Da Vinci Classics
Ensemble Musikfabrik, Johannes Schöllhorn
Five Chilean composers explore rhythm, poetry, identity and sonic transformation in works created for Ensemble Musikfabrik. Conducted by Johannes Schöllhorn, the ensemble presents music by Alejandro Guarello, Boris Alvarado, Ramón Gorigoitia, Pablo Aranda and Aliocha Solovera.
13.67€
Finis Terrae: Sounds from the End of the World · 5 tracks
Ensemble Musikfabrik · Johannes Schöllhorn, conductor. Five works by Chilean composers; track timings verified on Spotify and Apple Music. Sum of displayed track durations: 67:18.
Ever since its formation, Ensemble Musikfabrik has had the reputation of being one of the leading ensembles for contemporary music. Following the literal meaning of its name, Ensemble Musikfabrik is particularly dedicated to artistic innovation. New, unknown, and often personally commissioned works in unusual media are typical of their productions. The results of their extensive work, usually taking place in close collaboration with the composers, are presented by the Cologne-based international soloist ensemble in about 80 concerts a year in both Germany and abroad, at Festivals, in their own series “Musikfabrik in WDR” and in regular radio recordings and CD productions. The musicians themselves take the responsibility for making all-important decisions. Exploring forms of modern communication, and new possibilities for expression in musical and theatrical areas, are a focal point. Interdisciplinary projects that can include live electronics, dance, theatre, film, literature and creative artists, along with chamber music, and the confrontation with works using open form and improvisation, extend the traditional conducted ensemble concerts. Ensemble Musikfabrik is supported by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Johannes Schöllhorn is a German composer and conductor, born in Murnau in 1962. He studied composition in Freiburg with Klaus Huber, Emmanuel Nunes and Mathias Spahlinger, music theory with Peter Förtig, and conducting with Peter Eötvös. He directed Freiburg’s Ensemble für Neue Musik until 2004. His collaborators have included Ensemble Modern, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Musikfabrik and ensemble recherche, as well as major radio orchestras. He has taught composition in Zürich-Winterthur, Hannover, Cologne and Freiburg. On Finis Terrae, he conducts Ensemble Musikfabrik in five works by Chilean composers.
Alejandro Guarello was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, on 21 August 1951. His creative output includes more than seventy-four chamber and symphonic works, many performed in Chile, Europe, Japan and the United States. Several have received awards in composition competitions. Three monographic CDs—Alejandro Guarello (1998), Retrospectiva (2000) and Nueva Música para Cuerdas (2014)—are available alongside other recordings of his music.
Guarello has also been active as a conductor of contemporary music. He founded, organised and directed composition studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and was a founder and artistic director of its Contemporary Music Festival, Chile’s longest-running festival of its kind.
Aliocha Solovera Roje was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1963. Since 1987 his works have been performed in Chile and internationally, including Ljubljana, Vienna, Copenhagen, Zagreb, Bucharest, Cologne, Frankfurt, The Hague, Madrid, São Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Melbourne. His music has been recorded and broadcast by ORF, WDR, Deutschlandfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk, RTVSLO, HRT, Romanian radio and television, Radio Cultura FM in São Paulo, Radio Beethoven and Radio Universidad de Chile, among others.
His distinctions include an Alban Berg Foundation scholarship; the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research’s Würdigungspreis (1993); second prize in the Republic of Slovenia’s first composition competition (1993); the Lampadia Foundation Prize in São Paulo (2000); the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano’s Charles Ives Prize (2003); and Chile’s Altazor Award for directing the Ensamble Contemporáneo (2003). His teaching has included composition at the Institute of Music of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Boris Alvarado was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1962. He earned a doctorate in composition at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and pursued doctoral studies in philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. In Chile he studied composition with Alejandro Guarello and Andrés Alcalde; in Poland, with Krzysztof Penderecki and Marian Borkowski.
