Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror)

A programmatic improvisation on four stories from the cycle of the same title by Michael Ende.

Press responses (selection):

"Hardly anyone knows that Michael Ende, the terrific creator of the Neverending Story, also wrote texts for adults - for example his prose volume The Mirror in the Mirror, a series of absurd and surreal reflections that turn our usual perceptions upside down. The idea of mirroring also fascinated the composer and pianist Hans-Joachim Hessler - after all, mirrorings, reversings and canons have been well-known musical techniques ever since the middle ages. Hessler mirrors four narrations of Ende's work with musical refinement and connects coposed and free passages so elaborately that the Berlin tenor Matthias Schubert, who considering his amazing scope belongs to the strongest saxophone players of Germany, can play out his entire emotionality. A dazzling reflex which, illuminated by Ende, surpasses usual expectations" (Traumzeit, July 6, 2009).

The "participants combined composed and free passages in such a way that they created a dream-like world of sound..." (Coolibri 4/2012, p. 28).

"So when a musician undertakes a programmatic improvisation from the cycle [Mirror in the Mirror by Michael Ende], the circle of painting, literature and music is complete. [...] As frontier runner between contemporary composition and free improvisation, Hessler dedicates himself to his concept of «conceptual discontinuity» with creative plenty, musical finesse, high emotional denseness and partly almost unsettling intensity - thereby creating an own labyrinth of mirroring, surreal, poetic, filled with warm light" (Tobias Boecker in Jazzpodium 7-8/2012, p. 84).

"The main thing is that it is good. And it is good. Ende's text «Heavy black cloth» (track 2) deals with a dancer who waits for his performance which will never take place. This dance, as it is written in Ende's text, is supposed to begin «with a mighty drumbeat». In the text, which artistically marks time, the releasing drumbeat never occurs. The music, however, delivers it after exactly 6:29 minutes, and then the dance begins: wild, frolic. In another text of Ende, the music delineates the traces, which an ice-skater, in a sophisticated way, draws in the sky with his ice-skates (track 4). Here, the beautiful transitions surprise: in the middle of this piece of music, there is a passage which at first sounds like a popular catchy tune from a fully air- conditioned hotel lobby in Las Vegas. However, the way in which the tenor saxophone (Matthias Schubert) then frees itself from the dialogue with the piano (Hessler) and celebrates odd obstinacy in a most profuse way - that is classy" (Jens Sparschuh, newspaper DER TAGESSPIEGEL Nr. 21399, dated July 22, 2012, p. 28).

"Ideologies, in relation to a «contemporary» language of sound, are unknown to the composer Hans Joachim Hessler. His competence in style allows him to engage with alternations between free-tonal and a-tonal music, between composed and improvised passages, between quote and original. The composer documents this again clearly in his four programmatic improvisations «mirror in the mirror». It becomes clear in the programmatic improvisations on Michael Ende's texts that irony and satire are well-known to Hessler. A precursor to Hessler's surreal streak can be seen in the string quartet «Dance in the bird cage», which with its sounds of flamenco shows folkloristic allusions. The orchestra piece «Nabuli Tintin» of 1999 tells a lot about Hessler's constantly searching and wide-ranging spirit as a composer. As a homage to Arvo Paert, whose Tintinnabuli-style (Glockenspiel-style) led, in the 1970s, out of modernity, which he felt had no future, «Nabuli Tintin» demonstrates the multifaceted possibilities of «postmodern» composition" (Dr. Barbara Dobrestsberger in Glarean Magazin, dated July 6, 2012).