fictions.
Even in this short solo work, it was fascinating to experience how the music moves along in textures consisting of different layers at the same time: Melodic progressions were given unmediated microtonal impulses and counterpoints, seemingly static multiphonics fanned out into modal textures, as if these different principles were two ways of describing the same thing: what was happening musically was also always something else at the same time.
In The Guest, this phenomenon of cross-fading is elaborated even more: there is little to separate the soloist in terms of sound and musical gestures and textures: when the recorder first appears, it emerges out of the orchestra sound, which is also given a special sonority by the addition of the cimbalom that tells of many melodies and timbres flowing into one another.
This melting pot of orchestral sounds could not be guessed in the least during the tryout sessions exploring many possible recorder types. In the end, Liza Lim (in addition to the aforementioned recorder based on 16th century models) chose an alto recorder at 415 Hz and a basset recorder at 442 Hz. “A lot of things will happen to you” was all she said regarding the anticipated dramaturgy of the piece.
In fact, the pulsating sounds that engage both the soloist and the orchestra seem like wave movements that are controlled in their visibility or their merging by “greater forces” in the background—in the spirit of the Rumi poem quoted in Liza Lim´s remarks. Consequently, the piece ends with the soloist “dissolving”: he joins the winds in the orchestra, where he plays the end softly and thus merges musically into the “greater whole”.
The collaboration with Dai Fujikura
In the collaboration with Dai Fujikura, everything is characterized by the composer’s great curiosity to get to know the performer and his instruments very precisely and to develop the musical material of the work together. To this end, he records numerous videos during the rehearsal phases, allows the player to improvise a lot and is on the lookout from the outset for sounds that show instrument and player “in harmony”, i.e. that radiate a liveliness that has an immediate musical effect.
He tries to translate these “finds” into compositional material, which he then transmits directly to the musician with the request to record these “snippets” and send them back to him. This creates an immediate dialogue—the musical material is formed in direct contact between the composer and his performer. Dai is a master of encouragement and good humor and it is very important to him to “satisfy” and spur on his partner. The result is a musical material the soloist feels at ease despite the challenges.
Of course, this does not lead to “easy to play” pieces—rather, the dialogue process gives the performers more and more desire to playfully challenge themselves, which in turn produces interesting new material for the composer who attentively encourages this process.
The piece is essentially “tailored” to the performers. In this process, Dai Fujikura devotes himself with great dedication to his “favorite sounds” that he hears from the musicians' playing, which he then develops into musical material: in other words, he writes the music that he would most like to hear in collaboration with this musician. In fact, he is very generous in his dedication to this collaborative work: he really wants to make his soloists “happy” with “their” piece and he really means it. Being seen and appreciated that way creates a bonding and a friendship: there is no musician who ever worked with him who does not love Dai: he brings out the best in you!
In the case of the recorder, this collaboration was also preceded by a shorter solo piece, Pérla, in which he had already intensively explored the recorder as a particularly differentiated instrument in relation to many ways of articulation. This principle of extensive articulation which is only possible in this variety on the recorder, is developed in the Recorder Concerto in an even much more differentiated and extensive way with the tenor, sopranino and basset recorder. The orchestra also adopts the principle of differentiated articulations and acts as an echo and sound space for the soloist's actions. Through contrapuntal overlapping of the motifs, however, constantly new phrases and dialogues of the various principles are created: an actually calm melody by the soloist can “come back” as an answer with added articulatory elements such as tremolos from the orchestra. In the very first conversation about the piece, Dai Fujikura told me about the concept of data transfer where information is compressed by the sender and then “unpacked” by the receiver—and about the unexpected events that may arise if such a seemingly simple principle would have a small change or disturbance on any side in this ongoing process: from then on, many processes would unfold a completely unpredictable effect. For me, this is an apt image for the motifs that vary between quick and extended and wander back and forth between soloist and orchestra. Underlying everything, however, is a horizontal, wind-like movement that blows through the entire piece, as Fujikura writes in his very short program note, which leaves everything else up to the listener of this marvelous piece.
The collaboration with Iris ter Schiphorst
In her commentary on the work, Iris ter Schiphorst explains the compositional principle of “performative writing”: the sound material of the solo instrument (here: tenor and soprano recorder) is created in close connection with the performer, who generates musical material for the piece in improvisational attempts.
