113 grand pianos are piled up on the cemetery. Grand pianos - the most intimate of all romantic instruments. Having (almost) been deprived of thier sounds, they rise one last time into a sonorous sky, before they slip into Hades, dedicating themselves to the underworld irrevocably ..." The location could not have been chosen better. Nowhere is one confronted with the transience of all being in a plainer manner than on a cemetery. It being night and dark, one is all the more assured to have been removed from all earthly existence. No less surreal than this atmosphere is the project that began May 13 on the Old Cemetery of Langenberg under the artistic direction of the Duisburg based composer Gerhard Stäbler.

kalt·erhitzt - Abgesang to 113 grand pianos is a part of Ruhr area’s festival "Tuchfühlung". Gerhard Stäbler is known for music projects breaking free from traditional concert halls and familiar listening habits. He has once more found an unusual venue for presenting this requiem. Stäbler succeeds in involving the morbid environment in the musical action, letting the former penetrate the latter. The spectacle begins as the visitor grasps the peculiar sublime of the nightly cemetery, while the graveyard atmosphere sheds a novel quality over the course of the performance. The first actions make clear there is no graveyard hush to be expected. This very special funeral is not honouring a deceased and his achievements contemplatively. They are last words for those who are nothing but mere instruments, distracting the ear away from themselves onto the sounds they are capable of bringing alive the masterworks of music history. It is a requiem for grand pianos, breaking the silence in a grand way.

The performance’s first bars already are a mere orgy of sound, produced by a general crowd of musicians. But the true protagonists of the evening are the 113 grand pianos, celebrating the autumn of their instrument life. They lie piled up between the graves, abandoned for decay as well as the bodies underneath. The pianos, rotting away and raising their voice one last time for their own Abgesang, give rise to anthropomorphing fantasies. There is a constant change of roles: the grand pianos themselves pronouncing that which to be said for them. For sure, the grand piano is our culture’s most loved and best hated instrument. Stäbler’s performance speaks of art’s pleasure and student’s torture, of beautiful sounds and unheard-of possibilities. The project’s first part brought together countless performers. Next to pianists Paolo Alvares, Ulrich Roeder, Kunsu Shim and Annette Wiegand, soprano Sigune von Osten played a central role, as she mastered the partly dramatic partly playful vocal role brilliantly, also becoming violent with the pianos. She dominated the action with striking presence,singing, playing piano, drumming, dancing, being at all times the connecting link between the simultaneous actions. Pianos were maltreated with hammers and sticks, piano lids were declared a stage, strings were beaten, wood was stamped, there was singing and playing.

The ensemble "musica temporale" and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze were supported by members of no less than nine choirs, two wind ensembles and numerous piano students of the region. Conductors Cecile Victoria Hertel, Klaus Heyens, Jochen Weber, Yoko Hayashi and Doc Opelders attended the desired co-ordination.Gerhard Stäbler for kalt·erhitzt (I) has created a montage not just of his own compositions dealing with presentiment and proclamation of death - as Karas.Krähen [Crows]. He has also quoted piano pieces of an everyday familiarity. Chopin’s funeral march thus becomes a goodbye to te grand pianos as well as a symbol of a past epoch, to which one is maybe bidding farewell as well. The actions in, on and around the pianos probed the sounding potential of the dying instrument - sometimes with utmost violence.

Ilona Schneider