Sadlo demonstrated the melodic fireworks that are possible on the marimba and vibraphone as a soloist with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester at the Konzerthaus. Bertold Hummel's virtuoso "Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra" is a showpiece for the "master of the clappers". With sensitive antennae, he explores the sound worlds of various cymbals in the Adagio, which he makes vibrate with soft tremolos. His mallets bounce over the marimba at breakneck speed like a ping-pong ball.

Peter Sadlo achieved great success as a soloist with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester in the Konzerthaus. Sadlo makes real music with cymbals and bongo, gong and bell, xylophone or vibraphone. He not only demonstrates that the times when percussion was merely used for loud background music are over. In Bertold Hummel's "Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra", he has a work under his powerful, nimble hands that is worth the performer's effort. Hummel begins with Bruckner tones. Trombone pathos dominates in an adagio. The percussion counter this with a long resonating echo and the muffled drone of the bass drum. It often takes the lead in the other three movements. The rattling and clanging, wooden tapping and dry banging, the hissing of the cymbal strokes develop into a colourful speech of sound. With the drum roll of a funeral march, with bell singing and the sound of bells, the music passes through the Great Gate of Kiev. There are hints of Bartók motifs. But Hummel's opus remains original and easy to grasp.

Hummel has composed a genuine concerto in which the percussion takes the place of the classical solo instrument, in an alternating dialogue with the orchestra, with its own cadenzas. This is a rare occurrence and the young percussionist Jasmin Kolberg (29) utilised the available space with intense musicality. With her virtuoso and sensitive percussion technique, she countered the symphonic, sometimes threatening, sometimes plaintive gestures of the orchestra, giving them surprising colours and rhythmic figures as suggestions with her cadenzas. She even managed the expressive feat of creating a "lament" using only percussion instruments, which then dissolved into a whirling vivace. The audience applauded vigorously and stamped their feet.

Hummel gives the musicians what they want. Opportunities for the strings to bathe in a rich sound, the chance for the brass to make their mark. And the musicians of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie did not miss the opportunity to trace Hummel's symphonic developments with great intensity. Even if they had to take a back seat to the dominance of the percussion in many places, they made an enormous contribution to the popularisation of this composition under Toshiyuki Kamioka's precise direction.

The love of the monumental is also evident in Hummel's Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra, although completely different, meditative, almost lyrical tones could also be heard here for long stretches. The long solo at the beginning of the second movement was fascinating, not only because of its high demands on the soloist's technical ability, but also because of its highly interesting and imaginative interweaving of rhythmic and melodic structures. This also applies to the rather meditative third movement, entitled "Lamentation", which the percussion also begins without orchestral accompaniment. Almost imperceptibly at first, this meditative mood transforms into increasingly threatening, dark drama, which finally dissolves into quiet despair. The concert ends with a lively finale, for which Peter Sadlo received far more than polite applause.

With great skilfulness and effect, Hummel used half tonally difficult, half powerfully pathetic means reminiscent of Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra, which enabled the percussion soloist to showcase himself to great effect.

J.S. Bach would certainly have enjoyed this concerto for percussion and orchestra by Bertold Hummel, whose second movement plays with the famous B-A-C-H motif in a highly original way. Bach himself even composed strongly rhythm-orientated music in his church cantatas, which earned him harsh criticism from pious Christians during his lifetime ("dancing rubbish"). In his concerto for percussion and orchestra, Bertold Hummel draws an arc from B-A-C-H to the twentieth century with the tone sequence D-S-C-H for Dimitri Shostakovich. A music-historical homage of great musical expressiveness, seriousness and depth. This work, premiered in 1985, is interpreted congenially by Peter Sadlo on his new CD "Percussion in Concert". Sadlo is the masterful playmaker when, together with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Wolfgang Rögner, he puts everything the percussion has to offer into action. The term "virtuoso" is just a tired auxiliary word here. You can't help but think of those Indian deities who have more than just two arms at their disposal when you listen to Peter Sadlo using wood and skin to make his battery of percussion instruments, including vibraphone and marimba, resound. Peter Sadlo offers percussion that could not be more effective, exciting and tonally mature, but which nevertheless does not stop at pure effect. Bertold Hummel's Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra is the central work on this CD.

