In May, two important orchestra premieres are coming up for Enno Poppe: the world premiere of Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern in Munich (Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Matthias Pintscher) and the UK premiere of Altbau (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov). Click here to view all orchestra scores by Enno Poppe.

Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern • [2005-15]
for choir, organ and orchestra
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Filz • [2014]
for viola solo, four clarinets and strings
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Welt • [2011/12]
for large string orchestra
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Markt • [2008/2009]
for large orchestra
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Altbau • [2007/2008]
for orchestra
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Keilschrift • [2006]
for orchestra
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Obst • [2006]
for orchestra
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Car tires and memories: Enno Poppe's Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern
Enno Poppe’s composition Salz (2005) is one of the most frequently performed ensemble works in recent years. In this piece, Poppe experimented with consonant chords and transitions between these. He then meant to develop this concept further in a choral work that has remained unfinished. Instead, Poppe has taken this fragment and developed it into a new work: Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern for organ, choir and orchestra (2005-2015). “A simple chord sung by a choir can already be moving and touching,” says Enno Poppe. “It is more immediate than any piano note. The listener’s physical response to a choral sound is completely different.”

Poppe has worked together with the German poet Marcel Beyer for a long time, including all existing stage works by the composer. Once again, Poppe sets the choral part of his new piece to Beyer’s poem Fünf Zeilen. The nine movements correspond to the poem’s nine verses, which share car tires as a repeated key motif. The tire of a car bears associations and memories of accidents, suicides and other terrible tragedies. Beyer loosely alludes to such events in his text. The seventh movement, the climax of the work, expresses war memories sung a capella, hearkening back to the first movement in which the title Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern (I cannot remember anything) is introduced as a vocal solo. Both music and the lyrics are equally searching for the inconspicuous relics on the road and within memory.

The 30-minute piece Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern is multi-faceted. It is built upon shifting clusters of nine pitches with multiple variations. Timbre is varied by partly using microtonal variations of each pitch at the same time. Poppe uses the interplay between the organ and homophonic choral writing as an ironic reference to the bygone genre of representative art. But he does so without using representational gestures. Over the course of the piece, the organ appears and claims its solo function within the ensemble. Vibrating the entire space, it functions as an anchor around which the choir and orchestra develop microtonal variations. In the final ninth movement the organ is given a supra-melody spread over eight octaves.
- Till Knipper -