Enno Poppe has ‘tailor-made’ concise ensemble works for two of the most important ensembles of contemporary music: Gold – a purely vocal work for the SWR Vokalensemble – and Körper – for the Ensemble Modern.

In the three-part a cappella work Gold (one of only two choral compositions to date), Poppe indulges for the first time in his love of the lustfully excessive texts by Arno Holz (1863–1929), one of the most important representatives of German Naturalism and literary Modernism. The poems are parodistically related to less humorous high literature. The SWR Vokalensemble’s supple miracle sound appears confidently in various combinations, sometimes fanned out in 24 voices as in old vocal polyphony.

Körper takes us to another end of the scale of possible sounds. Here, the 21 soloists of the Ensemble Modern form a formidable big band, augmented by appropriate woodwind and brass instruments (including saxophones, of course). Here, however, Poppe is more concerned with exploring and expanding what the big band provides as a ‘sound body’, i.e. the colours, dynamic and rhythmic possibilities, with the means of New Music, an art that the Ensemble Modern has truly perfected.

As so often with Poppe, the piece Körper goes through multiple processes of intensification and collapse. In the climaxes, the physicality of the music is almost overwhelming. Nevertheless, the nuclei of the piece are the intimate, thinly scored moments when the electric strings ever so gradually rise up with the percussion, or when a saxophone, a keyboard, or a trombone steps out of the thicket of sound and is allowed a few moments of self-discovery.