Reviews

Piano News on "Drei Japanische Reisebilder" (Three Japanese Travel Pictures)

Here is a small excerpt:

We turn our attention to a work ‘that (...) has been thoroughly steeped in post-war avant-garde music. We are talking about the Three Japanese Travel Pictures, composed in 2023 by Andreas F. Staffel.’ He is "active as both a pianist and composer, but represents a radically contemporary position that aims to exploit all the possibilities of contemporary composition available to date and transcend the boundaries of genres and styles.

The Three Japanese Travel Pictures are a good example of this aesthetic approach. Staffel has incorporated a whole range of unconventional playing techniques into this small but exquisite cycle, enabling pianists to create a completely new piano sound."

from: Piano News, 5/2025

Cristoffer Cornil's review of "Lascia vibrare... - Solo pieces I"

A similar ambiguity is also at play on Andreas F. Staffel’s »Lascia vibrare …– Solostücke I↗,« a collection of eight pieces performed by musicians from Berlin’s contemporary music scene like Elena Kakaliagu and Nikolaus Schlierf. It is the first of a two-part showcase of the Berlin-based composer’s recent works for soloists and concerned with aesthetic questions, but also here, something seems to be brooding beneath the surface.

Take »Fünf Episoden für einen singenden Bratschisten« (»Five Episodes for a Singing Violist«) that put Schlierf’s virtuosity on full display by applying different aesthetic ideas and techniques and whose titles like »Versetzung gefährdet« (»Relocation in Danger«) express a sense of doom. In the last piece, Schlierf sings five words lifted from an e e cummings poem. Removed from its original context, the line »who are you, little I« takes on new meaning. Is this still an ode to transformation, or an identity crisis? Subtleties such as these indeed make Staffel’s music resonate, as already promised by the title, and make it possible to uncover its hidden secrets on an emotional rather than on an intellectual level.

from: field notes | Contemporary Music in Berlin, Found Sounds #5
(Dis)Comfort Music | 29 July 2025 | Cristoffer Cornils

Rainer Nonnenmann on "Beethoven_off_set"

The fourth movement begins like Beethoven's finale ff with the ‘fanfare of terror’, especially in the ensemble's wind instruments, while the Beethoven orchestra stops after bar 3 and the ensemble continues playing alone, but then only ‘subito pp’. (...) The long-prepared instrumental entry of the ‘Joy’ melody is then taken over as an audio and video playback from the Nazi propaganda film of the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on 20 April 1942 – on Adolf Hitler's birthday in front of the highest-ranking Nazi dignitaries – with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. (...) The ensemble reacts as if paralysed, not by withdrawing Beethoven's Ninth and its fatal reception in the Third Reich, but by withdrawing itself. (...) Twice, the vocalists allow the sibilant sound ‘z’ to swell strongly and then suddenly break off, remaining silent with their mouths open. After this visible sign of helplessness and speechlessness, the piece finally freezes and ebbs away with scattered instrumental actions and aimless, staggering humming, like a ‘withdrawal’ from Beethoven's final movement, which whirls to an end in tutti, fortissimo and prestissimo.

From: Rainer Nonnenmann: Komponierte „Zurücknahmen“ von Beethovens IX. Symphonie. In: Die Musikforschung, 2/2023

Martin Hufner on Beethoven_off_set

I don't think we've ever had this here before: an online presentation in the form of a score video. You can see and hear the third movement (III. Adagio molto) of Andreas F. Staffel's composition ‘Beethoven_off_set (or I take it back, the Ninth Symphony)’. In December 2020, the third movement of the forty-minute orchestral piece was recorded in the studio with the help of the VSL library and live recordings. The composer and the participating artists then answered questions from journalist and author Fritz Schütte about the creation of the work. I have already had the opportunity to listen to passages of the composition: an astonishingly good-sounding texture and a finely iridescent score in sound.

