Contemporary Music Goes Bonkers
Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard, Ensemble Adapter, Walter Zimmermann
Apologies for the late arrival of this week’s newsletter. Yesterday I was on a long train ride from Austria, where I attended the lovely Jazzfest Saalfelden amid the stunning Alps. Now that I’m back I’m bracing for a sudden explosion of live music following the usual summer lull, and although contemporary music abounds year-round, the folks at initiative new music berlin have been declaring September the city’s Month of Contemporary Music, and this year there does some to be a significant number of alluring events. My travel means that I’m still catching up, but I’ve highlighted a couple of notable concerts this week.
Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard’s “Intersecting Encounters”
In the lead-up to the Month of Contemporary Music is a promising night of sounds over at Kühlhaus Berlin on Saturday, August 31, entitled “Intersecting Encounters,” which is built around the increasingly expansive activities of Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard. The improvising trio has regularly engaged in outside collaborations, usually with fellow improvisers like violist Mat Maneri or the late saxophonist John Tchicai. More recently, however, the trio has been working with figures from the new music world, luring them ever so gradually toward improvisation. In 2022 the trio released a strong album with classical pianist Tamara Stefanovich in which the two parties found a fruitful middle ground, and that practice grew with the April release of Extended Beats (Bastille Musique), which includes collaborations with a host of musicians like Klangforum Wien as well as Sonar Quartett, Stefanovich, clarinetist Martin Adámek, and electronic producer Johannes Brecht, who worked with the trio on the 2018 album Boulez Materialism "live in concert.”
Many of the album participants will reconnect with the trio at Friday’s event, including Sonar Quartett, Stefanovich, and Adámek, along with some other stellar guests, such as the remarkable vocalist Sofia Jernberg, who I got to hear in several disparate contexts this past weekend at Saalfelden. The album is terrific, capturing the most visceral, mathematically complex side of the trio, where drummer Christian Lillinger’s singular attack sets the tone, masterfully grounded by the stuttering but ultraprecise lines of bassist Jonas Westergaard and the blocky colors and jagged polyrhythms of vibraphonist Christopher Dell. The four pieces featuring Stefanovich are among the strongest moments, revealing an impressive leap from the sessions that produced the 2022 collaboration. On a track like “Cortois,” which you can hear below and which will be revisited at the concert, her rangy playing occupies the deliciously angular, head-nodding grooves of the trio with preternatural ease, offering feints and jabs, to say nothing of more extended slaloming lines and chordal patterns that deftly make sense of the trio’s rhythmic deconstructions.
The album features the trio operating alone on numerous tracks, where listeners can clearly parse how everything emanates from the group’s time-honed rapport and quicksilver precision. The collaborations come in a few “closed forms,” largely notated arrangements chosen due to a lack of time to forge an improvisational bond, while others deploy “open forms,” where spontaneous interplay determines the exact shape of each performance. “Orangerie II” and “Zone Witten,” which seamlessly meld into one another, feature four members of Klangforum Wien—saxophonist Gerald Preinfalk, trombonist Mikael Rudolfsson, pianist Anna D’Errico, and violinist Gunde Jäch-Micko—shaping loose arrangements with room for improvisational accents and flurries, over more impressionistic mewling and abstract rhythmic modes from the core trio. The composer credits for “Sonar Ellipse,” a piece with Sonar Quartett, go to the trio, yet the halting work conveys an improvisational vibe even if it’s fully notated, with the strings moving in and out of ensemble writing and more collective improvisation, blurring the lines between classic and improv practices.
