 "Harry’s Dream" fait directement référence au compositeur américain Harry Partch (il fabriquait aussi ses propres instruments) – et à son système d’intonation juste (créé pour accorder précisément les sons spectraux et leurs inversions) : pour cette pièce aux sonorités féériques, Friedrich Jaecker (1950-), élève de György Ligeti, confie à chacun des 33 musiciens la responsabilité d’une seule note, à jouer sur un verre à vin, accordé précisément – en résulte une harpe de verre, enrichie de sporadiques chants et fredonnements, un souffle de sons enveloppant l’auditeur comme une brume d’altitude. "Paradis", qui ouvre ce disque, est une épure, presque statique, que nourrissent aussi bien les notes aiguës que le claquement des marteaux de l’instrument. "Douze Bagatellen" s’entrelacent avec "Douze Studie"n (toutes pour piano), présentant chacune, souvent de façon furtive, une idée musicale que le compositeur allemand, comme trop modeste devant sa proposition, s’attache à estomper – au fond, Morton Feldman n’est jamais loin, comme en témoigne le sous-titre « aussi doucement que possible » de la deuxième Bagatelle, phrase récurrente dans les pièces pour piano du New-Yorkais, et l’élongation du temps, comme hors des limites du fini. (Bernard Vincken) Friedrich Jaecker (born 1950 in Soest, Germany) studied with György Ligeti at the Hochschüle für Musik in Cologne. Jaecker is deeply expert in the music of Feldman and Scelsi, both of whom influence his music. American composer and instrument builder Harry Partch developed a system of just intonation, in which the exact tuning of spectral sounds and their inversions are made possible. In the composition Harry’s Dream, each of the thirty-three musicians is responsible for a single note to be pl ayed on a tuned wine glass. Each glass — tuned precisely to the (microtonal) cent — helps to build a tremendous “glass harp,” in which the listener is enveloped by a mass of sounds, moving from dense to transparent, from fast to slow. The glass tones change as the musicians are intermittently asked to hum and sing, contributing additional colors and intensity in the overall sound. The cosmic theme, the just intonation and the unique instrumentation of Harry’s Dream, offers a complete contrast to the intimacy portrayed in Bagatellen & Studien, written for solo piano—the father of all well tempered instruments. Composed between 2007 and 2012, each of the twenty-four miniatures represents its own unique, pointed style. In their short, sketchy lightness, the musical ideas evolve as quickly as they are presented. The contrasting profile of the Bagatelles and Studies — compared to Preludes and Fugues — becomes especially clear if they are alternately performed by two pianists at two pianos, as they are presented on this recording. The composition paradis (paradise), written in 2013, unites both instruments, forming a delicate array of sounds mostly within the pianos’ upper octaves. The composition is extremely thinned out — even to the point that only a single canonic line often remains. Even the sound of the hardly noticed or graciously tolerated piano hammers even play an important role in the composition. The lower register appears in only two sections, in which an array of sounds open for a brief moment, only to retreat to the higher ranges from which they came. The fainted image of beauty lingers in the air, leaving one to ask if the beauty had ever been present, or in the spherical sounds simply suggested.
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