Medek: Cello Concerto No. 1, Eine Stele fur Bernd Alois Zimmermann & Schattenspiele

On 22 January of this year, the German composer Tilo Medek, who died in 2006, would have been seventy years old. On this occasion we are releasing his cello concerto and two other works for solo cello with support from the International Foundation for the Support of Culture and Civilization. Beginning in the mid-1960s this composer born in Jena made an international name for himself as a creative musician, but increasing restrictions in the German Democratic Republic after the Prague Spring culminated in the revocation of his citizenship in 1977. Medek was greatly stimulated by the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, but he continued to focus on tonality. His works exhibit an extraordinary melodic and rhythmic wealth of invention and a profound inclination for the traditional musical instruments, which he decidedly preferred to the electronic music of the Darmstadt school. Medek’s first cello concerto, composed in 1978 and presented in a new version in 1982, thrives on the idea of maintaining music in suspense between absolute music and program music. Each of its four movements bears a title designed to inspire the hearer’s imagination and not to limit it to musically depicted content. It is a very extraordinary, virtuosic piece that only a few cellists have in their repertoire. We are pleased to be able to release Guido Schiefen’s interpretation on CD.