A guide to Wolfgang Rihm's music

His enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds make Rihm a true original, and worth getting to knowTradition, Mahler once famously said, is "Schlamperei" - which means something akin to sloppiness. Mahler meant it in terms of performance practice, but it's an axiom many contemporary composers have followed to the letter, throwing out any "sloppy" vestiges of previous traditions, the tainted sentimentality of romanticism, the overblown rhetoric of expressionism, or any of the to...

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