Sospeso devoted an entire evening to Rihm's work on February 19, 2000, and performs his score to Un Chien Andalou at the Lincoln Center Festival 2004.   

John Cage, in a 1990 interview, said that he enjoyed Boulez's recent music, "but I didn't find it as interesting, for instance, as I've found the work of Wolfgang Rihm.  I may take the liberty of saying now, that for me being here, a very rich experience comes from getting to know Wolfgang's music as much as I have.  I've liked all of the pieces that I've heard, very much.  I think that they have to do very closely with a love of paying attention to sound, and what a great variety of sound there is in this music!"

Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, Rihm was writing by age eleven; among his early teachers were Eugen Werner Velte, Wolfgang Fortner, and Humphrey Searle. He attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1970 and during the seventies continued studies (with Stockhausen, Klaus Huber, and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht) while teaching at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe and composing with characteristic prolificacy, winning the City of Stuttgart Prize (1974) and that of the City of Mannheim (1975).

Feldman and Webern, along with Stockhausen, strongly mark Rihm’s first works; further works disclosed a personality strongly drawn to literature and the arts: the controversial chamber opera Jakob Lenz, to the story by Georg Büchner and Michael Frühling, was performed in 1978; a collaboration with Heiner Müller produced the opera Die Hamletmaschine in 1983. Later influences were Wilhelm Killmayer, Helmut Lachenmann, and especially Luigi Nono, to whom Rihm has dedicated several works. Other notable works include the operas Oedipus (1987), with texts by Rihm after Sophocles, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Müller; Die Eroberung von Mexico (1991), after Antonin Artaud; and the violin concerto Gesungene Zeit, recorded by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Levine. Rihm recently served as the composer in residence at the Salzburg Festival as well as at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg.

Click here to see a page of one of Rihm's compositional sketches.

Click here to read the Ensemble Sospeso's interview with Wolfgang Rihm.