In her compositional process, however, this represents only one of several layers of material: disturbing “acoustic ready-mades” such as the soundtrack from the widely known WikiLeaks video of the shelling of a civilian vehicle in Baghdad, speaking and screaming sequences—performed by the musicians of the ensemble—and the whistleblower's continuous struggle to be heard against the unfeeling collective, condense into an oppressive audio piece.
The constant overworking of the soloist, who has to speak and sing while simultaneously playing the most precise glissandi and microtonal figures, creates the image of a character in an emergency or extreme situation, who is simultaneously throttled and gagged while trying to express himself.
The composer vividly captures this state of anxiety and threat: the monstrosity of the real events underlying the piece becomes visible precisely through the use of real quotations from noises and text excerpts as sonic materials.
The energy produced during the composition process forces us not to look away, not to listen away.
The cruelty in our world exhibited here is not contrived, but made visible. The composer allows us to decipher her ciphers by listening to them and by also making it clear in the piece where the material comes from: Chelsea Manning's letter to Obama can be decoded both in terms of content and as musical material: the audience is put in an investigative state of wanting to get to the bottom of the acoustic ciphers by listening to them.
The messages in this musical “escape room” can be decoded—only to realize afterwards that we have not escaped but are in the real world where all this is actually happening.
Work texts of the composers
Samir Odeh-Tamimi in conversation with Florian Olters, 2009
About Madjnun
“Madjnun” refers to a book titled ‘Leila and Madjnun’. It's a story similar to 'Romeo and Juliet', but older. It was written by the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi around the 12th century. These are collected poems that have been compiled into a story. It's a love story, and Madjnun means ‘The Madman’ in Arabic. Madjnun falls in love with Leila, but his love remains unrequited. As a result, he goes mad in the sense that he only writes love poems from then on. He abandoned his tribe, wandered into the desert, lived among animals, and shed his clothes. He became a great Sufi because he abandoned everything and everyone. He no longer ate what humans eat but nourished himself like the animals. Ultimately, it illustrates how art can sometimes emerge from madness. Just to be clear, I didn’t compose program music. When I compose, I forget all these inspirations.
About the Recorder
In this work, I tried to musically depict this madman through the recorder. What does madness truly mean? This theme permeates the entire work and extends beyond the recorder. Naturally, the piece features a soloist, and the recorder has its own solo passages. Sometimes these are supported or taken over by the orchestra. But I didn't create a classical concerto: I see the piece as a whole, as a unity. It's about a feeling towards the person.
I myself played the recorder in my childhood. The first work for recorder I composed was in 2001, and it was for three recorders, a recorder trio. The second piece was Námi for soprano, recorder, three violas, and harpsichord from 2004, which began my collaboration with Jeremias Schwarzer. He introduced me to the Ganassi instrument, which I also use in the new piece. It's a tenor recorder in C-sharp, with a powerful sound. As a composer, you have a lot more possibilities compared to ordinary Baroque tenor recorders. This flute can be incredibly loud as well as quiet and sensual. It has a wide range of expressions.
About the Collaboration with Jeremias Schwarzer
I wrote the work for him, and it results from an increasingly close collaboration. He is a recorder player for whom I dare to write a lot, where others would say it is impossible to play on the instrument. I take quite a risk with him because through his incredible virtuosity and openness, he always finds new techniques and fingerings. This naturally strengthens the collaboration. He wanted a piece from me, then came a request from the Ruhrtriennale to create a music theater about ‘Leila and Madjnun’ (the project is in development). So I read the book again, I know it very well, and it was immediately clear to me: If I don't write a music theater piece about it yet, it will be the recorder. These decisions weren’t purely intellectual; they simply felt right. I find the recorder very similar to the human voice.
Liza Lim: The Guest
In Sufi poetry, ‘the Guest’ (Divine presence) is sometimes indicated by states of longing, grief, desire, intoxication—these words need to be peeled away again and again to reveal something very subtle and naked.
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
~ Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (13th century) ~
(The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks)
– Liza Lim
Dai Fujikura: Recorder Concerto
My starting point for this concerto was to research and explore the recorder's unique attributes. I found that the articulation of the players can be directly magnified by the recorder, so I thought I should make a piece in which the string orchestra functions as an amplification of the articulations which come from the recorder. In other words, everything in this work originates from the mouth of the soloist.
