Gathering Thunders

The avant-garde of modernity transformed noise into music—not least through the increased use of percussion. For this album, the young multi-percussionist Leonie Klein has recorded a wide variety of solo works representing different stages of the New Music era. In Leonie Klein’s interpretation, each work reveals its distinctive character within the tension between compositional constraints and interpretive freedom. Together, they reveal many different aspects of contemporary percussion music and provide a representative insight into a major central area of New Music. Leonie Klein presents Karlheinz Stockhausen’s cycle of solo works for percussion orchestra (1959) as a multifaceted kaleidoscope of percussion instruments. In Iannis Xenakis’s Psappha (1975), she makes audible the musically articulated periodicity in the constant alternation of basic rhythmic structures. Helmut Lachenmann’s Intérieur I (1966) consists of subtly animated sonic events, while Nicolaus A. Huber’s Pothos (2010) intones “the longing of one sound for the next” through the harmonization of opposites. In Peter Eötvös’s Thunder (1993), the bass drum is brought through pedal techniques into continuous pitch changes, while Johann Julius Fischer’s repetitive Gathering (2018) for prepared vibraphone represents the current state of percussion music.