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The Art of the Toy Piano 2
Margaret Leng Tan, toy pianos, toy instruments, piano, percussion, music boxes, voice. In addition to being a renowned new music pianist, Margaret Leng Tan is the foremost specialist at the toy piano. She has concertized worldwide with her miniature instruments, bestowing them with serious music status in repertoire both written for her and arrangements. For this disc of attractive yet challenging music, Ms. Tan performs Cage's classic 'Suite for Toy Piano' plus her arrangement of Cage's seminal…
Njinga: The Queen King – The Return of a Warrior
Written and Directed by IONE Original music and Sound by Pauline Oliveros Traditional Congolese Music by Titos Sompa Set and Costume Design by Valerie Maynard, Dance and Movement by Carol Chappell, Nego Gato, Biza Sompa and Titos Sompa, Traditional Brazilian Music and Dance by Nego Gato.
Njinga the Queen King is a collaborative effort between writer/director Ione and composer Pauline Oliveros, which they refer to as “a play with music and pageantry.” It is based on historica…
Maim (Water)
Maim, a major piece in Chaya Czernowin’s œuvre, is a large scale, 50-minute orchestral tryptch with 5 soloists. The 5 soloists are include regular interpreters of her music: Rico Gubler, tubax (a hybrid of a saxophone & tuba); Peter Veale, oboe & musette; John Mark Harris, piano & harpsichord; Seth Josel, guitars; Mary Oliver, viola. Maim, “water” in Hebrew, is the metaphor which dominates the piece. Elementary forms of water appear throughout Maim, musically translated. Scattered droplets — ar…
Works With Piano - Eonta
Pianist Aki Takahashi’s follows up her acclaimed first disc of Xenakis piano works (which won a "Diapason d’or" in France) with this second volume, of works for piano with instruments. She is joined by an all-star cast of players: Rohan de Saram (formerly of the Arditti Quartet), The JACK Quartet, and the Callithumpian Consort conducted by Stephen Drury. All works are underrepresented in current recordings or difficult to find at all. Included is the first new recording in over 10 years o…
Trio
The expansive length of Morton Feldman’s Trio (1 hr., 45 min., 22 sec.) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listener’s sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan…
The Minimalists
A two-CD set, and the lineup consists of Steve Reich (City Life) Terry Riley (In C) Louis Andriessen (Worker's Union) Kyle Gann (Sunken City) John Adams (Short Ride in a Fast Machine) David Lang (Street) "Orkest de Volharding, Jussi Jaatinen. In the spring of 1972, composer Louis Andriessen and saxophonist Willem Breuker brought together musicians from improvised and from traditional music, at a historical and tumultuous concert in the Amsterdam Carré theatre.They became the Orkest de Volharding…
Epigram And Evolution: Complete Piano Works
These piano pieces were written at every turning point in Roger Reynolds’ creative life, marking his evolution. The music is driven by relentless attacks toward catharsis, but also bittersweet chords, and trembling, rolling, wandering or sweeping masses of sound. We feel as though we are being pushed around by forces beyond human imagination. This sense of being carried away by an uninterrupted undercurrent may be the image of the world we live in. The featured pianists are the legendary Yuji Ta…
Responses To Ives
“Responses to Ives” was conceived in 2003 by pianist Heather O’Donnell as a way to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Charles Ives’s death (May 19, 2004). She approached composers spanning a generation, known to have strong affinities for Ives and asked them to write a “musical reflection” on the presence of Ives in their lives and work. The set was premiered at the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin in 2004 in the midst of a twelve hour extravaganza of Ives. In the months following repeat perform…
Complete String Quartets
Xenakis Edition Volume 10 - Complete String Quartets. On Surround Sound DVD only: The studio recording process was dynamically captured by a multiple camera shoot. Each quartet is given its own visual treatment. Filmed in High Definition Video, widescreen format. 48khz-24-bit high resolution 5.1 surround sound recording. 'Tetras' (1983). 'Tetora' (1990.) 'ST-4-1,080262' (1956-62). 'Ergma' (1994). The Jack Quartet: Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violins. John Pickford Richards, viola. Kevin…
33-127 for Electric Guitar and CD
From orchestral works to installations, Peter Ablinger's oeuvre explores the differences between reality and our perception of reality. In '33–127' for electric guitar and CD, Ablinger confronts the rational, human division of sound into musical scales with the complex acoustical reality of any given moment - its "noise." In each of the 95 pieces that make up 33–127, these two realities come face to face again and again. In each piece, a scale descends, with gentle and unpredictable irregulariti…
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs
