Trio Accanto | Susanne Otto

In honour of the composer Dieter Schnebel, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year, the extended Trio Accanto together with singer Susanne Otto will perform an evening-long cycle of settings of late poems by Ingeborg Bachmann at MaerzMusik.

The second section of the Bachmann-Gedichte for Alto and Chamber Ensemble by Dieter Schnebel came about in spring 2003 in response to a commission from the poet’s sister and son and was premiered in Vienna on the 30th anniversary of Ingeborg Bachmann’s death in October 2003. For these Dieter Schnebel used the poems Terra nova, Verzicht, Immer wieder Schwarz und Weiß and Auflösung which were published in 2000. These are the final poems in the posthumous collection Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (“I know no better world”) and are individual love poems by Ingeborg Bachmann.

Dieter Schnebel: “In my musical setting the texts are more or less turned into psalms in tightly circling melodic lines. Preludes and interludes in extended melismas without text form seismographic curves of arousal. A saxophone, symbolic of the black lover, follows the singing voice, imitating it at a close distance, but with melodic digressions of its own. The instrument’s restrained jazzy idiom is enhanced with percussion. The piano accompaniment is mainly chordal and often chant-like, creating a very particular mood together with the singer and the other two instruments: that of an ancient love ritual.”

Mild und Leise – ultima speranza is a further development of Dieter Schnebel’s work with Ingeborg Bachmann’s poems from Ich weiß keine bessere Welt and it is a great pleasure to be able to give these works their world premiere at MaerzMusik.