... die Tiefen der Zeit

Works for viola & accordion by Birke Bertelsmeier, Michael Denhoff, Wolfgang Rihm, Toshio Hosokawa and transcriptions of Franz Schubert Lieder

Axel Porath, viola
Margit Kern, accordion

catalog number 21145

“Time is a strange thing. While one is living one’s life away, it is absolutely nothing. Then, suddenly, one is aware of nothing else ...”, sings the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’ opera “Der Rosenkavalier”. With these words she reflects on (her) getting older, but beyond that she also addresses fundamental issues about the perception of time. In his writings Saint Augustine emphasized the relativity of human perception of time, in which the past, present and future - in the sense of memory, perception and expectation - coincide in thinking. This is particularly evident in the reception of music, because a Schubert song is just as present in the listening experience as a work of New Music. And in turn, music’s ephemeral appearance as a temporal art means that it passes at the moment of its creation. Its existence propagates from moment to moment, sound to sound, leaving a trail of fading memories in its wake.  Against this background, music is predestined to make ‘coming into existence’ and ‘passing away’ sensually tangible - and the fact that every person experiences them differently in the process of sound realization draws attention to each and every person’s individual sense of time: to the respective time of the individual between life and death.  Dream and Reality  On the CD “ … die Tiefen der Zeit” the accordionist Margit Kern and the viola player Axel Porath reflect on these questions on a tonal level. They open up a broad spectrum, from contemporary music, to songs from Franz Schubert’s cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin” (1823), transcribed for their two instruments. It is true that this cycle, Wilhelm Müller’s poems (1821) and Schubert’s setting, is more optimistic than “Winterreise”. However, motifs such as lingering and wandering, love and failure, dreams and reality are also unmistakably present in the “Schöne Müllerin”. 

"A fantastic album. I love it." Toshio Hosokawa