I also had an image that the recorder player is playing somewhere in the desert and a simoom starts and blows the sands around him, sometimes entangling the recorder, sometimes leaving it, sometimes returning.
– Dai Fujikura (Edited by Harry Ross)
Iris ter Schiphorst: Whistle Blower
Whistle-Blower was composed for the exceptional recorder player Jeremias Schwarzer, who not only delights with interesting and unusual programs, but also inspires new compositions for his instrument with great curiosity and enthusiasm.
The premiere of the complete version is the result of a multi-layered working process between the composer and the recorder player, based on a very specific procedure, the so-called 'Performative Composing'. It refers to what the feminist performance theorist Della Pollock called 'Performative Writing', which I transferred to the composition process.
With the help of this process, different layers of times, states, intensities, languages, but also physical gestures are condensed into a very unique ‘code’. All these layers take their starting point from the first 'performative settings' between soloist and composer.
In the final 'performance' (= the concert), the soloist has to 'translate' this complexity, which has coagulated into code, into writing, into a living 'now-time'. The string orchestra acts as an attractor, giving ground to the soloist with rhythmic patterns.
And what is this about the title Whistle Blower? And how does Chelsea Manning come into play?
On the term 'Performative Composing'
In the first step, a setting was created for the soloist, in which he had to improvise according to certain guidelines worked out by the composer.
These improvisations, or more precisely: these 'performances' were recorded and further processed in various ways in subsequent work steps (transcribed, edited, cut into samples, examined with the help of spectral analysis, etc.). The important thing was to find a setting that would enable the soloist to arrive at a kind of 'proper time', a form of 'isomorphism' (simultaneity) of performing with the body (i.e. trained movements), hearing/seeing, perceiving/thinking. For in the improvisational situation of a ‘performance’, in this special form of highest concentration, something can take place that cannot be invented in the media of writing alone.
This procedure, as described, borrows from what feminist performance theorist Della Pollock calls ‘Performative Writing’. Pollock writes of 6 criteria:
(1) Performative writing works citationally, reflecting and enacting itself within what has already been written (or recorded, I.t.S.): “Citational writing figures writing as rewriting, as the repetition of given discursive forms that are exceeded in the ‘double-time’ of performing writing and thereby expose the fragility of identity, history, and culture constituted in rites of textual recurrence.”
(2) Performative writing evokes what is absent (the soloist's ‘original’ performance) without merely representing it. Through various acts of re-reading, re-staging and reflecting (on what is recorded), something new and different emerges that nevertheless remains connected to what is absent (the ‘first’ performance).
(3) Performative writing (composing) rewrites!—i.e. consciously takes up and plays with the manifold differences of sign and signified; it does not believe in the identity of sign and signified at any moment.
(4) Performative writing (composing) evokes an infinite chain of ‘translations’ (transformations). (Very specifically related to the compositional process are the various ways of transferring the source material through media-technical procedures such as spectral analysis, translation into midi, translation into musical notation/notation, translation into audio, translation into musical notation, translation into a performance in the rehearsals and the premiere).
(5) Performative writing always takes its beginning from a ‘performance’ whose most important characteristic, besides ‘fleetingness’, (and ‘uniqueness’) is the greatest possible isomorphism (simultaneity) of body/i.e. trained movements, hearing/seeing, perceiving/thinking. This ‘initial performance’ is—like any performance—unrepeatable and unrepresentable.
(6) Performative writing is permeated by very different temporalities! Time of the performance, time of the re-reading, time of the re-writing, (=time of the media-technical adaptations), time of the concert-event/the concert-performance).
