In 2010 the Freiburg-based Ensemble Recherche marked their 25th anniversary by asking composers with whom they had worked regularly to contribute love songs to a new collection, instrumental songs-without-words for a maximum of three woodwind, three string, two keyboards and percussion. No one in new music, the group decided, wrote love songs any more, and the responsibility for doing so had been taken over entirely by pop and rock music. It was an attempt to recover at least some of the expressive world that had been lost over the past century, and in the process perhaps to reopen the argument that has simmered ever since the rise of modernism about the explicit emotional content of music when traditional tonality and harmony has been abandoned.
Thirty of those pieces are collected together here, played in alphabetical order, beginning with one of the best, Hans Abrahamsen's beautifully understated contribution, and ending with the typical spareness of Walter Zimmermann's. They vary in length from less than a minute (pieces by Johannes Schöllhorn and Johannes Maria Staud) to works by Jörg Widmann and Günter Steinke that are more than 10 times as long and could easily stand as concert items in their own right.
Some of the results do seem like brief excursions into familiar territory, like the clicks, rattles and pops of Mark Andre's iv 9 for three low-pitched woodwind, or Enno Poppe's miniature cello concerto Schweiss. For other composers, though, it seems to have been an opportunity to take their music in a new direction: George Friedrich Haas's set of three microscopic love songs unfurls a soaring, aspiring melodic line; Lucia Ronchetti's Rosso Pompeiano blends elements of tango, klezmer, jazz and folk music into a delirious dance; Carola Bauckholt's piece uses birdsong, but in a much more naturalistic way than Messiaen ever did. There are a few rather routine efforts included, though not too many, and perhaps it's a collection to dip into rather than play complete at one sitting. But there are more than enough gems to make that thoroughly worthwhile.
