Moritz Eggert Wide Unclasp - Btl63832 - Jazz - by Between The Lines

Moritz Eggert used gentle irony to create the music for the memory chambers of Anne Sexton’s existential poems: terrible, funny, strange, brilliant. Shortly before her suicide in 1974, American poet Anne Sexton wrote a series of poems in which she evoked rooms and houses filled with strange memories. The maze-like Winchester House near San Francisco, where the Winchester rifles heiress led a spiritistic existence, is just such a place. Composer/pianist Moritz Eggert has placed Sexton’s inner world in juxtaposition to the labyrinthine corridors of the Winchester House, the title Wide Unclasp alluding to a Shakespeare quote written on the wall of the Winchester House ballroom: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts”. Moritz Eggert is a restless spirit, always on the lookout for new musical challenges. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his operas, ballets and works for the music theatre. The Wide Unclasp cycle of songs represents another departure for new shores, as Eggert was attracted by the idea of writing a piece devoted to an unusual theme in the context of his past work: the relationship of notation and improvisation. To this end, Eggert was able to work with an outstanding septet headed by one of the greatest new artistic discoveries of the German jazz scene in recent years: vocalist Céline Rudolph. The other names, too, speak for themselves: Steven Bernstein, musical director of the Robert Altman movie Kansas City; Sebastian Hess, master student of Rostropovich; star drummer Gerry Hemingway; guitarist Ralph Beerkircher, a master explorer of border areas, and Georg Breinschmid, a former member of the Vienna Philharmonic. This production also enabled composer Moritz Eggert to fulfil his long-cherished dream of performing as a jazz pianist.