Widmann - Fever Fantasy for Piano/string Quartet/clarinet

With the title of this composition Fever Fantasy Jorg Widmann refers to its musical air: 'I often feel Robert Schumann's melodic shape to be like the amplitude of a temperature curve: nervous flickering feverish an infinite number of small and large wave crests and troughs within the principal line.' The composer approaches this sound phenomenon with a setting for acoustic instruments. Nevertheless he succeeds in conjuring up very unusual sound spectrums. Over long sections the notation of this score mirrors the musical progressions containing no concrete pitches but detailed performance instructions instead. Slowly individual tones emerge from ascending pizzicato lines colourless sound surfaces sounds of harmonics roughened by tremolos and virtuoso clarinet scales tones that do not reveal their origin until the work ends: C - F - E - D sharp the beginning of Schumann's first violin sonata.