– Iris ter Schiphorst
Samir Odeh Tamimi: Madjnun
Live recording of the premiere performance, November 19th 2009, Prinzregententheater Munich
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW
Publisher: G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen-und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin
Liza Lim: The Guest
Live recording of the premiere performance at Donaueschinger Musiktage, October 15th, 2010 With kind permission of SWR Commissioned by Donaueschinger Musiktage
Publisher: G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen-und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin
Dai Fujikura: Recorder Concerto
Live recording Bamberg, March 9th 2021
Mixing and editing by Dai Fujikura
The performance was part of the digital project “Clear the stage-for the recorder” created by Jeremias Schwarzer and Bamberg Symphony 2021
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW
Publisher: G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen-und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin
Iris ter Schiphorst: Whistle Blower
Live recording of the premiere performances, June 2nd, 2021, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg Recording, mixing and editing by Sebastian Schottke
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW
Publisher: Boosey and Hawkes Bote und Bock GmbH, Berlin
Mastering: Sebastian Schottke
Jeremias Schwarzer Photos: © Verena Bruening, Berlin
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Jeremias Schwarzer has made a name for himself as a recorder soloist in both the early and contemporary music scenes through his enviable virtuosity and musicality. In 2008 he was the soloist in the world premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s 4 Adagi for recorder and orchestra with the Filarmonica della Scala under Daniel Harding at Milan’s La Scala to wide international acclaim. Since then, Jeremias Schwarzer has appeared at leading concert halls and venues around the world, including the Prinzregententheater Munich, Radialsystem V Berlin, Biennale di Venezia, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Tokyo Opera City Hall, Harvard University, and La Monnaie Brussels, among others. As a soloist Jeremias Schwarzer has performed with the Bavarian Radio, South West German Radio and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Bamberg Symphony, Frankfurter Opernund Museumsorchester, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and the Münchener Kammerorchester. Jeremias Schwarzer is Professor of Recorder and Contemporary Music at the Nuremberg University of Music and has held residencies and given master classes and lectures in Europe, the US, and Asia. His numerous CD releases include recordings for labels including Moeck, Neos, Wergo, HatHut, and Channel Classics. In collaboration with Kunststiftung NRW, Jeremias Schwarzer is continuing the TRANSIENT Impulse Festival— which he founded in 2021— with an interdisciplinary team of artists in the Eifel. In 2024, he was elected as a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA).
Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s vivid and rhythmically intense musical language reveals an archaic power at times. Born in Jaljulia near Tel Aviv in 1970 and enthusiastic about both European classical music and the aesthetics of New Music, the composer came to Germany at the age of 22 and studied musicology and composition. In addition to engaging with compositional role models such as Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis, he became increasingly involved with Arabic music during this time. His intensive research into the history of the ancient Orient and ancient Greece has since inspired his music more and more.
Important recent works include the music theatre piece Philoktet which premiered at the ECLAT Festival 2023. The Kammerakademie Potsdam premiered Tachypnon in September 2023, and in January 2024, the Munich Chamber Orchestra performed the new work Melancópion for string orchestra without conductor, which is infused with theatrical elements. Samir Odeh-Tamimi has been commissioned by the Biennale di Venezia to compose the sextet Roaïkron for the Christian Benning Percussion Group for their 2024 edition. The world premiere of a new work for the Ensemble Meitar is also planned for June 2025. Portrait CDs of his work have been produced by the labels Kairos and Wergo, among others. Samir Odeh-Tamimi has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2016 and in that same year was awarded a German Music Author’s Prize by GEMA.
Liza Lim (*30.8.1966 Perth / Australia) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. The roots of beauty (in noise), time effects in the Anthropocene and the sensoria of ecological connection are ongoing concerns in her compositional work.
Her four operas: The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (2000), The Navigator (2007) and Tree of Codes (2016), and the major ensemble work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) explore themes of desire, memory, ritual transformation and the uncanny. Her genre-crossing percussion ritual/opera Atlas of the Sky (2018), is a work involving community participants that investigates the emotional power and energy dynamics of crowds. Her Annunciation Triptych, performed in 2022 under the direction of Cristian Mâcelaru in its entirety for the first time, draws a broad line from the Greek poet Sappho to Mary, the virgin Mother of God, to Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed, founder of Islam. The composer considers the stories of these three women as comments on ecological, spiritual and transcultural issues of our times. To Liza Lim, who grew up as the daughter of Chinese parents in Australia and has taught intermittently in Europe, relations between different cultures have been a life-long subject of interest.
Lim is Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where she leads the ‘Composing Women’ program. Her music is published by Casa Ricordi Berlin and on CD labels such as Kairos, Hat Art, Wergo, HCR and Winter & Winter.
Born in 1977 in Osaka Japan, Dai Fujikura was fifteen when he moved to the UK. The recipient of many composition prizes, he has received numerous international co-commissions from the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, BBC Proms, Bamberg Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and more. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra since 2014 and held the same post at the Orchestre national d'Île-de-France in 2017/18. Dai’s first opera Solaris, co-commissioned by the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Opéra de Lausanne and the Opéra de Lille, had its world premiere in Paris in 2015 and has since gained a worldwide reputation. A new production of Solaris was created and performed at the Theatre Augsburg in 2018, and the opera received a subsequent staging in 2020.
