Matthias Pintscher has only just turned 30, but he has already inherited the mantle of the great hope of German music from Wolfgang Rihm. His first opera, Thomas Chatterton, was a big success when it was premiered in 1998, and another, for Salzburg, is on the stocks.
So far Britain has had little opportunity to sample Pintscher's work, but that is changing: the BBC Symphony Orchestra is devoting a whole concert to him in December, and on Friday he conducted the Composers Ensemble in a concert of his chamber works, as part of Hoxton Music Days. Pintscher had elected to interleave his works with pieces by Schumann and BA Zimmermann. His Figura V for solo cello became an interlude in Schumann's Kinderszenen, and two songcycles on texts by ee cummings were separated by Zimmermann's solo viola sonata.
That's an unlikely mix, but then Pintscher is part of the generation of European composers that has consciously tried to escape from the inheritance of the immediate past. The effect of that stylistic purging is demonstrated by the 1993 ensemble piece Départ (Monumento III), a tribute to the poetry of Rimbaud, where everything is reduced to a minimum, to spare, Webernesque gestures. There's a shivering vibrato here, a flicker of percussion there, and the occasional, cataclysmic climax. It is intensely compressed, fastidiously organised and impressively single-minded.
It is easy to see why the poetry of ee cummings appeals to Pintscher; the economy of language and the precision of every image parallels his musical approach. In the soprano and piano settings of Lieder und Schneebilder (sung by the first-rate Sarah Leonard), the huge range of vocal techniques, from speech to vocalise, is counterpointed by piano writing that sets the player to work on the keys and the inside of the instrument. The sound world is always changing, always revealing fresh perspectives. In A Twilight's Song, from 1997, a single cummings poem is embedded in a web of instrumental textures, with every gesture meant, every note made to tell.
