Das Spiel ist aus for 24 voices (2012)

10′
Text: Ingeborg Bachmann
Work commissioned by Südwestrundfunk
WP: 09.02.2012, Stuttgart (DE), ECLAT Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart | Florian Helgath (conductor), SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart

Programme note
The poem „Das Spiel ist aus“ (‘The game is over’) opens Ingeborg Bachmann’s cycle, Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear) dating from 1956. This setting is an attempt to do justice to the scale and magnitude of the poem, and to the alienation resulting from its temporal distance.

The music swoops round the text in the manner of a bird in flight, discovering individual words and metaphors, and quickly altering its perspective…from far off to close up, and then again from afar.

Thomas Larcher