In 2017, Dai received the Silver Lion Award from the Venice Biennale. In the same year, he was named the Artistic Director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater’s Born Creative Festival.
In 2019, his Shamisen Concerto was premiered at Mostly Mozart festival in New York Lincoln Center and there have so far been 9 performances of this work by various orchestras.
In 2020, his fourth piano concerto Akiko’s Piano is to be premiered by Martha Argerich and Dai is currently composing his third opera, which will be revealed to the public in the same year.
His works are recorded by and released mainly on his own label Minabel Records in collaboration with SONY Music and his compositions are published by Ricordi Berlin.
http://www.daifujikura.comAs a composer, Iris ter Schiphorst is influenced by years of experience as a classical pianist, a bass player, percussionist, keyboard player and sound engineer in various rock and pop bands. Her list of works covers all genres, including thirteen major orchestral works premiered by renowned orchestras in Germany and abroad, numerous full-length musical theatre works, and a variety of film music. Since the late 1980s, this list has also included a range of multimedia works. Iris ter Schiphorst’s resounding children’s opera Die Gänsemagd (2009) was staged with great success in Vienna and Berlin, as well as at the Zurich Opera. Her orchestral work Gravitational Waves (with Uroš Rojko), which was premiered at the 2016 London Proms at the Royal Albert Hall by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain conducted by Edward Gardner, received an enthusiastic critical response. The premiere of her semi-theatrical orchestral work Imaginäre nach Lacan for actor, orchestra and live electronics, was received with overwhelming enthusiasm by both audience and critics.
Iris ter Schiphorst has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the prestigious Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis in 2015. Since 2013, she has been a member of the Academy of Arts of Berlin, and since 2015 she has served as a professor of media composition at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts. Her works are published by Boosey & Hawkes, Berlin.
Die Blockflötenliteratur mit Orchester ist nicht so gerade beeindruckend vielfältig. Gerade die Zeit, die für das symphonische Repertoire in der Konzertöffentlichkeit die größte Rolle spielt, kennt kaum Werke für größere Ensembles oder gar Orchester und Blockflöte(n). Das ändert sich langsam. Das Album mit «New Recorder Concertos» mit dem Solisten Jeremias Schwarzer wartet auf mit vier bekannten Orchestern und ebenso bekannten Dirigenten: das Münchener Kammerorchester (Alexander Liebreich), das SWR Symphonieorchester (Rupert Huber), die Bamberger Symphoniker (Jonathan Stockhammer) und das Ensemble Resonanz (Peter Rundel). Die Blockflöten sind angekommen?
Wenn es nur so einfach wäre, das Repertoire durch neue Werke aufzufüllen. Denn das Schicksal vieler neuerer Kompositionen ist ja, dass deren Präsenz nicht automatisch mit ihrer Existenz einhergeht. Das dürfte auch für die vier auf diesem Album versammelten Werke gelten. Mit knapp 13 bis 19 Minuten Dauer gehören sie in die Standard-Kategorie neuerer neuer Musik. Damit sind gewisse Spannungsbögen und -längen mitgesetzt.
So denkt man bei «The Guest» von Liza Lim doch in der letzten Hälfte, ob da nicht vielleicht ein musikalischer Schlenker zu viel reinkomponiert wurde. Dabei ist diese Komposition diejenige, die mit dem größten symphonisch-konzertierenden Anspruch von den vier präsentierten Stücken hier antritt. Ein großes Werk, das von Anfang an klarstellt, dass es Raum und Zeit benötigt. Es sprudelt voller Farben und Raumtiefen.
Bei Dai Fujikuras «Recorder Concerto» wird das Spielmaterial zu Beginn so virtuos positioniert, dass es kaum über die ganzen 13 Minuten in gleichem Maße auf diesem Niveau zu halten ist. Aber es gelingt ihm durch Wechsel der Flöten, zumal wenn das Sopranino zu Einsatz kommt, neuere Klangwelten eigener Substanzialität aufzudecken und das Stück im Fluss zu halten. Iris ter Schiphorsts «Whistle Blower» zerfällt mit seiner Materialmixmacht im Rhapsodischen.
