3 strophes sur le nom sacher12/27/2023 Wolfgang Fortner’s Zum Spielen für den 70. To my ears, this is one of the most technically demanding pieces on the album, sometimes requiring the cellist to pluck with the left hand while bowing with the right. Agitated pizzicati scamper like the rodent’s ghost into a dense thicket of trees as the hawk raises calls of revelry and tears its meal limb from limb. But then the prey is spotted, and falls as if pierced by an arrow from its hunter’s very gaze. Each whispered harmonic lifts the bird with the silent power of a thermal. The majestic bird tears at the sky as it would the earth, eliciting a flurry of virtuosic leaps and plucked asides. 2, Op.45 immediately draws us in with its keening melody, crying out like a hawk losing sight of its prey. Originally, the other composers were asked to simply write variations thereof, but their ideas soon developed into full-fledged pieces in their own right. The project was originally spearheaded by Mstislav Rostropovich, but has been recorded here with requisite flair by Thomas and Patrick Demenga.Īt the heart of this project is Benjamin Britten’s Tema, the most straightforward iteration of the Sacher theme. The concept is similar to that of the B-A-C-H motif (Bb= B, A, C, H=B natural), which has been incorporated into works by, among many others, Liszt, Busoni, Pärt, Webern, and Bach himself (see ECM’s Ricercar for a creative juxtaposition of the latter two). For this project, realized in commemoration of his 70th birthday, a choice group of composers were commissioned to write pieces for cello around the so-called “Sacher hexachord,” a tone row derived from Sacher’s name: Eb=E s A C B= H E D= Re. Without him we wouldn’t have, for example, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta or Stravinsky’s Concerto in D. His wealth and musical acuity led him to commission some of the most defining works of the twentieth century. Sacher (1906-1999) was a Swiss conductor and patron of the arts who championed all of the composers represented in this 2-CD tribute. Now that the album has been with me for fifteen years, it is a name I cannot forget.
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