[…] The next day, we sit in the same spot again to discover Hans Tutschku. We know his music a little from recordings — but in acousmatic music, a disc is a poor substitute for the real experience. And this concert proved it — without a doubt!

Anyone who feels hesitation (or even allergic resistance) to this kind of music — so necessary in our century, burning with contemporary vision, carrying integrity and hope — must hear Tutschku in the concert hall.

Here, we encounter a different way of thinking and making acousmatic music. Tutschku begins by shaping a spatial envelope — not as a kinetic by-product of sound swirling around the room, but as a multidimensional stage he seeks to inhabit. Perspective speaks, silence becomes eloquent, gesture and composition reveal their omnipotent meaning.

Very quickly, one realizes: this is the Haydn of electroacoustics. Each of the five pieces we hear is as musical, original, expressive, and deeply felt as a Haydn string quartet.

Tutschku’s spatial conception is not rooted in trigonometric mapping. We find ourselves in a womb-like, matrix-like sound world, fertile with nourishing openings born from an imagination as singular as it is fertile. Seductive? Absolutely. It forces a thunderous concentration on the music — music that speaks only of itself, despite some political resonances (as in … Erinnerung…). It seeks, above all, to be art — lifting its message higher and more nobly, shaped anew by the time in which it exists.

Time — such a fundamental element, both physically and psychologically — Tutschku doesn’t just inhabit or invent it. He creates, recreates, nourishes, and shapes it. Like his classical ancestor (yes, the comparison with Haydn remains inescapable), there is no waste to be found.

No matter the piece — nothing is left to chance. A sound announces itself in the background, disappears, then returns to the foreground. An idea that seemed ornamental becomes the foundation of a later section.

The music expands, funnels inward, then emerges — from who-knows-where — with a devastating naturalness. Everything seems simple, which allows for an intuitively swift descent into its depth. Tutschku practices a kind of studied waltz, dancing between levels of perspective — within a plane and across the total volume — shifting between narrative and Durchführung (development), of which he is perhaps the greatest master since Berg and Stockhausen — in his own, method-free, unschooled aesthetic.

Each piece can be heard as a kind of sonata form, without exposition or repeat. Gently, Tutschku leads us into the heart of music — his music. The breath of this art becomes our own. Vocabulary, syntax, grammar — all are transcended. Whether the source material is synthetic or concrete (recorded voice, gamelan, or other sound objects), the solfège dreamed of by Schaeffer finds its realization here — as with Jonty Harrison or Parmerud — in a space of stunning and satisfying truth.

What? Only masterpieces? Yes! Absolutely!
The greatest joy is to recognize a style that convinces by its sheer grandeur, to embrace a signature without even a trace of mannerism. Genius — and I do not use the word lightly — doesn’t impose itself; it leads, irresistibly. Tutschku’s music inhabits — a maelstrom and a vortex, a supernova and a calm sea, mirroring the sublime intelligence and poetry of his live performances.

So moved, we scarcely dare to applaud.
And we await his return — all the more eagerly.