Martin Hufner, Neue Musikzeitung (nmz), 02/2021

On "Das dritte Streichquartett"

The Royal String Quartet Warsaw proved to be sensitive interpreters who devoted their concentrated attention to every note, every noisy element – tinkerers at work who were able to model difficult passages. Andreas Staffel's Third String Quartet thrives above all on the tonal spectrum of the instruments. It tells an intense story of the composer's engagement with Gerhard Richter's abstract painting in an atmospheric density.

Märkische Zeitung, 06/2019

On compositions for accordion

Under the heading Mixtur, compositions for accordion by Andreas Staffel were performed impressively by Neza Torka.

Neue Musikzeitung (nmz), 07/19

On "Fluctuations"

“I was about to write to you to say that the piece Fluctuations by Composer Andreas F. Staffel is a wild, strange and (in the best sense of the word) perverse piece.” James Erber, London 09/2018

On "Polymonolie II"

"Dear Andreas, I would like to congratulate you on the premiere at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow! The piece was very warmly received, and I was delighted to perform your music!" Sergej Tschirkow, 11/2015

On "The Recognitions"

Aachen-born composer Andreas Staffel, now based in Berlin, drew inspiration for his 17-minute orchestral work ‘The Recognitions’ from the voluminous novel ‘The Counterfeiters’ by American author William Gaddis. The colourful collage of bizarre artist biographies set between the church and the Latin American resistance movement is reflected in the complex structure of the work. The composer skilfully combines the large orchestra with a remote ensemble, percussion combo and tape recordings, shifting stylistically between mambo rhythms and quotations from early Dutch vocal polyphony, and despite the disparate structure, finds a personal style of expression. The fact that the tension is maintained throughout all five parts of this monumental work speaks both for the composer's inspiration and for the quality of the interpretation, which was in very good hands with Marcus R. Bosch and the Aachen Symphony Orchestra.

Pedro Obiera, Aachener Zeitung 2006

On "Chairos"

Andreas Staffel, together with ten symphony musicians, premiered two parts of his large-scale cycle ‘Chairos’ for two dancers, singers, video and ensemble. Naturally, this was ‘only’ in a concert setting. Two night music pieces formed essential components of the cycle, the first of which could now be heard. ‘Just another nightmusic’ with the overtone spectrum of the tone as its material basis. The musicians scattered spatially, took on the formation of the constellation Lyra and unfolded a shadowy, mysterious veil of sound with individual colouring. The second premiere piece, ‘Soleil et Chair’, based on a poem by Rimbaud about a dance of the naked Pan and his seductive arts, was more tangible. The composition captures a dazzling variety of degrees of movement, from standstill to bacchanalian exuberance. The musicians gave an exemplary performance of the new work. After the interval, Andreas Staffel could be heard at the piano in the original sextet by the fifteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Much applause for an extraordinary chamber concert.

Pedro Obiera, Rheinische Post, 04/2004

The composer and pianist captivated audiences with the breadth of his versatile talent at his concert in the newly founded Ningbo Concert Hall. The program included his own piano works as well as compositions by Debussy, Beethoven and Tan Dun. The large audience rewarded him with prolonged applause.

Ningbo Daily, People's Republic of China, 04/2000

Poems and texts

The city breathes, pulsates, tells stories. In HÄUSER – ZEILEN – UMBRÜCHE (HOUSES – LINES – BREAKS), urban life is condensed into word images – between poetry and prose, sound and silence.

Andreas F. Staffel whisks us away into his lyrical, abstract world with his lines. Andreas F. Staffel's texts are fragments of memory, cityscapes, dreams and reality blurring into one another.

In his texts, Staffel creates a poetry of upheaval, a lyrical cartography. At home in Berlin and in the metropolises of the world, he allows his readers to share in the fragility of his experiences.

For all those who understand literature as a multi-layered resonance chamber – poetic, musical, radically honest.

Lydia Gebel, author