Zender: Dialog mit Haydn - Issei no kyo - Nanzen no kyo

Album review

Dialogue with Haydn is a characteristic stage along the way to the “composed interpretation” (Hans Zender’s most famous such work being Schuberts Winterreise) created in 1982 on Haydn’s 250th birthday, and was first performed at the Donaueschinger Music Days that same year. The object of musical changes taken from the G-major Symphony No. 94 “Surprise”. This theme, as simple as a nursery rhyme, is handled much more subtly than the usual variation style, by putting it into play for three differently tuned orchestra groups, each differing from the other by 11 cent (about one-tenth of the half-tone, or half a “comma”), a fundamental value in the complicated theme of the “tempered tuning”. The Haydn theme whose “fundamental elements appear interchanged, distorted, mixed up, superimposed, partly destroyed or beyond recognition” (Zender) enters this complex and fragile sound space. Tonalities, styles, epochs and emotions are layered, cross-faded and sent into surreal developments. As for Zender’s “Japanese” pieces, there are four compositions with “kyō” (singing, song) in their title, two of which are recorded here, Issei no kyō (2009) and Nanzen no kyō (1992). The listener should in no way expect any postcard-like mock-Japanese musical content, as Zender merely takes the original Zen Japanese poetry – in Issei, they are sung in German, then Japanese, then French, then English – to weave his very own style of music. Highly original contemporary music it is, and should be revered as such. © SM/Qobuz