SIMON ZÖCHBAUER SOLO + KOEHNE QUARTET (AT/AUS/CAN)
During the last 15 years, SIMON ZÖCHBAUER explored traditional forms of music with his ensemble FEDERSPIEL. Now, he opens more to the future than to the past. In this, agreement and universality are more central to his work than concentration on what it stands for alone.
His debut solo album “Achad”, released in march 2019 at col legno, is the result of a musical search for traces of spirituality and timeliness.
“Achad” – a word of Hebrew origin - expresses the concept of one, of unity or wholeness. Insight is often only unfurled in the unity of the moment, such as you may find in meditation or musical improvisation – an instant in which the relation between present, past and future is revealed.
SIMON ZÖCHBAUER has brought in the Koehne Quartet as his playing partners – a string quartet which count as one of Europe’s leading ensembles in the field of contemporary music. Close cooperation with composers is of particular importance to the members of the ensemble to ensure they are able to penetrate into each individual tonal language. So, too, in the collaboration with ZÖCHBAUER, the musical power lies in the mutual understanding and the flexibility of the body of sound.
Second companion and co-producer of “Achad” is Sixtus Preiss – a tinkerer with sound who takes full advantage of the present as the experimentation field for his creative fantasy, tirelessly feeling his way towards its limits.
ZÖCHBAUER’s diverse musical influences are always subtly noticeable in his debut album, including sacred or contemporary music as well as echoes of folk music – but it is his individual and intuitive process of creation which is always to the fore.
REVIEWS
"The trumpeter, zither player and composer Simon Zöchbauer – known as one of the heads of the ensemble Federspiel, in demand throughout Europe – presents his first solo album. It is called “Achad”, a Hebrew word meaning one, but also in the broader sense unity, wholeness or oneness. “Achad” – such a lovely title for a touching musical search for meaning and self, accompanied by the famous Koehne Quartett as well as producer and electronics technician Sixtus Preiss. The great questions of our origin, current condition and the greater whole are posed to us all as listeners. Or, to put it in the words of the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger: this is about “the beginning and the end / and the couple of minutes in between.”
And quite apart from that: a string quartet with trumpet sounds fantastic!"
(Andreas Schett – col legno)
LINEUP
Simon Zöchbauer - trumpet
Joanna Lewis - violin
Anne Harvey-Nagl - violin
Lena Frankhauser - viola
Melissa Coleman - violoncello
HOMEPAGE
TERRITORIES
Worldwide
