Work of the Week - Jörg Widmann: Antiphon

Jörg Widmann’s Antiphon for orchestral ensembles starts its worldwide journey through the concert halls this week. After premieres in the US, France, and Finland, the work will see its first performance this week in France, before it makes its way to Great Britain in May 2009. In France, Heinz Holliger will lead the Orchestre national de Lyon in presenting the piece in three performances: on March 5th and 7th in the Lyon Auditorium, and on March 6th at the Espace Malreux in Chambéry.

One of the most exiting contemporary German musicians, Widmann—a clarinetist and composer—combines traditional musical elements with new ambient and spatial techniques. Inspired by the Venitian Polychoral style, Antiphon splits itself into different homologous choruses within the orchestral ensemble. Widmann’s composition also calls for a separate of woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion, which perform close to the audience and is integrated throughout the duration of the work. In this way, Widmann avoids the internal coherence of the ensemble’s sound, and instead treats the ensemble as a kind of spatial board game, within which the diverse sounds of the instruments move and interact.

The title of the work, Antiphon, therefore describes not only the polychoral arrangement of the music, but also the spatial arrangement of the musicians. It is a new constellation of instrumental groups that creates new challenges for conductors as well as performers, simultaneously organized by the sum of its sound and ruled by chaos. As Widmann writes, “everything is subordinated to the concept of the anthem and the antiphon.”