I recently revisited a 1988 Wergo disc devoted to the now seventy-one-year-old German composer Reinhard Febel, who emerged in the nineteen-eighties as the practitioner of a quizzical, deconstructive approach to traditional musical materials — a mode of composing "with" rather than "in" tonality, he called it. At the time, I was particularly fascinated by his vocal-orchestral piece Das Unendliche, which I featured on my college radio show, Music Since 1900. Wanting to catch up on what Febel has been doing lately, I found Slumberland, premiered in 2019. It's in quite a different vein from Febel's quasi-tonal early works. The dominant texture is one of pointillistic clouds of piano sound — six pianos are the core of the ensemble — from which more defined figures gradually emerge. The title is taken from Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran in the New York Herald from 1905 to 1911, although the composer also had in mind the venerable Berlin bar of the same name, over which he happens to live. Score and notes can be found here here. Also of note: the 2007 orchestral piece Berceuse avec cauchemar, which meditates ominously on the Chopin Berceuse.
