Helmut Lachenmann: My Melodies

The BR-Klassik label is now taking the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024 as an opportunity to make previously unreleased recordings of concerts worth listening to available on CD and as a stream for the first time. - Born in Stuttgart in 1935, Helmut Lachenmann is one of the most renowned German composers of contemporary music. He studied piano, music theory and counterpoint in Stuttgart and composition with Luigi Nono in Venice. The first public performances of his works took place in 1962 at the Venice Biennale and the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. He taught composition in Hanover (1976-1981) and Stuttgart (1981-1999) and led numerous master classes in Germany and abroad. His works are performed by internationally renowned interpreters and orchestras all over the world. Helmut Lachenmann has received numerous awards, most recently the GEMA German Music Authors' Prize for his life's work (2015). The six-part composition My Melodies for eight horns and orchestra was composed between 2016 and 2018, revised for the first time in 2019 and again in 2023 as a musica viva Munich version. It was commissioned by musica viva des Bayerischen Rundfunks with the support of the Freunde des Symphonieorchesters des Bayerischen Rundfunks e. V. The world premiere of the 2018 version took place on June 7, 2018 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz as part of BR's musica viva concert series with the horn section and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Eötvös. The present recording is a live recording of the world premiere of the Munich 2023 version from June 23, 2023 from the Herkulessaal, again as part of BR's musica viva concert series with the horn section and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, this time conducted by Matthias Hermann. In addition, the CD offers fourteen bonus tracks as well as a recording of a conversation between the composer and Johann Jahn about the musica viva premiere of My Melodies from 2018. The phenomenon of melody preoccupied Helmut Lachenmann for a very long time. When he went to study in Venice at the end of the 1950s, he met Luigi Nono, a teacher who strictly insisted on a critically reflective approach to musical material. Nono had objected to any trace of linear progression in Lachenmann's compositional sketches as a "tonal cell", as a melodic object that was seen as a recourse to a romanticizing tonal language that had to be overcome. The impetus for the scoring of My Melodies came from a rehearsal of Lachenmann's opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern in Madrid in 2008: eight horns forming a homogeneous and at the same time complex instrument. The premiere took place ten years later. Compared to that premiere, My Melodies was extended by an insertion of 77 bars by 2023, with Lachenmann drawing on additional sketch material. It is rare for the composer to change his own pieces after their premiere - but the sound ideas for the eight horns seem to have stayed with him. The bonus tracks offer short excerpts from this concert recording of My Melodies. They show characteristic passages of the work, inviting listeners to listen in on specific sounds or sequences and get to know Lachenmann's world of sound.