Jürgen Seeger

As he writes, Hummel wanted to try to give qualified percussion soloists, of whom there are now a considerable number, the opportunity to perform with the orchestra that other instrumental soloists have in large numbers. He has succeeded, but he needs the best of the many good percussion soloists who can play for him. Jeff Beer is one of them. The fact that the percussionist, who also enjoys an international reputation as an avant-garde composer, was a pupil of Bertold Hummel certainly helped the premiere. In his work, Hummel very consciously differentiates between percussion instruments with fixed pitches such as the baton instruments, vibraphone and marimba, and others with non-fixable pitches such as cymbals, tom-toms, triangle, gong and others, especially the wooden blocks in various sizes, which are graded according to lighter and darker tone colours. He leaves the tunable timpani and bass drum to the orchestra. In this concerto, the opinion that "concerto" comes from "concertare = to quarrel" is finally reduced to absurdity, because here only the derivation from "conserere - French concerter - to join together" applies. concerter - to join together": if there is a unity of soloist and ensemble in a concerto, then it is here. This in and out of unity is the genius of this concerto. Hummel makes free use of the tonal space and operates with compositional means that the symphonic tradition of the present has handed over to him for his own composition. This elevates his work far beyond pure avant-garde sound and makes it accessible. The correspondence of pure, indifferent sound, such as the gongs and cymbals at the beginning, to iridescent orchestral clusters, alternates with the virtuosically handled passages of the bar instruments with succinct unison themes of the strings and winds, which grow out of and return to the unmistakable musical diction of his teacher Genzmer and his teacher Hindemith in Brucknerian dimensions.
The virtuosity of the soloist is largely reflected in the second movement, which is also more characterised by the motor skills placed on the drums and finally contains the great "cadenza", an extensive percussion solo that develops brilliantly and, after a meditative phase, leads into a rapid coda. The soloistic idea leads into the third movement, entitled "Lamentation", which is then very variable in mood and reaches a pastose climax. The striking strings are heightened by striking, almost chorale-like, heavy brass in order to allow the funeral march-like drum passages to linger in the memory after an almost abrupt conclusion in an almost fading into nothingness in their alternation with the wide melodic arcs of the orchestra.
A fourth movement follows, which takes up many of the elements of the preceding movements, especially the first. This is a formally well-conceived work in itself, but it also harbours its own problems: after the fulminance of the second movement and the high density of the third, a very short overall coda, if there is such a thing, would perhaps have concluded the work more effectively than this relatively extended fourth movement.* Although it plays the vibraphone in particular to the fore with great virtuosity and thus takes on an almost rondo-like character, overall it seems too long. After the intense three preceding movements, the sounds are at times overused, they wear out. Somehow, however, such an impression also shows that the concertante possibilities of the percussion instruments are obviously limited, since formal and thematic fascination can be better created through the combination of melody, form and rhythm than through too much "just" sound. Hummel wisely endeavoured to limit this to a convincing degree. The work made a great impression and is likely to make its way through concert halls.
Any conductor who has a Paganini of percussion like Jeff Beer as a soloist is lucky. Tilo Fuchs worked with him and an orchestra that was perfectly prepared and played with the utmost concentration and differentiation. Conductor and orchestra have justified the confidence in the première.

Franz A. Stein

* Hummel made a few cuts to the score after the premiere.

By his own admission, Hummel wrote the Percussion Concerto, which was composed between 1978 and 1982, primarily as an addition to his repertoire. With his opus 70, however, he also succeeded in creating an original work, which, in a conventional four-movement sequence and sound reminiscences of Webern and Shostakovich, for example, provides attractive and captivating music for an unusual set of instruments: The soloist has to find his way between vibraphone, marimba, snare drums, bongos, tomtoms, temple blocks, cymbals, bells, gong and triangle, and in Frank Thomé, a musician was chosen who succeeded in this with dreamlike confidence. Hummel formulated the soloist part - especially in the fast-paced second movement - as a highly virtuosic dialogue with the orchestra, a demand that the musicians met in a captivating manner.

Claus-Dieter Hanauer