Das doch stärkste Werk ist «Madjnun» von Samir Odeh-Tamimi, bei dem auch die Frage nach dem Solo-Konzert ganz anders gestellt ist. Orchester und Solist treten hier recht eigentlich als Duo auf, konzertieren gleichberechtigt gegen- und miteinander. Das wirkt recht skulptural, weil der Orchesterpart deutlich geräuschhafte Anteile aufweist, bei denen die Einzelereignisse sich zu eigenen Gesten zusammenbinden. Das hält über den ganzen Stückverlauf an. Bei Odeh-Tamimi kann sich auch die halsbrecherische Virtuosität von Jeremias Schwarzer im Solopart auf eine sehr direkte Weise entfalten und austoben.
Diese CD schließt eine Lücke und macht sie zugleich offenbar, denn der Aktualitäten-Zyklus wird immer schneller, so dass alte Werke schon veralten, wenn sie nur gerade 15 Jahre alt sind. Sie sind fast nicht «etablierbar», wenn sie nicht selbst modisch werden, wie manches aus der Szene der repetitiven Musik oder von Großmeistern der Neuen Musik. Damit wird die Angelegenheit musikgeschichtlich dialektisch. Obwohl es rein faktisch immer Neue Musik an sich gibt, wird sie doch zugleich immer seltener auf längere Dauer im Bewusstsein gehalten. Sie verschwindet häufig schon während ihres Erscheinens.
Translation:
The recorder repertoire with orchestra is not exactly known for its impressive diversity. Especially in the symphonic repertoire, which dominates the public concert sphere, there are hardly any works featuring larger ensembles—or even orchestras—with recorder(s). That is slowly beginning to change. The album New Recorder Concertos, featuring soloist Jeremias Schwarzer, presents four works performed by well-known orchestras and conductors: the Munich Chamber Orchestra (Alexander Liebreich), SWR Symphony Orchestra (Rupert Huber), Bamberg Symphony (Jonathan Stockhammer), and Ensemble Resonanz (Peter Rundel). Has the recorder finally arrived?
If only it were that simple to expand the repertoire with new works. The reality is that many contemporary compositions struggle to gain presence, despite their existence. That likely applies to the four works included on this album as well. With durations ranging from 13 to 19 minutes, they fall into the standard category of recent contemporary music—predetermined, to some extent, in their tension arcs and structural scope.
In The Guest by Liza Lim, for instance, one may start to wonder in the second half whether there’s a musical detour too many. Yet this piece arguably carries the most symphonic and concertante ambition among the four. It’s a grand work that makes clear from the outset it demands time and space. The music brims with color and depth.
Dai Fujikura’s Recorder Concerto opens with such virtuosic intensity that it’s difficult to maintain the same level throughout all 13 minutes. However, through changes in instruments—especially the introduction of the sopranino—he unveils fresh soundscapes with their own distinct substance, keeping the piece fluid and engaging. Iris ter Schiphorst’s Whistle Blower, on the other hand, disperses into rhapsodic fragments due to its dense and eclectic material mix.
The strongest work is Madjnun by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, which reframes the concept of a solo concerto. Here, orchestra and soloist function more like a duo, engaging in an equal and responsive interplay. The result feels sculptural, with the orchestral part incorporating a significant amount of noise-based material, where individual sounds form cohesive gestures. This structure is sustained throughout the piece. Odeh-Tamimi’s writing also allows Jeremias Schwarzer’s daring virtuosity to unfold with striking immediacy and intensity.
This CD fills a gap while simultaneously making it visible. The cycle of musical “currency” is accelerating to the point where works just 15 years old already seem outdated. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to achieve lasting establishment—unless they happen to align with current trends, like some minimalist works or those by leading figures in contemporary music. This creates a dialectical dilemma in music history: even though there is always “new music,” it is increasingly rare for it to remain in collective memory over time. Often, it begins to vanish even as it emerges.
— Martin Hufner, 3.24.2025
Antagonistic – that’s the word to describe Madjnun, the one-movement concerto for recorder by Samir Odeh-Tamimi. The piece opens a new four-work album of assertively contemporary music featuring recorder player Jeremias Schwarzer, who is accompanied by a different ensemble in each piece.
Although, no, “accompanied” isn’t quite the word for Madjnun. The often percussive orchestra seems to challenge and threaten the soloist incessantly.
