16 October 2013, 6 p.m. (Admission 10 €)
E-MEX-Ensemble
“Of Sleep and Dreams”

With a concert program devoted entirely to sleep and dreams, the E-MEX-Ensemble is launching its autumn season in Cologne: Although sleep comes with a rather unexciting regularity, and seems to course inconspicuously as a non-experience most of the time, it nevertheless gives new cause for musical reflection over and over again. E-MEX, in its concert program “Of Sleep and Dreams,” gives musical shape to the non-tangible quality of our nocturnal recuperation. With works by contemporary and Romantic-era composers, E-Mex summons all of those things to our consciousness, things that a mere few hours later each of us will experience again in our unconscious. Intensive dream experience as well as its conditions and consequences may be perceived as an occurrence of material solidity. It doesn’t matter whether this is mechanically triggered, as with Nicolaus A. Huber, or if it comes and goes, following less stringent laws, as in Heinz Holliger’s “Clouds of Sleep”, in the sequence the unprotected permeability of the dream state may continue after awakening. There, it is then perceived under changed conditions, as Younghi Pagh-Paan reveals to us, allowing us to feel this in his “Sore from dreaming.” Although the magic of sleeping and dreaming is often regarded as a state of self-absence, it is equally plausible that sleep is wholly attentive and protective, geared to the sleeping person. Mark Randall Osborn’s “Sleep, in the Shape of my Body” leaves room for this interpretation of sleep as a place where one feels secure. Not least, piano works by Robert Schumann, Fryderyk Chopin and Claude Debussy serve to illustrate the typically Romantic dream topic as an escape from everyday life and the retreat to a sentimental inwardness.

The E-MEX-Ensemble is North Rhine Westphalia’s leading free ensemble for new music. With CDs, radio recordings, regular concerts, as well as international concert tours (to China, Korea, Chile, among other places), E-MEX is ever-present. In its concert series of contemporary music in Cologne and Essen, the E-MEX-Ensemble keeps searching for the roots of our present day, using works of classic Modernism. In so doing, E-MEX develops new concert formats outside customary performance venues. Thus, many of the concerts take place in exhibition rooms of museums, and often include a programmatic reference to the visual arts as well .

Program

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Träumerei from “Kinderszenen”, op. 15 (1838)

Mark Randall Osborn (1969-2002)
Sleep, in the Shape of my Body (1995)
For piccolo, clarinet, piano, violin and violoncello

Heinz Holliger
Schlafgewölk (Clouds of Sleep, 2000)
For alto flute, with Japanese temple bells or tubular bells ad lib.

Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849)
Nocturne cis-Moll (c-sharp minor), op. post. (1830)

Jean-Luc Hervé (1960)
Rêve de vol (1996)
For viola and clarinet

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Nocturne (1890)

Nicolaus A. Huber
Traummechanik (Mechanics of Dreams, 1967)
For percussion and piano

Younghi Pagh-Paan (1945)
Wundgeträumt (Sore from dreaming, 2004/2005)
For flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and violoncello

E-MEX
Evelin Degen, flute – Joachim Striepens, clarinet – Anja Schmiel, oboe – Kalina Kolarova, violin – Konrad von Coelln, viola – Burkart Zeller, violoncello – Martin von der Heydt, piano – Michael Pattmann, percussion – Christoph Maria Wagner, music direction

Art museum of the
Archdiocese of Cologne