Lotti Tauber - Concern and Simplicity Volume 1: Original Recordings, 1981–1986 Lotti Tauber

Concern and Simplicity Volume 1: Original Recordings, 1981–1986 documents the scarcely heard recordings of Swiss pianist and composer Lotti Tauber, selected from various albums privately pressed across the 1980s. Living with musculoskeletal disability since childhood, and surviving a critical injury in her late 20s, the singular minimalism and innovative playing of Tauber’s piano(s) testifies to music’s ability to provide a dialogue between pain and joy. Covering a breadth of output in the final decade of her life, this first archival volume of Tauber’s work introduces her capacity to inflect the avant-garde with the intimacy of the personal, combining improvisation and intuition with the chance-based structures to which her intellectual and spiritual life was devoted.

Lotti Tauber was born in 1944, in Winterthur, Switzerland, north of Zurich. Her mother and father were close associates of the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung. Living with musculoskeletal disability since childhood, and surviving a critical injury in her late 20s, Tauber developed an iconoclastic playing style that focused on the movements of her thumb and ring finger. Her compositions were often structured by mystical texts related to her Jungian interests. The singular minimalism and innovative playing of Tauber’s piano(s) testifies to music’s ability to provide a dialogue between pain and joy, combining improvisation and intuition with the chance-based structures to which her intellectual and spiritual life was devoted. Covering a breadth of output in the final decade of her life, this first archival volume of Tauber’s work introduces her capacity to inflect the avant-garde with the intimacy of the personal.

Transferred and restored by Frédéric Ménétrier and Alexis Eskandari at Gecko Studios and mastered by Stephan Mathieu, this audiophile edition was pressed by RTI and includes extensive liner notes by Kristen Gallerneaux. The effort to situate Tauber’s musical practice in her personal, historical, and creative milieu for new audiences was made possible by Tauber’s family, Marianne, Christian, and Julian Ludwig, and Christian and Roswith Tauber, and especially, composer and independent researcher Vincent de Roguin.