»The young Berlin Zafraan Ensemble adopted the idea of overwriting for their recording Palimpsesto. Works by younger Spanish composers are offered, the music comes from this century – with one exception: Guárdame las Vacas by the Renaissance composer Luys de Narváez will be heard in a chamber music arrangement by Miguel Pérez Iñesta, the ensemble’s clarinetist. Here the concept of the palimpsest is most clearly applied to music.« (Tim Caspar Boehme)
»The bizarre location lends a strong element of magic to this new production, but the evening’s greatest strengths are musical. David Robert Coleman leads the assured players of the Opera Lab Berlin in a taut, engrossing account of the score.« (Shirley Apthorp)
»Rasche, who stands for his very own musical theater, had the composer Ari Benjamin Meyers write a minimalist score for three musicians and a tenor (great: Guillaume Francois), which furiously drives Stockmann’s text and takes it into spheres beyond the problems with neoliberalism and Libido increases.« Patrick Wildermann
»Ari Benjamin Meyers has composed a competently hypnotizing Philip Glass imitation for this occasion, which naturally suits Robert Wilson student Rasche: a pulsating carpet of repetitive patterns from which longing cello cantilenas arise again and again and which is accompanied by the fabulous tenor Guillaume Francois sometimes contributes softly swinging, sometimes whippingly choppy vocalizations. The result is a three-hour music-and-text theater that will make you go crazy and melt away, an evening that you will either absorb and be swept away by or leave tearing your hair out.« (André Mumot)
»The outstanding artistic quality of the recording can be heard after just a few bars of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, when the soprano Sarah Maria Sun moves with great rhythmic precision between singing and speaking, tones and sounds in Mondestrunken, the first poem by Albert Giraud . […] Flute, violin (Emmanuelle Bernard) and clarinet (Miguel Pérez Iñesta) are so exactly parallel at the beginning of A Pale Washerwoman that they are almost no longer perceived as separate instrumental colors. Bass clarinet and cello (Arthur Hornig) charge the dark Passacaglia night with a threatening atmosphere.« (Georg Rudiger)
»The instrumentalists distributed around the room (with the attentive percussionist Daniel Eichholz in the center) actually embody a musical attitude that draws its self-confidence from playful precision, but still conveys the feeling that things could be completely different at any given moment. Such courage to play ‘into the open’ would have been absurd in the new New Music in 1913, in the year of the highest artistic flowering and at the same time the unbearable built-up social pressures and nationalistic aggression.” (Matthias Nöther)
