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The instrumental parts are taken over by the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik, which precisely reproduces the basically sparse gestures and curt turns of phrase, decidedly bringing out subtle colour values in the always delicate instrumentations. Each actor acts as soloist and is at the same time an alert part of an agile chamber music formation.
Dr. Matthias Lange, klassik.com
Monday, 5 April 2021 / CD review Arvo Pärt – Miserere
This Miserere is a good half-hour work for solos, choir, ensemble and organ; the music places the highest demands on both the musicians and the listeners; especially in the movement for the “Day of Wrath”, the Dies Irae. […] Accordingly, this piece is rarely recorded or performed in concert. Yet it is one of Pärt’s major works, highly complex and full of contrasts.
The ensembles under the direction of Howard Arman succeed in creating an existentially moving interpretation; powerful, almost physically shattering in the clusters of sound – but also with a fine sense for the spiritual significance of each individual note, for the pulsation of the sound space, for the transitions into the silence from which everything emerges for Pärt.
Oliver Cech, Deutschlandfunk
Wednesday, 27 November 2019
Frank Zappa is God. At least for all those who judge music according to creative quality rather than genre pigeonholing. […] Already as a teenager, he revealed himself as an admirer of the composer Edgard Varèse in a letter, according to the programme. And Zappa’s piece “I was in a Drum”, published posthumously in 1994, would pass any Darmstadt holiday course. The musicians of the Austrian Ensemble for New Music (oenm) and drummer Jakob Sigl worked their way precisely through the gruffly reduced sound of a superficially austere composition, which admittedly bears witness to Zappa’s wicked sense of humour. […] For rockier material from Zappa’s pen, Blank Manuscript reinforced the oenm. A perfect choice […]
Florian Oberhummer, Salzburger Nachrichten
Tuesday, 7 Februar 2017
[…] There are – more rarely than one would like to think – concerts that make you happy. Sounding mood-lifters. Prescription-free. With a long-lasting effect. Such was the concert of the oenm – the Austrian Ensemble for New Music – on the second Saturday of the Mozart Week. […]
Heidemarie Klabacher, DrehpunktKultur
Sunday, 14 August 2016
[…] Several times, in different tempi and dance-like elatedness, each in turn seems to grasp the other cheerfully, perhaps even amorously – before the punch line reveals the evil ulterior motive: only a morsel in the midst of a found food for the conducting chansonnier HK Gruber and the virtuoso Austrian Ensemble for New Music (OENM). […] Cerha again: great how he knots the atonal in the “Keintate” with the verve and frenzy of Heurigenmusik – and how the laughter can get stuck in your throat several times. Especially when Gruber bites the punchlines with relish and the OENM nestles up to him perky or perfectly sweet. Cheers! […]
Walter Weidringer, Die Presse
Monday, 6 June 2016
[…] Those who, like the members of œnm, can transpose the aura of Mark André’s “Canon”, stripped back to the point of soundlessness, in such a way that the silence sounds eloquent, gain a mastery of their own. […]
Karl Harb, Salzburger Nachrichten
Tuesday, 26 April 2016
[…] Anna Maria Pammer was the brilliant singer and wordsmith, Nora Skuta (piano) and the oenm members Irmgard Messin (flute), Andreas Schablas (clarinet), Thomas Wally (violin) and Peter Sigl (violoncello) the ever-ready partners. What a world of different aggregate states between Hugo Ball’s “Clouds” and Paul Scheerbart’s “Monologue of the Mad Mastodon”. […]
Reinhard Kriechbaum, revolving point culture
Monday, 30 November 2015
students of the Bodhi Project of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) performed very organic movement patterns to a concert collage of solo and ensemble pieces by Feldman, Mozart, Ravel, Beat Furrer, Elliott Carter and György Ligeti, which created a stringent dramaturgy of their own and were played with magnificent intensity by the Austrian Ensemble for New Music. […]
Karl Harb, Salzburger Nachrichten
Saturday, 26 September 2015
[…] The following evening, in the Schwaz church of St Martin, the brilliant Austrian Ensemble for New Music in a changing line-up. Lang was represented with “Hungrige Sterne”, a subtle, vibrato-less, again immensely nuanced oscillation that led into the interior of the sounds. Before that, Georg Friedrich Haas’ “Anachronism” from 2013, a great piece, also microtonal, that plays with dynamics and condensation over a long constant pattern. Spectral musician Tristan Murail brought wild life and new perspective to the church space, and finally, grandiose, Salvatore Sciarrino. His 1981 “Introduzione all’Oscuro” is an existential night piece of fleetingness and a thousand auditory events in the dark, with knocking signs from the intermediate realm. […]
Ursula Strohal, Tiroler Tageszeitung
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
“New music” and old favourites by Peter Handke thrilled the Carinthian audience. The echo of this evening continues to resonate for a long time. What the “österreichische ensemble für neue musik” and speaker Ulla Pilz brought to the stage of the Villach Congress Center was thrilling: […] Exactly coordinated and with perfect transitions, text and sound opened up diverse approaches to the works. […]
Karin Waldner-Petutschnig, Kleine Zeitung
