With so many works to choose from, every new disc of Wolfgang Rihm’s music almost inevitably includes at least one piece that has never been recorded before. There are two on this seventh instalment of SWR Music’s Rihm series. The eight-minute Abkehr was composed in 1986 to accompany a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. It is haunted by allusions both to that work, extending its sense of ebbing and dying, and to Mahler’s Tenth. By comparison, Two Other Movements, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, who first performed it under Lorin Maazel in 2005, is far more substantial and lasts almost 40 minutes. In fact the apparently throwaway title is just an indication of the way in which Rihm works, with each piece becoming a commentary on the one composed immediately before it. Here the stylistically discursive first movement is almost three times as long as the more single-minded second. Then the set of six expressionist Schattenstücke from the early 1980s, inspired by the painting technique of Danish artist Per Kirkeby, reveal yet another facet of Rihm’s creative personality.
