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Artist
Heinz Reber
12+ albums
swissClassicalcontemporary classicaljazzcrossover
about
Swiss composer (1952-2007). http://www.heinzreber.net Heinz Reber’s premature death in 2007 left a musical gap that is never likely to be filled. The Swiss composer didn’t so much chart new paths as abandon the idea of paths altogether. In their place, he enacted an idiosyncratic (yet unusually selfless) comportment of sound in which bodies, voices, and instruments came to describe their own conditions without academic partitions. All of which makes MA – Two Songs all the more remarkable. In its contradictory impulses, one finds auditory portraits of the Second Viennese School (think Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern) and its tonal expansions, as well as, in the words of one press statement, the “relationship of Asiatic singers to the Romantic song tradition.” Although a fascinating album in its own right, as Reber’s projects usually are, this one bids our total attention in order to appreciate not only its texts and their conceptual milieu, but also the brittle agency of its voices, which breathe with all the beauty of a slow-motion breakdown. “School of Vienna” lives in the depths of a piano, beyond which we hear only the acrobatic soprano of Kimiko Hagiwara. Her tender blend of forced vulnerability and highly trained exposition make for an especially balanced piece, one that both reifies and breaks everything a prototypical Lied should be. This 20-minute diatribe thus becomes an eloquent statement of its own incremental demise. The high note functions here
