Boris Blacher- MUSIKVERLAGE

Boris Blacher MUSIKVERLAGE

(All sleeve notes in German.)
These Notes excerpted from external sources:

Memories of Boris Blacher
by Harald Kunz

Blacher certainly took great pleasure in experimenting. This began already in the 1920s with the Dadaistic opera Habemeajaja. The high point was reached with music for Werner Egks meaningless but emotive artificial words in his Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1, which initially caused a scandal but went on to be a success. The end point was Ariadne, a duo-drama in which two speakers recite a text written in Goethe's time to an accompaniment by electronics in microtones of a third.

He also found great pleasure in jazz. Jazzy syncopation in Concertante Musik had made him unpopular with the Nazi press and later compositions often use chords that recall Blacher's liking for the Glenn Miller Sound of the 1940s. From time to time he wrote compositions for jazz ensembles like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the German All Stars. Blues Espagnola und Rumba for the twelve cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra demonstrates how elegantly Blacher combines jazz elements with the classical tradition.

The creativity of the musician Blacher was guided and controlled by the rationality of Blacher the mathematician. According to the laws of mathematics, he constructed his compositions and created the rhythmic serial principle of his „Variable Metrics“. Yet even in the most logical of his scores, there are always deviations from the norm, breaks in the rules; Blacher said of such „mistakes“ that they are what renders art human.
Intelligence and imagination, charm and humour, nonchalance and understatement were the hallmarks of his personality. With these congenial traits in his music, Boris Blacher's oeuvre will remain timeless and contemporary.

(translation: Gloria Custance)
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
(...) Blacher's is an idiom of striking originality,based upon free atonal counterpoint. His adherence to the neo-classic esthetic manifests itself in his fondness for terseness and directness of expression.His orchestral writing is bright, vivid, and thinned out according to a careful selection of instruments. The result is a lightness and transparency which is at the opposite pole from the fat sound of German postromanticism. The rhythmic subtlety of Blacher's music derives from a technique of "variable meters" that are worked out according to definite mathematical progressions. The meter changes from bar to bar according to a pre-existent series which applies to rhythm the tone-row principle of twelve-tone music.Yet Blacher does not transform the technique into a system, leaving himself free to vary it according to his needs.His penchant for satire and irony goes hand in hand with a suppleness and volatility that are not often found in German music.(...)

Joseph Machlis- Introduction To Contemporary Music (1961,W.W.Norton & Company, pp 251-2).

note: Blacher was married to the pianist Gerty Blacher-Hertzog.



















Side One:

ABSTRAKTE OPER NO. 1, OPUS 43 (1953) 27:21
(The University of Illinois Opera Group, Leitung- Ludwig Zerner)


Side Two:

ELEKTRONISCHE IMPULSE (1965) 2:50

SONATA FUR KLAVIER, OPUS 39 (1951) 7:54
(Gerty Herzog- Klavier)

APRESLUDE- 4 Lieder nach Gedichten von Gottfried Benn OPUS 57 (1958) 4:41
(Ernst Haeflinger- Tenor ; Gerty Herzog- Klavier)

WHAT ABOUT THIS, MR. CLEMENTI? 3 Stucke (1943) 3:05
(Gerty Herzog- Klavier)

re-up again:(1)