Poppe: Interzone

Slowly I think that Enno Poppe is really the only young(ish - 40) composer whose music I really love. According to me, he should be much better known than he is.I wish there were some interviews I could find. I'd like to know where he thinks he's coming from. The writing for the electric organ ALONE makes this recording more than worthwhile...It's funny; there seem to be two (at least two) kinds of trained composers that came up in this era: one kind tries to move into some kind of relationship/ compromise with Minimalism, while the other kind tries to further the work of the great predecessors. I never would've thought that I would prefer the latter, but it seems that I do...Academic Minimalism has this problem of being a common language that seems to refuse to admit that it is one: every composer just says "I'm writing the music I like!" which I, for one, don't believe. There's just too much similarity between people's work. But no-one wants to be as annoying as those 12-tone composers who used to talk about serial music's "inevitability". However, I digress...This work-back to it. It's amazing. It's not perfect. It's full of '60's and '70's references - the writing for the Bass Clarinet, the E-flat Clarinet...oh, those bring back such memories...These were things. Was it the influence of Eric Dolphy? Or how that got transmitted...Everywhere you looked there was a Bass Clarinet virtuoso. And the E-Flat...right out of the climax of my beloved Venetian Games. We all listened to those same records. Penderecki Technicolor Orchestration with a slather of Eastern European gray to keep it from being too super (Schwantner) ficial...and like that. Yummy. I still find it yummy. But Poppe manages to find new things in it. Not always in love with the vocal writing - sometimes there are dead passages.Morocco and Burroughs is an underpinning to this work. And some of the exoticism is surprisingly quite good,although the English Horn player should have studied Shenai, to keep it all out of Scheherazade territory. So many reminiscences, of so many pieces. Like Roland Barthes, with his theories about books primarily being responses to other books. Point is: the guy has a voice, he sounds like he gets out of the house sometimes, he comes up with remarkable things. Can't wait to hear more!

exellente musique contemporaine. Je conseille de l' écouter pour ceux qui aime la musique type Ircam..