Lunea

The subtitle of this work dedicated to Christian Gerhaher, '23 sentences by Nikolaus Lenau', should be taken literally: some of the texts in Heinz Holliger’s setting consist of only a few words. With relentless focus on essential elements, the texts are a distillation of the sensation which has been recorded in literary history as 'world-weariness'. Holliger reflects this concentrated emotion, presenting the singer and pianist with the highest level of technical demands within an extremely limited space, never as an end in itself but always as means to an extreme compression of musical and emotional expression.