The full program of the evening can be found here, with DLW playing sets with Jernberg, Sonar Quartett, Adámek and pianist Sun-Young Nam, and Stefanovich—some of whom will play on their own as well. In addition to various discussions with the participating musicians, there will be a separate set played by Trio Catch and Zafraan Ensemble—next month the former will release a new album titled Gassenhauer, released by Bastille Musique, which issued Extended Beats. The concert officially starts at 5 PM, but at 3 PM there’s a prelude featuring Trio Catch playing the Matthias Kranebitter piece “Whirl and Pendulum,” which appears on their upcoming recording.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of German composer Walter Zimmermann, who traveled to the United States in the mid-1970s to conduct extensive interviews with a veritable who’s who in American experimental music. He would later publish those discussions in his essential book Desert Plants, which included deep and thoughtful conversations with the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, James Tenney, Joan LaBarbara, Charlemagne Palestine, Pauline Oliveros, Larry Austin, and Christian Wolff. His work was crucial in introducing this monumental and crucially influential body of work to European audiences, providing invaluable inroads. Decades later those interviews remain fascinating.
Zimmermann, of course, went on to establish his compositional voice in Europe, forging a sound that often touched on these American figures, while drawing on his own European influences. He turned 75 on April 15th of this year, leading to various celebrations of the landmark. A few weeks ago Mode Records reissued Zimmermann’s first recording Beginner’s Mind, a long out-of-print solo piano work performed by German new music specialist Herbert Henck. The name of that album provides the title for a much different program of Zimmermann works performed by Ensemble Adapter (Matthias Engler and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir) and special guest percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, along with an exhibition of concert programs and posters, photographs, and ephemera, this weekend at Gallery Max Hetzler. The program delves into less familiar works, most for percussion, most written in the early 1980s, although a new work for harp, toy piano, and kazoo—“Maikäfer, flieg”—will be performed by Einarsdóttir, although only at the opening reception on Friday at 6:45 PM.
Several of the other works involve spoken texts, such as the solo percussion piece “Riuti” and the solo harp piece “Wolkenorte.” Recordings of both works were featured on Zimmermann’s classic 1982 triple album Lokale Musik, also reissued by Mode. The composer originally wrote the latter piece for Gabriele Emde, but according to Engler she never managed to perform the thorny work live, and the version of the piece on Lokale Musik is a revised version of the original composition. Franziska Huhn did record the original score, also featured on the Lokale Musik reissue, and this weekend Einarsdóttir will give the long overdue Berlin premiere of the original version, which she previously performed in Switzerland. The program also includes “Klangfaden,” a 1983 trio piece for harp, bass clarinet, and glockenspiel, which Adapter recorded on the composer’s 2013 album Synastria (Maria de Alvear World Edition)—check it out below. For these performances Adapter is joined by guest bass clarinetist Carol McGonnell. Zimmermann originally composed his 1983 piece “Glockenspiel” for Schulkowsky, one of the greatest contemporary music percussionists in the world and a long-time Berlin resident. When she stopped playing the work, it largely dropped out of circulation although there is a recording by Christian Dierstein. Hearing Schulkowsky tackle the strange, technically demanding work once again promises to be something special. The program will be performed on Friday, August 30 at 8 PM and again on Sunday, September 1 at 11:30 AM.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
August 27: Piano Associations as part of Holy Fluxus. From the Francesco Conz Collection, Miroslav Beinhauer, piano (Glass, Cage, Bakla), 7 PM, St. Matthäus-Kirche, Matthäikirchplatz 1, 10785 Berlin
August 28: Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, Matthias Pitscher, conductor, Conrad Tao, piano (Ives, Gershwin, Copland), 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, main auditorium, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
