Benjamin Schweitzer

The chiaroscuro-technique developed by painters of the Italian renaissance served to intensify contrasts and effects of optical depth. In Klar/Obskur, I tried to transfer the general idea of this tech...

entschlackt [Piece in Two Parts] resulted from an attempt to write music that is clear, precise and concentrated without being superficially 'simple'. The 'purged' or 'cleansed' character of the piece...

One of the most bodacious episodes in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic tells how Joukahainen challenges the old, wise singer Vainamoinen to a competition, during which Vainamoinen sings him up...

The cycle of 27 lithographs on the Apocalypse of St. John created by Max Beckmann in his Dutch exile in 1941 inspired Benjamin Schweitzer to compose 27 musical 'sheets' as well. 'The pictures are fill...

Nausea (lat., seasickness, disgust) - Nenia (greek/lat., folksong, elegy, magical song): Two similar sounding terms, which offer, based on their ambiguity, lots of space to musical connotations. These...

The text of this 'small sound piece' combines material from Petrarch's well-known Sonnet No. 132 and its Baroque adaptation by Martin Opitz, alternating between - and sometimes mixing - Italian and Ge...

The text of this 'small sound piece' combines material from Petrarch's well-known Sonnet No. 132 and its Baroque adaptation by Martin Opitz, alternating between - and sometimes mixing - Italian and Ge...

The title hidden tracks is ambiguous. First of all, the piece is almost throughout imagined as 'multi-track', with layers (in the sense of sound tracks) that partly overlay each other, partly suddenly...

These attributes mentioned here: Ease -Swiftness - Precision - Vividness - Complexity - are used by Benjamin Schweitzer as signposts for putting the pop into the weasel in his solo violin part. Out of...

Football (resp. soccer) has been fascinating for many contemporary composers - maybe because of the unpredictable dramaturgy within a match, the complexity of different combinations, contrasts or comp...

Football (resp. soccer) has been fascinating for many contemporary composers - maybe because of the unpredictable dramaturgy within a match, the complexity of different combinations, contrasts or comp...

The title may be read as an indication of the key and genre, on the one hand, but also as an allusion to a slightly depressive mood, on the other hand. Mozart's Piano Sonata in A minor which may have...

'Landscape With Deserted House' is a piece of a dark and very individual character, almost a 'gothic piece'. The topos of the deserted house comes from the literature of Victorian England, but also po...

Der Mythos um die Nymphe Dafne war im 17. Jahrhundert der erste Opernstoff der Musikgeschichte. Der junge Komponist Benjamin Schweitzer hat ihn 2005 nach dem Libretto des Barockdichters Martin Opitz n...

An Zimmern was initially planned to be part of a cycle of Hölderlin settings. Hölderlin's late lyrics offer a certain riveness between equation, lunatic bursts and a dissociated smoothness. This 'rive...

Solostimmensatz - gemischter Chor (SSAATTBB), Trompete in B, Horn in F, Posaune und Tuba

The acerbic and bizarre opulence of Baroque lyrical poetry sets the tone for vergehn wie Rauch (vanish like smoke). The interlinked themes running through the poems, expressed with similar linguistic...