As a composer and conductor, he has participated in contemporary music concerts around the world and conducted orchestras in the Americas and Europe. His work has included a full-time professorship at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and lectures on contemporary Chilean music at leading music academies. His compositions have been performed in the Americas, Europe and Asia and recorded on several CDs. He has also published books and articles on music and philosophy.
Pablo Aranda, born in 1960, studied for a bachelor’s degree in composition at the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad de Chile. A DAAD scholarship subsequently enabled him to pursue a master’s degree in composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. His teachers included Cirilo Vila and Andrés Alcalde in Chile, Johannes Fritsch in Germany and Franco Donatoni in Italy. He participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for Contemporary Music and attended classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mathias Spahlinger and Helmut Lachenmann.
His works include Da for two flutes, Parphe for orchestra, Per Franko for flute, Alma for flute, piano and violin, and the stage work El Desvarío del Apuntador. Since 2000 he has directed the Taller de Música Contemporánea, presenting concerts and premieres by Chilean and international composers. In 2004 he established the biennial Encuentro Internacional de Compositores.
Ramón Gorigoitia was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1958. He studied music education and composition at the Catholic University in Valparaíso. In 1983 he moved to Germany to study composition and jazz, first at the Cologne Conservatoire and later at the University of Cologne, where he continued his education in musicology and phonetics. He attended composition masterclasses and seminars in Paris, Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Oldenburg and Cologne with Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Mauricio Kagel, Jos Leusink and others.
He has received scholarships, prizes and commissions from the Gaudeamus Foundation, Stiftung Kunst & Kultur NRW, SK Stiftung Kultur, Kulturamt Köln, Deutsche Welle, WDR, Deutschlandfunk and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, among others. He has taught at universities and academies in Chile and Germany and collaborated with ensembles, choirs and soloists in Germany, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Ukraine and Chile. His music has been performed at contemporary music festivals in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. With support from the Goethe-Institut, he has toured with the E-Mex Ensemble, Auditivvokal Dresden and Ensemble Iberoamericano. Based in Cologne, he works as a freelance composer, conductor, pianist and writer.
Finis Terrae: Sounds from the End of the World The musical exchange project FINIS TERRAE, bringing together five Chilean composers and Ensemble Musikfabrik, offers an insight into Chile’s growing contemporary music scene. The title points to the country’s relative geographical isolation from international events. Despite this geographical and historical distance, Chile has repeatedly contributed new impulses to different artistic disciplines. Global connections have gradually increased the international presence of Chilean artists in recent decades. This CD presents works by Alejandro Guarello, Boris Alvarado, Ramón Gorigoitia, Pablo Aranda and Aliocha Solovera,…
The musical exchange project FINIS TERRAE, bringing together five Chilean composers and Ensemble Musikfabrik, offers an insight into Chile’s growing contemporary music scene. The title points to the country’s relative geographical isolation from international events. Despite this geographical and historical distance, Chile has repeatedly contributed new impulses to different artistic disciplines. Global connections have gradually increased the international presence of Chilean artists in recent decades.
This CD presents works by Alejandro Guarello, Boris Alvarado, Ramón Gorigoitia, Pablo Aranda and Aliocha Solovera, commissioned with the support of the Siemens music foundation and premiered by Ensemble Musikfabrik on 11 November 2015 in the chamber hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, Germany. For their support of the project and the production of this CD, we express our gratitude to the Siemens Musikstiftung, DIRAC, the regional authorities in Cologne, Deutschlandfunk Radio, the Catholic universities in Santiago and Valparaíso, the Chilean artists’ network INOCA e.V., and the music fund of Chile’s National Council for Culture and the Arts, CNCA.
