Andreas Grün takes the stage with an air of calm assurance — relaxed, yet never careless; focused, yet never tense. This is already evident in the remarkable subtlety of his touch: sensitive fingers that seem scarcely to brush the strings, yet draw from the warmly resonant instrument a maximum of nuance. Added to this is a left-hand technique of astonishing virtuosity.
Just how astonishing became clear at the very outset, in his interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Lute Suite in G minor (BWV 995): a sequence of seven dance movements filled with demanding chords and intricate harmonic progressions, as well as trills and turns. Grün not only structured the work with lucid logic, but also infused it with almost Romantic shades of mood.
From Bach, Andreas Grün stepped back two centuries into the Renaissance to pay homage to one of the great composers and virtuosos of his instrument, the Italian Francesco da Milano. He did so with a vibrant — and correspondingly sculpted — sequence of ricercari and fantasias.
The seasoned concert guitarist and sensitive musician was revealed in Grün’s interpretation of the Suite op. 164 by the Viennese composer Ernst Krenek: a complex work full of subtle contrasts, incorporating elements of jazz and the twelve-tone system, even as its harmonies repeatedly suggest classical structures. This reading displayed not only the intellect of the trained musicologist, but above all the soul of the artist — whose intuitive understanding made Krenek’s music tangible even to the uninitiated listener.

Südwest Presse

This performer did not astonish the audience with bravura passages or especially rapid tempi, but offered profound pleasure through thoughtfully shaped phrasing, logical dynamics, and a keen sense of musical form and style. The guitarist’s performance can be summed up in two epithets — cultivated artistry and academic refinement.

Lietuvos Rytas

Andreas Grün impressed his audience with the soft yet remarkably clear tone of his guitar. In the precise articulation of the individual voices, the soloist left nothing to be desired.

Pforzheimer Zeitung

In this respect, Andreas Grün proved to be the ideal partner: he exercised all the necessary restraint, yet at the same time brought out the full range of the guitar’s expressive possibilities, contributing a wealth of color and subtle effects. He most aptly complemented the flute’s limited register, as though he had taken up and continued its impulses. The result was a finely balanced chamber-music partnership

Freudenstädter Kreiszeitung

Andreas Grün demonstrated a quality rare among guitarists: the ability to play with absolute rhythmic precision and to suppress completely the extraneous noises so often heard. At the same time, his tone remained present and richly satisfying in timbre. The ensemble playing of the two artists was marked by an effortless unanimity, even in the most difficult tempi and rhythms and in every nuance, including the most subtly implied modifications. … Thus the two musicians — performing without any trace of star affectation yet at the highest artistic level — blended in their playing as if cast from a single mould, creating music of youthful vitality that, in its unaffected simplicity, its commitment and the sincerity of its expression, carried the audience to prolonged applause.

Südwest Presse

Under the motto Zeitenwende – Wendezeiten (“Turning of the Times — Times of Turning”), the Karlsruhe guitarist and composer Andreas Grün juxtaposed works of German Romanticism with compositions of the immediate present in his recital. The result was an evening whose intelligent program dramaturgy opened up unexpected perspectives and, above all, offered food for thought — it was exciting to experience how “old” and “new” illuminated one another, revealing unexpected and almost secret connections across different periods and styles.
Heinrich Marschner’s Zwölf Bagatellen, op. 4, divided into three sections, ran like a red thread through the entire program. From these often underestimated pieces — in the strict sense the only genuinely Romantic compositions for solo guitar — to which Andreas Grün lent an astonishing richness of color and nuance, the remaining works of the evening, all composed in the 1990s, differed in a variety of ways. The recurring reference to Marschner naturally suggested the intriguing question of whether “Romantic” elements might still hold significance in contemporary composition.
The Karlsruhe composer Stephan Marc Schneider offered a distinctly affirmative and sonority-centered response with his piece Je suis encore un chêne, whose title alludes to Jean Anouilh’s interpretation of one of La Fontaine’s fables. (Even a cursory glance at the score confirms this, with performance indications such as “mit Stolz und Schmerz” [with pride and pain], “verlöschend” [fading away], or “Melodie aus der Ferne, sehr dünn und zart” [melody from afar, very thin and delicate].) Andreas Grün’s interpretation — particularly in the central section, which contained moments of rare enchantment — brought this expressive and gestural character of the music vividly to the fore, making clear that looking back need not mean regression.
The true center of the program, however, was a composition by Andreas Grün himself, whose title (Die Hölderlin-Vertonungen des Josquin Desprez — The Hölderlin Settings of Josquin Desprez) encapsulated the evening’s motto — the interpenetration of different eras — with gentle irony. (Josquin died in 1521, almost exactly 250 years before Hölderlin’s birth.) The movements, consistently extremely slow and reduced to the simplest melodic gestures, unfolded from the initial monophony into an increasingly dense polyphonic network. Their inward circling and uniformity of motion generated a sonic magic whose gravitational pull entered into a remarkable dialogue with the works of art by Armin Goeck displayed in the exhibition space. The program concluded with Detlev Glanert’s 1994 composition Paralipomena — Seven Pieces for Guitar on a Tale by Novalis, which carried the reference to the overarching theme already in its title and added a further Romantic dimension to the evening — that of outward virtuosity.

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