While the recorder’s flutter and other effects may call to mind a miniature, sped-up shakuhachi, this piece is diametrically opposed to the meditative associations of the Japanese instrument. Its hostility derives from “Layla and Majnun,” the ancient Arab tale and narrative poem referenced in the title. It’s a Romeo and Juliet-like story of lovers forced apart, in this case because the young man is seen as mentally unstable, hence the nickname “Majnun” which means crazy or possessed by djinn. Odeh-Tamimi makes of this theme a musical battle royale. The orchestra gives no quarter, and the recorder gets no succor, right up to the door-slams in the coda.
A very different sense of unease pervades The Guest by Liza Lim. Here recorder and orchestra bathe together in rippling washes of sound. The ear can’t always tease them apart. Schwarzer brings several recorders to this particular challenge, including a tenor and a baroque alto. The name of the latter reminds us that when we hear a recorder in concert today it’s usually in a baroque or early music setting. This is a far cry from those traditions.
Tonality and atonality clash repeatedly, the latter usually winning out. And whatever is happening thematically, whichever instrument is in Schwarzer’s hands, the recorder parts are all of a piece with the orchestra’s. Halfway through, a series of exposed passages spotlight the soloist. But even there, some other wind player or percussionist is always snaking in and around the recorder.
In contrast, Dai Fujikura’s Recorder Concerto features the soloist “downstage” through much of its 13 minutes. The piece requires extended techniques and technical virtuosity, yet feels thoroughly natural. This likely results from the composer’s method of working with the musicians as he writes, incorporating their ideas and capabilities to create an organic tapestry of intriguing yet natural language.
On the sopranino recorder, for example, Schwarzer sounds like a bird (or more accurately, birds), though in the kind of resonant context in which you’ll never hear a biological bird. After the bird takes flight in relatively clear air, a deeper instrument (the bassett recorder, I think) draws responses from the orchestra and deploys a multi-tone technique, warbling warily and pulling down a night-time mood.
For Whistle Blower, composer Iris ter Schiphorst employed a similar collaborative process, but she adds sampled sounds as well as vocalizations from the orchestra to create a jerky electro-operatic march. The piece is a workout for the soloist, who must “speak and sing while simultaneously playing the most precise glissandi and microtonal figures,” as the liner notes describe it. The anxiety recalls Madjnun but paradoxically, despite the references to real historical violence and the presence of actual human voices, results in what feels like a more abstract struggle between soloist and orchestra. The actual words and references seem to stand in for the ineffable general woes of the human condition.
These four works, each remarkable in its own way, spotlight the wide-ranging skills and creativity of Jeremias Schwarzer himself as well as the composers’ challenging, sharply delineated visions. Each features a different German orchestra, which is a jab in the ribs of music scenes in other Western lands where most music like this inhabits a little-noticed fringe. The recordings were no picnic to make, surely, but they offer valuable nourishment to anyone anxious for something new from a very old instrument.
— Jon Sobel, 3.27.2025
This is one of those “forget everything you knew about…” albums, in this case, the recorder. Often relegated to a decorative or novelty role—or seen as a beginner’s instrument—the humble wooden wind, in its many variations, handily takes center stage in these spectacularly varied compositions. But then again, including works by Liza Lim and Dai Fujikura likely guaranteed success because they do. not. miss. In addition to Lim’s colorful, percussion-heavy The Guest (2010), inspired by Sufi poetry, and Fujikura’s dramatic Recorder Concerto (2021), we are treated to Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s angular, aggressive Madjun (2009), and Iris ter Schiphorst’s riotous Whistle Blower (2021), filled with wild vocalizations. Schwarzer handles every technical difficulty with flair, but what leaves the most lasting impression is his adventurousness and sure hand on the expansive musical stories these composers tell.
— Jeremy Shatan, 3.29.2025
Recorder concerti are pretty rare beasts in contemporary music, so plaudits first of all to the German recorder player Jeremias Schwarzer for finding not only four, but four such and contrasting ones. (All four, it transpires, were written in collaboration with the performer.)
The principal challenge with combining recorder and orchestra, one imagines, must be one of audibility. How to avoid the sound of such a modest instrument from another time being completely overwhelmed by the forces of dozens of orchestral musicians, armed with the best amplificatory technologies the nineteenth century could muster? Fortunately, the recorder has two principal weapons in its own arsenal. First is the piercing quality of its highest register, strong enough to cut through almost any accompaniment. Second is the sheer weirdness of its sound when placed in a contemporary context.
