Carl Rütti (b.1949)
Carl Rütti was born in 1949 and grew up in Zug, Switzerland. As a boy he
played the violin and the piano. At the monastery boarding school of Engelberg,
he had the opportunity to study Gregorian chant and the organ, and to sing in
the choir, first as a treble, then as a baritone. Besides this he learnt the
trombone and played in a military band. He liked the jazz style very much and
experimented with it on various instruments. After leaving school he studied
piano with Sava Savoff and organ with Erich Vollenwyder at the Zürich
Conservatoire, leaving there in 1975 with a Solisten-Diplom in both instruments.
1976 was the ‘London year‘: Carl studied piano with Kendall
Taylor and organ with Richard Latham. He went to many concerts and was
especially fascinated by the quality of English choir singing. On Sundays he
went to church at Brompton Oratory, enjoying the very high standard of the
church music there. He also remembers a lunch-time concert given by the BBC
Singers in which Scarlatti’s 10-part Stabat Mater impressed him deeply. This
inspired him to write music for a cappella choir: the seven motets on poems by
R. M. Rilke for 10-part choir and soloists, Buch der Bilder, were written
between 1976 and 1978. They were recorded in 1979 by the Brompton Oratory Choir
directed by John Hoban, and appeared as a record in a bibliophile cassette with
woodprints on the same Rilke poems by the Swiss painter Peter Wullimann.
This record was broadcast on Radio de la Suisse Romande, and, as a result,
Carl Rütti was commissioned to write a Missa brevis, by the Maîtrise de
Fribourg, and later a Magnificat, by the Choir of the Radio de la Suisse Romande.
In 1982 the BBC Singers under Simon Joly recorded and produced the Rilke motets,
followed by the Missa brevis and the Magnificat in 1984. At that time the Missa
brevis was without a ‘Gloria‘ and the Magnificat without a ‘Nunc dimittis‘; the
BBC Singers encouraged him to add them.
Ian Moore heard the BBC Singers‘ broadcast of the Missa brevis on BBC Radio
3, and tried hard to find out about its composer. In 1990 he met him through the
Propstei St. Gerold in Austria, and since then they have been working together
very well. Cambridge Voices gave first performances of the Gloria of the Missa
brevis in 1991, the Christmas piece O magnum mysterium for Austrian television (broadcast
on Christmas Eve 1992), the Nunc dimittis, and many other works of his,
including The Moon, and Ite missa est (suggested by Ian Moore), which turned the
Missa brevis into the Missa Angelorum.
Some of the pieces were especially written for Cambridge Voices. They also
first performed the seven Songs of Love in Trinity College Chapel for the 1994
Cambridge Summer Recitals series, and toured with them to Switzerland and
Austria.
The BBC Symphony Chorus, directed by Stephen Jackson, made a CD on the ASV
label in 1995, including the Missa Angelorum, Magnificat, Nunc dimittis, Alpha
et Omega, and O magnum mysterium.
Besides composing, Carl Rütti has a career as a pianist. His Stundenbuch for
piano solo was broadcast by the BBC and by Classic FM in 1993. Carl is married
and the father of two boys. He lives in Unterägeri, near Zug, between Zürich and
Lucerne, teaches piano at the Conservatoire in Zürich an is the organist of St
Peter and St Paul in Oberägeri.
Carl Rütti on Guild
Music
Page revised Monday August 24 2009
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