In the composition Left Silence of the contemporary Alois Bröder (born 1961) it shows itself up in suffering on German past. Where many people desireful devote themselves to repression (“let bygones be bygones!”), art does’nt evade. That makes it so valuable, that makes it so conflictable.
Alois Bröder has set texts by Richard Exner to music which reflect the Auschwitz grey without seizing it directly into words. Bröder finds an up-shaking orchestra language and singing forms between declamatory yell and internalization in a singing style, which were exceptionally affecting indicated by Silvia Hablowetz with an apparently unfailing feeling.
The open-minded audience gave this premiere due attention and grateful approval.
Eckhard Britsch
(in: Neue Westfälische, 24.12.2001)
In his song cycle Left Silence for mezzosoprano and orchestra on texts by Richard Exner Alois Bröder renounces almost completely a melodic voice-leading. The motives assigned to the solo voice have a symbolic character and mean in their form stations of human development in each case. The limited range in Portrait of a Child widens over Morning Song up to the untamed yell of Liberty and narrows again in Mute and Eternity. The orchestra describes the stations without loud-picturesque representation of individual terms mentioned in the text. Thus Bröder avoids e.g. in the first song with the words "Now they mirror, between sleeps, from without and within heaven." to represent this "heaven" with well sounding tones, because the entire atmosphere of the poem is engraved on the consciousness of future "terrors" and "tears". The representation of the situations from rebelling to resignation, which also engraved on Jánačeks composition, is here so much enhanced, that the vocal part had sometimes no chance to be understood. However straight such moments made the listener shocked, just like the end of the work when after the death cry the tension is completely relaxed. The fact that the composition was impressing like that was to a high degree also because of the outstanding achievement of the artists.
Armin Kansteiner
(in: Westfalen Blatt, 27.12.2001)