There are plenty of examples of the former on the four pieces on this disc, by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Liza Lim, Dai Fujikura and Iris ter Schiphorst. But it is the latter that is more interesting. Odeh-Tamimi’s Madjnun, inspired by the Romeo-and-Juliet-esque story Leila and Madjnun by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi, begins with a shudder of strings and a wall of rippling percussion (the orchestra is the Munich Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Liebreich). Over this already remarkable backdrop, Schwarzer’s recorder ducks and weaves with glissando pitch bends, stuttering tremolos and that uniquely open tone the recorder has. (The instrument in this case is a sixteenth-century-style Ganassi recorder, tuned slightly sharp for extra penetration.) It’s a stunning opening that convinced me not only that there is mileage in the contemporary recorder concerto, but that Odeh-Tamimi – a composer with whom I have not previously had many encounters – is one to pay attention to.
Regular readers will know that I need no such introduction to Liza Lim. However, The Guest is one of her works with which I am not so familiar. The recording here is the same one (sans applause) that was recorded live at Donaueschingen in 2010 with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden conducted by Rupert Huber and is collected on the hat[now]ART CD of Lim’s orchestral music. The advantage of reproducing it in this context is to hear Lim’s writing in contrast to that of three other composers, rather than as part of a portrait of her own orchestral writing.
Like many of Lim’s works since the late 1990s, The Guest draws on words by the Sufi poet Rumi. ‘The Guest’ is the Divine presence, sometimes symbolised in Rumi’s poetry by states of longing or desire. In Lim’s music, such states are often actualised through lines of distance and connection between instruments. The ‘teaching’ episode between violin and string drum in Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus is probably the most dramatic example of this, but the juxtaposition of a Renaissance recorder with a modern orchestra offers plenty of other possibilities. Again, Schwarzer plays a modern reconstruction of Ganassi (the same instrument Lim used for the solo weaver-of-fictions, written for Genevieve Lacey), plus alto and basset instruments. Lim’s music is intensely melodic – in the sense of a continuous musical line – into, out of and around which Schwarzer’s recorder swims and weaves, before dissolving at the end into the sound of the orchestral winds.
Dai Fujikura’s Recorder Concerto was also preceded by a solo work, Pérla. In this case, this was made in close collaboration with Schwarzer, composer and performer exchanging their favourite sounds and techniques back and forth to create a unique musical vocabulary for the work that was shaped by the character and abilities of its performer. For his Concerto, Fujikura expanded and amplified these ideas into his writing for string orchestra (the Bamberg Symphony, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer): in this way, he answers the problem of audibility described above by turning his orchestra into a kind of ‘hyper-recorder’.
The punning title of Iris ter Schiphorst’s Whistle Blower points in two directions. First, to the recorder player themselves: literally, the blower of a whistle. More pointedly, however, it turns our thoughts to those individuals who speak up to and expose abuses of power, and for which the dynamic of a single recorder against a massed ensemble provides a suitable metaphor. (In this case, the ensemble is not an orchestra, but the smaller but no less commanding Ensemble Resonanz, conducted by Peter Rundel.) Those whistleblowers include the US Army soldier Chelsea Manning, who was convicted in 2013 of disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, and who in 2016 petitioned President Obama to commute her 35-year sentence. Part of Manning’s letter is used as material in this collage-like work; as is the sound recording of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video – one of the most shocking and infamous files leaked by Manning – in which US Apache helicopters are seen to fire on two vans of civilians, killing eleven men and injuring two children.
Schiphorst’s collaborative process with Schwarzer involved what she calls ‘performative composing’ – guided improvisation workshops that were recorded then mined for musical materials. Unlike the other three works on this disc, the difference between soloist and orchestra is not used as a means for creating loving contact, amplification or empathy, but as a framework for the violence of systems like that that imprisoned Manning, and the struggles whistleblowers face to make their voices heard and to enact meaningful change.
All in all, Schwarzer’s album could have been a colllection of curiosities and oddball combinations. But in fact it is a remarkable cross-section of the state of the art: four contrasting works by four composers from very different musical backgrounds, all of whom approach the fundamental challenges and affordances of the format in different but illuminating ways. Each work is special and all of them are given an exemplary reading by a leading soloist. Highly recommended.
— Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 3.30.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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