FABIO NIEDER (b.1957): The Devourer of Images for Speaking Pianist, Accordion, Percussion and Violins, 18 Orchestral Groups and Choir.

Description: The Devourer of Images is part of Nieder's music-theatre work based on the life of the painter Vito Timmel (Thümmel)(1886 - 1949), an accomplished and successful artist of expressionist/symbolist bent, who succumbed to alcoholism and mental illness and spent the last years of his life in the lunatic asylum in Trieste. Here he produced his last works, naïve, vaguely ominous drawings - the 'images' of the title. The music depicts the images (vividly, with quasi-onomatopœic sound effects from specialised instruments, and announcement of the titles in exaggerated sprechstimme by the pianist), Timmel's relationship to them, their absorption into him (or his into them), and the final disintegration of the images and the personality of the tortured artist. Nieder's idiom is one of evocative soundscapes, unabashedly avant-garde and making use of the widest range of instrumental textures and timbres, with specific instrumental combinations taking on the rôles of leitmotifs, or characters in the drama. No texts. Marino Formenti (piano), Teodoro Anzellotti (accordion), Cologne Percussion Quartet, West German Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra Cologne; Emilio Pomàrico.