about this recording:
As is generally known, music grinds less thoroughly than life. And when the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang makes repetition the subject of a substantial cycle, he is nowhere near maneuvering the listener into a hopeless situation. But he does confronts him with a corresponding problem. For with his cycle Differenz/Wiederholung (“Difference/Repetition”; abbreviated DW), which he has been working on for various formations since 1997, Lang explores the inextricable dialectics of repetition, the triviality of the ever same, on the one hand, and the in-between existence of mere similarities and variants, on the other.

DW 9 was written in memory of author Christian Loidl, a friend of Bernhard Lang’s, many of whose texts Lang has set to music. As a reserved act of grieving, the piece differs also in terms of stature from the two opulently set predecessors discussed above. With the subject of death, the music nurtures the dark foreboding that, perhaps other than through death, that which Phil Connors succeeded in doing in Groundhog Day – namely breaking through the dreary course of time – can only succeed in art.