Dorrit Bauerecker - From Inner Cities (2021)

New music is often enough hermetic and aloof? Not at all - when you see on Dorrit Bauerecker's new CD how the Cologne-based pianist, accordionist and performer creates clever dramaturgies. The look of the cover already suggests this impression: Your tools are accordion and concert grand piano, which is often "taken apart" - and where playful or tonal possibilities are questioned, what happens here on the toy piano and melodica.

Above all: Dorrit Bauerecker plays her instruments and confirms her own artistic signature throughout. It is about sensitive approaches to the silence or the pure sine tone, often about eloquent immediate sound events and also about their humorous, ambiguous counteracting.

Manos Tsangari's incidental miniatures are not just sound studies that appear to be recitative. In the middle of it all, he has his interpreter quote a few Dadaistically alienating words from the world of botany - creations which could also do credit to Ernst Jandl and which Dorrit Bauerecker speaks with a firm voice.

Oxana Molechuk's 5 dedications to the hidden recipient begin in a playful free spirit: Here the accordion merges into the heightening of an electronic sound space. In all kinds of detours, playful and seemingly unplayable intricacies, Bauerecker's game dialogues with everything that the computer produces. You could (but don't have to) associate Frank Zappa's late work or weird fair music here.

The opposite of this marks a logical continuation of the entertaining programmatic flow of this CD: In Alvin Curran's Inner Cities 3, toy-like sounds go hand in hand with the charm of exposed second intervals in sparingly changed movement patterns. John Cage received much applause and angry protests for such a thing. Under Dorrit Bauerecker's hands, such associations flow out of the toy piano with sparkling lightness of foot. Less movement, but all the more dream sequences are Curran's Inner Cities 9, where frugal melodic patterns savor the reverberation of the concert grand. But this American composer and sound artist as well as his wide-awake interpreter can also do very differently:

Inner Cities 5 shakes the WDR broadcasting hall with percussive force on all keys of the grand piano. Swirling clusters storm sky high or plunge down into the sub-octave underworld. It has something of the improvised free jazz cascades of Cecil Taylor.

The composer and improvisation artist Simon Rummel comes from Dorrit Bauerecker's adopted home in Cologne, who repeatedly surprises with his poetic and at the same time highly reflective live actions - and is therefore probably a soul mate of the interpreter. His melody study takes the accordion's expressive potential further. Air that strokes the metal tongues produces pure, clear, light tones, which often have the character of sine frequencies attached. Rummels Melodiestudie meditates on this tonality, with 12 minutes by far the longest piece on this sound carrier - which, however, looks a bit stinging in the long run due to the uncompromising tonality that is created here.