Felix Werder:
The Tempest
by Felix Werder
Pogus Production, Chester, NY, 2007
Audio CD, 4 tracks, 7818"
P21044-2.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@gmail.com
German-born composer, teacher, writer
and painter Felix Werder (°1922)
spent most of his career in Melbourne,
after having fled for the Nazis to the
UK and being deported to Australia. He
has been working as a critic and producer
for public broadcasting alongside his
activities with the well-known Australia
Felix ensemble. His status in his adopted
homeland has been mostly marginal. His
work was scorned by critics and audiences
but highly regarded by a smallish group
of friends and like-minded musicians,
that is, until the last decennium, when
he has been rewarded and finally acclaimed
as a driving force in Australias
avant-garde.
This CD is a re-release of four works
involving electronics and synthesizers.
Werder has never limited himself to one
type of music. He has written operas,
orchestral music, and pieces for small
ensemble in diverse styles, from improvisation
and graphic scores to aleatorics and serialism.
His electronic work must be
situated in the early seventies, with
one exception from 1992 (V/Line). Banker
and Oscussion are piece for live
synthesizers and small ensemble, and The
Tempest is a tape composition. All
three have been published (Greg Young
Productions), but since the master tapes
were lost, they had to be recovered from
LP, a painstaking job outstandingly done
by his friend Warren Burt who also wrote
the liner, with a very interesting introduction
to Werders works. Banker,
The Tempest and Oscussion,
though very different, are typical examples
of what live or taped electronics from
the seventies sounded like, in Europe,
the States or anywhere else. Layered volumes
of sound, heavily structured but giving
the overall impression of being improvised
are interspersed with surprise
statements of the instruments. The
Tempest, after Giorgiones "Tempesta"
is mainly an exercise in translation from
the visual to the spatial, and Banker
even has a plot based on Aeschylos
drama, Agamemnon.
The most interesting piece on the CD,
however, is V/Line, composed
by Werder but technically realised by
Burt, who also convinced the author to
return to electronics for one last time.
The title refers to both the Victoria
Line of the Melbourne underground and
to its compositional structure as a five-voiced
polyphonic orchestral piece. From the
first moment, one can hear references
to the music of Webern and Berg
whom Werder may have known because his
father was an acquaintance of Schoenberg.
The texture is extremely tight but retains
a certain transparency as each separate
voice can be easily distinguished: strings,
brass and woodwinds (Bergs clarinet!),
percussion, piano and, of course, the
synth with bursts of white noise. At times,
for a few seconds, one could imagine an
ensemble of acoustical instruments performing,
but the illusion is quickly dissolved
when the sounds are subtly modified or
when some instrument races through a passage
at an inhumanly fast tempo. The result
is a very funny, ironic piece of retro
Second Vienna School at the underground
and a proof of the outstanding mastery
of a composer who is being justly rediscovered.