Robert Landfermann - Rhenus (2023)

The premiere of his composition ‘Rhenus’ with an eight-piece ensemble had been planned for 2020. Like many things, the first edition of the Triennale was cancelled due to Covid-19. Instead, Landfermann was featured online in the alternative Monheim programme as a duo with harpist Kathrin Pechlof, and in a talk about improvisation with Monheim artist in residence Achim Tang. This year, there will again be no regular festival – and thus we still don’t get to hear the octet that was originally planned. Instead, there will be open improvisational encounters with other Monheim Triennale musicians. There is nevertheless something we gain from this pandemic crisis – the unexpected multi-year and potentially even lengthier productive encounter of artists from the most diverse parts of the world in this unique constellation.

Everything culminates in the ‘Rhenus’ project. It is Landfermann’s most extensive project to date in terms of instrumentation and a melting pot of all his musical traits. The whole spectrum of his artistic personality will be visible and multiplied into the potentially orchestral by the immense expressive depth of his fellow musicians. For this, he will bring some of his longest and closest companions to Monheim: the above-mentioned drummers Jonas Burgwinkel and Christian Lillinger, who are so organically intertwined with him and yet so different, as well as two musicians from his quintet, the piano player Elias Stemeseder, and sax player Sebastian Gille. Also part of it are harpist Kathrin Pechlof, who has been playing in the Trio Landfermann for ten years now, as well as the British trumpeter Percy Pursglove and the Belgian piano player and Fender Rhodes specialist Jozef Dumoulin.
Landfermann’s composed material ranges from highly complex structures and textural delineations to heartfelt melodies. He and his ensemble will be perfectly at home in this multicoloured Landfermann-style world of sound – and will go on improvisational journeys in it and beyond it. This is the message that jazz and improvisation convey: to welcome the foreign, to recognise diversity and, from within this diversity to sense one’s own exact answer to a question in that very moment.

“What is your goal with your music?”, I ask Robert Landfermann at the end of our conversation. “Hmm… it may sound naive, but: peace of mind. Yes, I make music for my peace of mind. To come to terms with myself or my life. Making music is helpful for my soul rather than I perceive it as a torment.”