A complete video realization by Don Gillespie, Roberta Friedman and Gene Caprioglio. John Cage's artwork, "49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs", appeared in the October 6, 1977 Rolling Stone magazine - a gala issue celebrating their move to New York. He constructed his "waltzes" through chance operations as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City. Later, he published a score for "performer(s) or listener(s) or record maker(s)" with the exact street l…
Electronic Works 2 - Hibiki Hana Ma; Polytope De Cluny
This volume collects two of Iannis Xenakis’ multi-channel works from the 1970s, along with a long-lost film soundtrack (on the DVD only). Restored from the best quality source materials. A new high-resolution transfer was created from the original analog master tape for Polytope De Cluny. Hibiki Hana Ma has been restored from the multi-track digital masters. (This is audio only on the DVD). Hibiki Hana Ma was created for the Expo 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, where it was experienced by …
Electronic Works 2
"Featured pieces" "Polytope de Cluny" (1972, for 8-channel tape); "Hibiki hana ma" (1969-70, for 16-channel tape); "Fer Chaud" (1957, original film soundtrack). "Mode continues its Iannis Xenakis Edition with the second volume dedicated to his electronic works, again restored from the best quality source materials. New high-resolution transfers were made of 'Polytope de Cluny' from the original analog master tapes. 'Hibiki hana ma' has been restored from the existing digital masters. 'Hibiki han…
Musica Da Camera: Ensemble Dissonanzen
The selections of chamber music on this CD by Hans Werner Henze (b.1926) tend toward his lyrical side, and with an emphasis on compositions derived from his theater pieces. The CD's repertoire especially suits the Naples-based Ensemble Dissonanzen, featuring the talents of its guitarist, Marco Cappelli. The 'Sonatina for Flute and Piano' was written in 1947, its style owing something to both Fortner (Henze's teacher in Heidelberg at this time) and Hindemith. 'Boulevard Solitude,' composed in 195…
Piano Sonatas
Chris Newman is a contemporary composer, painter, author and performance artist living in Berlin. This is the first recording of Newman’s Piano Sonatas, a large and important aspect to his work. The renowned British piano virtuoso and composer Michael Finnissy performs the four sonatas here. Newman and Finnissy have been collaborators for over a quarter century, ensuring definitive performances. Composer supervised recordings. Liner notes by the composer and Michael Finnissy. From 1976-79, C…
Cage Performs Cage
Empty Words (1973-74) with Music for Piano (1952-56). John Cage, voice. Yvar Mikhashoff, piano. One7 (1991) for any way of producing sounds. John cage, voice. Mode celebrates its 200th release with a special installment in its John cage Edition - works performed by John cage himself, released for the first time. These recordings were made in Buffalo, New York in April 1991. cage and Mode Records were in Buffalo to work on the premiere of his Europera 5, which he wrote for Yvar Mikhashoff, a long…
Silenced Voices
The Barton Workshop & others. Frank Denyer & James Fulkerson, music directors. 'Woman, Viola and Crow' (2004) with Elisabeth Smalt, muted viola, voice, percussion sounds. 'Two Beacons' (2005) with Harma Everts, voice; Boris Visser, muted violin; Rozemarie Heggen, muted double-bass; Neil Sorrell, sarangi; Tobias Liebezeit & Juan Martinez Cortès, percussion; Jos Zwaanenburg, Melkorta Olafsdottir, Ayano Akubo, flutes; Joeri de Vente, horn; Yula Andrews, Ella Dangerfield, Catherine Guy, Lucinda Guy,…
Kraanerg
Kraanerg (1968) for 23 instruments and 4-channel tape. Callithumpian Consort. Stephen Drury, conductor. First recording with restored analog tape. Kraanerg is one of Xenakis' most popular - and infamous - works. A visceral and highly charged score for woodwinds, brass, and strings along with quadrophonic tape. The title, Kraanerg, is a composite of two Greek words: 'kraan', meaning to perfect, to accomplish; and erg, signifying energy. Commissioned for the gala opening of the National Arts Centr…
The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan
10 years in the making, 2 films by Evans Chan trace the artist's life, career and pianism. Strumming the strings of a grand piano like a harp and performing Beethoven on toy piano are among the surprising scenes in Evans Chan's documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), which celebrates the trans-cultural career of Singapore-born, New York-based pianist Margaret Leng Tan, hailed by The New Yorker as 'the diva of avant-garde pianism.' Featured performers and critics include Joan LaBarbara, E…
The Number Pieces 5 - Two2
Laurel Karlik Sheehan gave the Canadian premiere of Two2 with Jack Behrens in 1990. Rob Haskins is a respected John Cage expert and scholar. Together they bring an authority and expertise to this performance of Two2. In most of the Number Pieces, all the performers have some freedom through Cage’s use of time brackets, flexible measures that show a range of possible starting and ending times. The time bracket system of notation used in these works allows a certain amount of flexibility in the p…