Jörg Widmann - Armonica | Christa Schönfeldinger | Jörg Widmann | WDR Sinfonieorchester
Jörg Widmann's "Armonica" performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester with Glasharomonika soloist Christa Schönfeldinger under the baton of composer Jörg Widmann on 09.10.2021 at the Kölner Philharmonie.
Jörg Widmann - Armonica
Christa Schönfeldinger, glass harmonica
WDR Symphony Orchestra
Jörg Widmann, conductor
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○ Introduction to the work
It comes as no surprise that Jörg Widmann repeatedly puts Mozart's works on the program. After all, the Munich native is the modern embodiment of a classical musician who not only composes work after work with dizzying productivity, as Mozart did, but also performs as a virtuoso (in Widmann's case, on the clarinet) and, more recently, as a conductor. In each subject Widmann has achieved a level of perfection that speaks to his enormous creativity and enthusiasm.
From his teachers - including Hans Werner Henze, Wolfgang Rihm and Heiner Goebbels - Widmann has inherited theatrical flair, curiosity about unheard-of timbres, but also a creative approach to tradition. It all comes together in his 15-minute orchestral piece "Armonica," premiered in 2007 by Pierre Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic. In it, Widmann picks up a lost instrument that Mozart had been passionate about in the last year of his life: the glass harmonica. The Boston natural scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin had developed a real "instrument" from tuned drinking glasses made to sound with wet fingers, in which several glass bowls of different sizes are mounted on a horizontal axis, driven by a foot pedal. The mysterious floating, silvery sound of the glasses fascinated the age of sensibility.
In Jörg Widmann's "Armonica," too, one can watch Christa Schönfeldinger at work on Franklin's "musical glasses." Widmann has provided her with sound partners, such as an accordion and a "harmonica group" consisting of piano, celesta, harp, glockenspiel and crotales (ancient cymbals). The "delicate swelling out of nothing that constitutes the sound of the glass harmonica" is, as the composer writes, transferred to the orchestra: "All structures come out of nothing, swell and recede again." Widmann has realized this process of constant tension and compression with an enchanting poetry of sound that turns the orchestra into a giant harmonica.
(Text: Michael Struck-Schloen)