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Harry Pepl * 1945  † 2005

Press archive

What was written and broadcast about Harry Pepl: reviews, portraits, interviews and obituaries, with summary and source. The originals are protected by copyright and kept in the archive; we provide them to researchers and the press on request.

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  1. April 1998 · Interview · DE

    Concerto (music magazine), issue 2/1998: „Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen“

    Martin Schuster

    Interview in the Café Museum in Vienna, conducted in connection with the solo piano CD “Flow”. Pepl talks about his beginnings, the Jazzzwio, the brief engagement with Benny Goodman, Real-time Composing and MIDI technology, and announces reissues of “Gegenwind” and “Montreux 81”.

    I wanted you to be able to hear the room on the CD as well.

    Harry Pepl

    My main problem is my high blood pressure. Another contradiction: on the outside I may seem calm, but inside it races around in me like mad.

    Talking to Martin Schuster of the Austrian music magazine Concerto in 1998, at the Café Museum in Vienna, around the time of his piano album “Flow”. Pepl speaks openly and with self-irony about the blood pressure that kept him off the stage from 1994/95, and about the contrast between outward calm and inner high voltage

    Harry Pepl

    I am a man of contrasts, often very funny or ironic and then very sad again. You can probably hear that in my playing too

    Talking to Martin Schuster (Concerto, an Austrian music magazine) at the Café Museum in Vienna in 1998; the interviewer describes how Pepl speaks in a deep, gentle voice, giggles at a bon mot and turns serious again the next moment

    Harry Pepl

    For me music means emotions and memories. And even when I play something I don’t much like, my blood pressure goes up, because then it gets on my nerves.

    In Concerto in 1998, about the guitar, which he did not touch for a long time after 1994 because he feared the excitement; „auf den Wecker gehen“ (literally “to get on one’s alarm clock”) is colloquial German for “to get on one’s nerves”, and the remark is self-ironic. At the piano he then found a new freedom

    Harry Pepl

  2. 10 February 1998 · Interview · DE

    Wiener Zeitung (p. 4, column „Jazzignal“): „Echtzeitkompositionen“

    Christian Rösner

    Portrait with interview on the piano album “Flow” (PAO Records). After his second brain haemorrhage and a break, Pepl has made the piano his instrument and developed his real-time composing further. He tells how for the recording he sat down in a Vienna concert hall (the article names the Bösendorfer hall), played a note and let himself be guided by the acoustics, and recalls an unprepared festival concert with Jack DeJohnette.

    The guitarist and composer Harry Pepl may well be called Austria’s most independent and at the same time most uncompromising jazz voice.

    What mattered to me was to play music that really comes from within and that happens in the moment

    In 1998, on Real-time Composing at the piano

    Harry Pepl

    I played one note, then the second, and by the third at the latest Jack knew exactly where I was, and we were together.

    On a festival concert with Jack DeJohnette without any joint preparation, in conversation in 1998

    Harry Pepl

    Pepl’s flowing real-time compositions on “Flow” are in any case full of energy and honesty; understandable in expression and eloquent.

    Music is my life, and I cannot not play

    Talking to the Wiener Zeitung, a Vienna daily, in 1998 about the time after his second brain haemorrhage in 1994: playing the guitar was out of the question at first, so he turned to the piano, which led to the album “Flow”; the double negative is deliberate

    Harry Pepl