Sächsisches Vocalensemble - Pepping: Heut und ewig Liederkreis nach Gedichten von Goethe (2020)

Goethe year 1949: Ernst Pepping (1901-1981), who left lasting traces in the diverse currents of contemporary art, especially with his church music, devoted himself to a daring, secular task. From the huge pool of Goethe's poetry collections, he filtered a concentrate of 27 texts across all themes and genres from the sheer overflowing abundance of odes, "songs", sayings and hymns to the Venetian epigrams and contributions from the West-Eastern Divan des great Weimar poets. As if that weren't enough, almost all thought-heavy outpourings of poetic poetry, laden with various metaphorical backgrounds, were additionally stylized into a real challenge for the performers and their listeners by a no less thought-heavy, metaphorical tonal language.

These demands of a "multiple reception" of words, content and contemporary sound thinking in the most demanding of clauses in counterpoint, rhythm, simultaneous word overlapping and harsh polyphony are now faced by the capable, talented and in every respect finely detailed structuring of the choir director Matthias Jung with his masterful , multiple award-winning vocalists of the Saxon Vocal Ensemble. Even the respect for the result of a flawless top performance in interpretation and perfection of the work reproduction that can be heard here calls for the best evaluation of the result. But this also includes the daring of the production company, here a noticeably dawning in the shadow of the musical history of the 20th century Goethe appreciation (despite many "cumbersome" peculiarities) the chance of meeting as a sounding, unabridged overall recording - thanks to extraordinarily capable and ready-to-work choir singers - to have admitted.