Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart Des SWR, Experimentalstudi
Description
MAHNKOPF: "Two central themes of my artistic work are the fate of Judaism and the disasters of the 20th century. The word "void" denotes emptiness, but also a gap. This idea has preoccupied me since 2000, when I became acquainted with the Jewish Museum in Berlin (still empty at the time), built by Daniel Libeskind; his architecture immediately captivated me, and I have repeatedly engaged with it to this day.
Libeskind filled the building with vertical rooms that are simply empty and thus unusable - for a functional building in the strict sense, they are dysfunctional. They symbolize something absent: the European Jews, who not least enriched Berlin life until the Nazi regime came to power. Libeskind is a master of absences and losses, as his recent 9/11 Memorial in New York demonstrates.
Upon my first visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin I noticed a specific acoustic, especially in the "Holocaust Tower". In December 2002 I visited the museum to record sounds there and in one of the "Voids", where Menashe Kadishman's installation Fallen Leaves was located. I subsequently worked with these recordings at the Experimentalstudio des SWR in Freiburg, resulting in the spatial composition void - mal d'archive. Except for a few oboe notes, the work is a form of musique concrete. It is for 8 loudspeakers, and develops a spatial landscape in which these sounds are used to tell a story whose concretion each listener must conceive for themselves. mal d'archive is the title of a book by Jacques Derrida; in this context, it refers to something being inscribed in a gap in the memory."
Tracklisting
Claude Lenners, Noise Watchers Unlimited Ensemble
Munchener Kammerorchester, Ilan Volkov, Jessica Niles, Tobias Vogelmann
Tobias Eduard Schick
Cuarteto Ornati
Festival Strings Lucerne Chamber Players
Klara Tomljanovic, Alberto Carretero, Marton Illes, Vito Zuraj, Steingrimur Rohloff, Nikolaus Brass, Detlef Heusinger
Ensemble Musikfabrik, Carl Rosman, Patrick Stadler
lovemusic & Santiago Diez Fischer
Ostrava New Orchestra, Owen Underhill, Ostravska Banda, Petr Kotik, Elision Ensemble, Arditti Quartet, Switch~ Ensemble, Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Kilian Herold, Barbara Buntrock, Florian Donderer, Tanja Tetzlaff
Kathrin Zukowski, KammerMusikKoln
Duncan Honeybourne with Leora Cohen
Josef Krips; Various Orchestras
Dionysos Now!
Soloists; Les Traversees Baroques; Meyer
Richard Casey, Annabelle Lawson, Joanna Lam, Peter Lawson, Stephen Plews, Jean Hasse, David Owen Norris, John McCabe, Aleksander Szram