August 28: Kollektiv Nights—Night 2 with Philm (Philipp Gropper, tenor saxophone, Elias Stemeseder, piano, Robert Landfermann, bass, and Leif Berger, drums); Els Vandewyer, vibraphone, Marc Schmolling, piano, and Sofia Borges, drums; Slavin-Gawlik Quartet (Wanja Slavin, alto saxophone, Julius Gawlik, tenor saxophone, Phil Donkin, bass, and Jochen Rückert, drums), 8 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin
August 29: Filarmonica della Scala, Riccardo Chailly, conductor (Berio, Rihm, Ravel), 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, main auditorium, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
August 29: Kollektiv Nights—Night 3 with Gulph of Berlin (Antje Messerschmidt, violin, Maike Hilbig, bass, Gebhard Ullmann, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, Gerhard Gschlößl, trombone, tuba, Jan Leipnitz, drums, and Michael Haves, live sound processing); Clara Vetter Trio (Clara Vetter, piano, Mario Angelov, bass, Lucas Klein, drums); Please Note (Vesna Pisarović, voice, Axel Dörner, trumpet, electronics, Tony Buck, drums), 8 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin
August 29: Ellen Arkbro, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
August 30: Wojciech Rusin; Martha Skye Murphy; Mariam Rezaei, 8 PM, MaHalla, Wilhelminenhofstraße 76, 12459 Berlin
August 30: Concrete/Unexpected as part of Holy Fluxus. From the Francesco Conz Collection, Nora Gomringer & Günter Baby Sommer, 7 PM, St. Matthäus-Kirche, Matthäikirchplatz 1, 10785 Berlin
August 30: Ignaz Schick’s Rotary Perceptions II (with Stefan Roigk, Sofia Borges, Ignaz Schick, and Eliad Wagner, turntables, pick-ups, surfaces, and Rabih Beaini, sound diffusion), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
August 30: Beginner’s Mind: Ensemble Adapter plays Walter Zimmermann (Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir, harp, Matthias Engler, percussion, and Carol McGonnell, bass clarinet, with guest Robyn Schulkowksy, percussion), 8 PM, Gallery Max Hetzler, Goethestrasse 2-3, 10623 Berlin
August 30: Isi FloW SamT AnnaGROUND (Florian Müller, guitar, Anna Kaluza, saxophone, Isabel Rößler, double bass, Sam Hall, drums), 8 PM, Peppi Guggenheim, Weichselstrasse 7, 12043 Berlin
August 31: Intersecting Encounters (Sofia Jernberg & Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard; Trio Catch & Zafraan Ensemble; Sonar Quartett & Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard; Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard & Martin Adámek; Tamara Stefanovich, Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard & Sonar Quartett), 5 PM, Kühlhaus Berlin, Luckenwalder Str. 3, 10963 Berlin
August 31: Ignaz Schick’s Rotary Perceptions II (with Stefan Roigk, Sofia Borges, Ignaz Schick, and Eliad Wagner, turntables, pick-ups, surfaces, and Rabih Beaini, sound diffusion), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
August 31: Martina Berther, bass, preparations, effects; Contagious (Sabine Ercklentz, trumpet, electronics, Andrea Neumann, inside piano, mixer, Mieko Suzuki, electronics, turntable), 9 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin
August 31: Entre les Lignes (Between the Lines) Sound Art Festival with Nathalie Forget (ondes martenot), Lila Fraysse (voice, Occitan percussion), Julius Holtz (modular synth, voice), Bérangère Maximin (field recordings, digital processing), Caroline Cecilia Tallone (hurdy gurdy, objects), and Gilles Aubry (modular synth, field recording), 7 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin
August 31: Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Lea Bertucci, solo woodwinds, electronics, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 1: Beginner’s Mind: Ensemble Adapter plays Walter Zimmermann (Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir, harp, Matthias Engler, percussion, and Carol McGonnell, bass clarinet, with guest Robyn Schulkowksy, percussion), 11:30 AM, Gallery Max Hetzler, Goethestrasse 2-3, 10623 Berlin
September 2: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano (Schoenberg, Ives), 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 2: Callum Builder, self-built pipe organ & saxophone; Carolina Mendonça + Leticia Skrycky, performance; Auguste Vickunaite, reel-to-reel tape machine, 8 PM, Ballhaus Ost, Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin
September 2: Joyce Moreno, 8 PM, Emmauskirche, Lausitzer Platz 8 A, 10997 Berlin