The German composer and clarinettist Jörg Widmann (1973) has already received more than a dozen awards in his homeland. As a seventeen-year-old he caused a stir with his first official work, the opera Absences, composed for the Münchener Biennale. To date, all the works of this acclaimed student of Hans Werner Henze, Wolfgang Rihm and Heiner Goebbels have been based on a dramatic idea. Whether composing scenic works, an orchestral composition or an intimate string quartet, Widmann views the stage and the concert hall as spaces for exploring sound and communication. His music is a unique mixture of spontaneous expression and musical logic; an echo of both the Classical-Romantic sound idiom and Xenakis’s numbers cosmos. Reason enough for a portrait, in which the composer himself also takes to the stage as clarinettist.

Artists

JÖRG WIDMANN
Oktett
Fantasie
Freie Stücke
WOLFGANG RIHM
Male über Male 2

ASKO|SCHÖNBERG
conductor
Reinbert de Leeuw
clarinet
Jörg Widmann