Georg Nigl & Olga Pashchenko

Wolfgang Rihm always preserved an immediate, unbroken relationship with singing. Even in works that did not involve human voices, he liked the music “to sing”. Vocal works from lied via choir pieces and oratory works to grand operas take pride of place in his oeuvre. The lied cycle “Vermischter Traum”, commissioned by Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin and dedicated to Georg Nigl, was the first work Rihm wrote after a severe illness, probably even before the ordeal of convalescence was quite over. He chose verses by the Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius, who wrote during the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War. He took them as a challenge to ask questions and to concentrate – on the essential, the truly moving, regardless of whether he found it in heaven, on earth or on the brink of the abyss.

In Rihm’s lieder, words and music are always engaged in a dialogue; they query and doubt, carry each other and correspond like two individuals who have something to sing and to say to each other. Georg Nigl and Olga Pashchenko encompass this new work with Beethoven’s most advance lied cycle, which was also regarded as a confession, and with lieder by Franz Schubert that look outwards – to where the circumstances’ constraints lose their power.