ENSEMBLE MODERN/E?TV?S,PETER/TALI,ANU/+ - Where From? Where To? Myths,Nation,Identities (Sealed) (2CD)

Music, it is said, has played an important role in the constitution of national identity in Eastern Europe since the nineteenth century. In 2012, the Goethe Institute (Central Eastern Europe), together with the Ensemble Modern and the support of the BHF Bank Foundation, initiated the project Woher? Where? - myths, nation, identities, the relationship of music and national identity formation examined. Eight composers from Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia were commissioned to deal musically with the theme of "national identity". After their premiere at the musica viva festival in Munich, the resulting works were performed by the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt am Main in autumn 2012, followed by the Autumn Autumn of 2013, Riga and Budapest. Now the Ensemble Modern brings the double CD with recordings from the different cities under the direction of Peter E?tv?s, Anu Tali and Clemens Heil in their own label. While Kristaps Petersons (Money) takes up the theme of the seemingly identity-creating effect of a national currency, Andris Dzenitis deals with the phenomenon of the national court (Latvian Cookbook), and Janis Petraskevics makes the search for himself in Darkroom. The Hungarian Judit Varga draws in Entitas a dialectical relationship between the de-traditionalization of techniques of sound production on the one hand and a resulting unification of the ensemble sound on the other. Pawel Hendrich from Breslau approaches the concept of the individual with Sedimetron backwards, by identifying identity as a sedimentation process. The Slovenian artist Nina Senk has collected material from Twentieth-Five in her country, where her contradictions do not disappear. The Czech Frantisek Chaloupka is the only one in Masin Gun to take a kind of myth, an ambivalent heroic story from the national resistance of the early fifties. With his composition (Kaleidoscope), the Slovenian Matej Bonin draws a picture of the country in which his opinion is propagated different ideals which serve not the national cohesion but the interests of individual groups.