The title refers to Musikfabrik, the ensemble for which the work was written. It is essentially a rhythmic piece, with a few static and atmospheric moments alternating in contrasting, internally homogeneous panels. The organisation of the piece revolves around three numbers: 3, 7 and 11. They manifest themselves in several ways—in the grouping of figures, rhythmic and metrical combinations, and the selection of pitches, governed through different processes by these numbers. The work was premiered by Musikfabrik at Deutschlandfunk in Cologne on 11 November 2015 and was subsequently performed in Vancouver during the ISCM World New Music Days in 2017.
Composing commits me to invention: a musical thought based on ornamentation and multiplication, determining a music that can be varied, multiplied or radically transformed, but cannot develop. This characteristic creates a static image of sound, even when it seems to possess a Baroque mobility. Instead of the logical and temporal continuity of statements and developments, there is discontinuity and a rupture in the linear course of time. Articulation can be identified here as a vitality reproduced in several folds of ornamentation that interact out of phase and group together a variable number of sounds. Alla is, in a sense, an invention upon Eonta (1964) by Iannis Xenakis.
The title Transgresiones suggests exceeding limits and crossing established boundaries. In this work it relates to the transcendence and permeability of materials and elements that underpin the musical concept. Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, the literary epic about the history of the Americas, became the key element and backbone of the piece. For the opening, I undertook an intensive process of transcription, extracting and translating the lyrical structure of Neruda’s famous cycle into pitches, pulse and rhythm.
Neruda’s descriptions of historical events and aspirations to independence then led me to the Spanish chronicler Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga. His La Araucana (1569) describes the battles between the Spanish conquerors and the Mapuche people, and the acts of heroism attributed to both sides. Its eleven-syllable verses and ABABABCC rhyme scheme shape the middle section, determining the metre and pace of the musical discourse.
Finally, Erich Fried’s poem An Kindes Statt, from Warngedichte, provides a further foundation through its sarcasm and human intensity. It encompasses post-war Germany and Europe as a shared memory and history of people from different eras and cultures. These destinies interact with quotations from my personal recollections, embracing a musical conception of cultural exchange and complex identity.
Alma is written in fragments, conceived through the “similar” and the “contrary” aspects of sonic material. Each fragment is a unit in itself; formally, the piece consists of sections and microforms undergoing continuous transformation. While composing it, I imagined each performer moving inside a transparent cube, with the possibility of exchanging positions at random. Temporality is explored musically through microforms written as monologues spoken in an anagrammatic space.
Fuegos de artificio (Fireworks) was largely composed in 2012 as working material for a workshop with Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, Germany, and revised and completed in 2015. Although the title is associated with a visual image, the work does not aim to represent a pyrotechnic spectacle in music. The image of fireworks provided an initial creative impulse. While it does not remain present throughout the whole piece, it determines the character of various gestural elements and certain aspects of symmetry in both the small-scale and large-scale formal structure.
Introduction and composers’ commentaries from the original bilingual booklet; English revised for the website.
Ensemble Musikfabrik · Johannes Schöllhorn, conductor. Recorded on 11 November 2015 at the Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal, Cologne, Germany.
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Revista Átomo
“Sin duda, estamos ante un disco importante.”
Writing in November 2019, Reyes Busch praises the composers’ individual languages, the ensemble’s performances and the recording quality. His exceptionally enthusiastic conclusion calls for another release from this project.
Read the review ↗ — Revista ÁtomoBroadcasts, conversations and listening features dedicated to this recording.
Deutschlandfunk · Musik-Panorama
Neue Ensemblemusik aus Chile presented the Finis Terrae recording project, subsequently released on this album. The official programme documents Ensemble Musikfabrik, Johannes Schöllhorn and the Cologne recording of 11 November 2015; this link is a programme reference.
Explore the broadcast ↗ — Deutschlandfunk · Musik-PanoramaDeutschlandfunk · Klassik live
The official schedule documents a broadcast of Mufa, Alma and Transgresiones performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik under Johannes Schöllhorn, from the recording of 11 November 2015. The link opens the programme archive; no surviving podcast is asserted.
Explore the broadcast ↗ — Deutschlandfunk · Klassik live
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