Saturday, 2 May 2015
[…] In general, the performers, many of whom have been closely associated with the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik for years, were instrumental in the success of the festival. Already in the opening concert, the Austrian Ensemble for New Music (oenm) under the direction of Johannes Kalitzke and the Ensemble KNM Berlin under the direction of Manuel Nawri interpreted the fascinating three-part work “Slow Summer Stay” (2012/13) for two octets by Chaya Czernowin with great impetus. […]
Michelle Ziegler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
[…] On the first weekend of the Salzburg Biennale, Simon Steen-Andersen presented several such varieties to the willingly following audience and demanded them from his performers. The Black Box Music, for example: Three ensemble groups of the excellently prepared Austrian Ensemble for New Music (oenm) distributed in the room react to a “conducting” solo percussionist who puts his hands into a black box and marks the course of the piece with white gloves in the manner of Black Theatre. […]
Karl Harb, Salzburger Nachrichten
Monday, 16 February 2015
The concerts in the oenm studio in the Künstlerhaus would have to be invented if they didn’t exist. Here you can experience not only, but above all, new music in a concentrated workshop atmosphere. At the same time, it has something in common with the old salons, when friends and acquaintances meet to make and listen to music together and then chat about it and about God and the world over a glass of wine. […]
Where the journey of the new music should go, namely to new, imaginative and creative transformations of parameters that have ultimately remained valid, such as simply melody, rhythm and tonal centres, was first made clear by Johannes Maria Staud’s brilliantly formulated “Sydenham Music”, with which the composer has significantly enriched the rare literature for flute, viola and harp. […]
One looks forward to many more “very private” oenm performances.
Gottfried Franz Kasparek, DrehPunktKultur
Tuesday, 3 February 2015
There is sometimes something to be said for arriving very early – especially when it is for a concert in the series “oenm.ganz privat”. As the first guest, you are greeted in a friendly manner by the musicians, watch them position the music stands and lighting fixtures and get in the mood for the chamber music ambience of the small hall in the Künstlerhaus.
[…] “Pay as you wish”, is the request to the audience. “We give all we can”, seems to be the offer of the four musicians.
The pleasantly unacademic words with which cellist Peter Sigl introduces the audience are ideally suited to “not being afraid of new music”, as the motto of the series says. […]
The first half of the programme is dedicated to Elliot Carter. […] The variety of sounds Carter draws from the instruments is captivating, congenially realised by the incredibly motivated musicians – perhaps most impressively in “Bariolage” for harp solo.
[…] Questions […] can be casually discussed with the musicians after the concert over a good glass of wine, but of course cannot be given a definitive answer.
The three questions: Was this an excellent concert evening? Is this fantastic concert series an enrichment for our city? Is it worthy of much more attention and audience? There are three final answers to these questions: Yes!
Dietmar Rudolf, DrehPunktKultur
Tuesday, 21 October 2014
[…] On Saturday, the Mozartsaal was opened by the magnificent “œnm” (“österreichisches ensemble für neue musik”), whose versatility could be experienced in such diverse pieces as Sofia Gubaidulina’s sometimes surprisingly jazzy Five Etudes and Franco Donatoni’s glitteringly unfolding sextet “Lumen”.
Together with the clever Anna Maria Pammer, who knows all the stylistic ropes, the works with voice were particularly fascinating. Hissing, sighing, cooing in a selection from Mathias Spahlinger’s “128 erfüllten augenblicken”, but above all breathing, snapping, yelping and frantically ejected text fragments, which towards the end of Helmut Lachenmann’s famous “temA” (1968) coagulate into silent grimaces: The soprano fulfilled all this with the same poetic concentration as the enigmatic melodies that Luciano Berio has entwined by clarinet, cello and harp in his “Chamber Music”. Great enthusiasm. […]
Walter Weidringer, Die Presse
Thursday, 17 July 2014
[…] a universe in two voices (violin and cello), performed by Ivana Pristasova and Peter Sigl with technical brilliance and captivating intensity. […]
[…] Superb performance by the Austrian Ensemble for New Music, Johannes Kalitzke ensures a detailed and yet highly musical interpretation. New music is quite natural after all.
(mt), South Tyrolean Weekly Magazine
Sunday, 25 May 2014
[…] Perhaps most powerful of the three Spahlinger works heard was his string trio “presentimientos” (Vorgefühle, 1993), illustrating how directed and tension-generating each moment of intense music can be. The Austrian Ensemble for New Music Salzburg gave an excellent interpretation.
Herbert Schranz, Kleine Zeitung
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
[…] “No inter-sentence clearing, no programme rustling, no mobile phone noise, no candy-striped tanniol crackling or other improprieties: the musicians and their music were at the absolute centre. This must have been the concert situation in paradise. A sympathetic and convincing undertaking. One may be curious to see what will become of this fine initiative.” […]
Erhard Petzel, DrehPunktKultur