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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1996 · Other · DE
PAO Records (CD-Booklet, CD 10140-2): Booklettext zu „Flow“
Georg Pepl
Liner notes by Georg Pepl, musicologist and Harry Pepl’s elder son, for the solo piano album “Flow” (recorded on Sunday, 10 March 1996, in the Brahms Hall of the Vienna Musikverein), printed in the booklet also in Stephen Ferguson’s English translation. The text presents the improviser at the piano as an image of isolation and of freedom and draws a line from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s free fantasias via Mozart and Beethoven to jazz, which built dams against the “flood of improvisation”. He reads the flowing that gives the album its name through Rousseau’s “Reveries of the Solitary Walker”, Goethe’s “Werther”, Freud’s “oceanic feeling” and Herbert Marcuse. At the piano Pepl enjoys losing himself in the moment, the notes stream out “all by themselves, as silent water or as a flow”; in “Grace & Gary” and “2 Klavierpianos” he improvised a second piano track over the first. On the titles: “Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen” as a reminiscence of Glenn Gould, “Improv 2” of Schubert’s impromptus, “Grace & Gary” of the film “High Noon”; on “3 Mo” he quotes Pepl himself (“mothy, momenty, minory”). The German text is freely available as a text PDF, Ferguson’s English version for signed-in users.
While playing the piano Harry Pepl enjoys being able to elevate himself to the mood of the moment, or to plunge into a different sense of being. The notes are independent, streaming out all by themselves, as silent water or as a flow.
Just looking at the titles of his pieces one recognises that Pepl is a deeply musical and romantic artist. Musically his playing is related to language itself, he has listened to its rhythms and double meanings.
The improvising pianist flows out into the world of tones, the piano player melts into oneness with the piano, desists in his identity as a subjective entity.
3 Mo stands for mothy, momenty, minory. Mothy because the music sounds as if the moths are waiting to pounce.
Word play on his piano piece “3 Mo” from the album “Flow” (1996): three German adjectives beginning with “mo”, echoing Motten (moths), Moll (minor key) and Moment
Harry Pepl
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20 April 1994 · Other · DE
Österreichische Mediathek, Katalog (online): „Harry Pepl Quartet 20.04.1994 (1)“ (unveröffentlichte Aufnahme)
The Österreichische Mediathek (Austrian Mediathek), Austria’s archive of sound and video recordings at the Technisches Museum Wien, lists an unreleased recording of the Harry Pepl Quartet of Wednesday, 20 April 1994, recorded at the Orpheum in Graz, Austria, that is, at the concert of the Graz Meeting “Strings”. It is on compact cassette (shelf mark 6-69528) and can only be heard on site at the Mediathek in Vienna. The catalogue names only Harry Pepl (guitar); according to the Austrian news agency APA, the quartet played with Wolfgang Puschnig.