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…
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…
Number Pieces 4
The first recording of John Cage’s large scale composition for 3 recorder players. The Trio Dolce wrote Cage for permission to perform Solo with Obbligato Accompaniment on three alto recorders, one octave higher than the prescribed range. In a letter from March 1987 Cage replied: “Of course you may use the 3 alto recorders. I am glad that you are playing that piece.” They performed it on July 1988 with Cage in attendance. Cage’s enthusiastic reaction to this performance encouraged Trio Dolce t…
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…
Tracer - Chamber Works 1952-1999
Surround sound DVD. Earle Brown first encountered the work of Alexander Calder in 1948, whose mobile sculptures Brown saw as a visual embodiment of the variable (impermanent) aesthetic that he was striving to create. This Calder aesthetic stayed with Brown throughout his several stylistic shifts. Whether he was writing twelve-tone serial music (Music for Violin, Cello, and Piano), conceptual graphic scores (Folio and Four Systems), composed material open form scores (String Quartet, New Piece an…
The Art of the Curved Bow, Vol. 1
The Curved Bow, or BACH Bow, gives string-players the unique ability to play up to all four strings simultaneously — an impossibility with today's bow. Some believe that the curved bow was used during Bach's time, in the 20th century it was championed by the likes of Albert Schweitzer. It is a device with incredible potential for new and old repertoire, shedding new musical light on the works in which it is employed. Michael Bach has been playing with the curved bow for many years, continually d…
Wolpe in Jerusalem
** 2021 Stock. Deluxe packaging in slipcase, including essays by Austin Clarkson and Yuval Shaked, and historical photos. Liner notes in English, German, French and Hebrew ** In 1931, Stefan Wolpe escaped from the growing Nazi threat, eventually arriving in Vienna to study with Anton Webern. When the Austrian authorities threatened to deport him back to Germany, he left and eventually settled in Jerusalem in 1934 where he began to teach composition and direct the choir at the Palestine Conservat…
The Echoing Green
** 2021 Stock ** Like Morton Feldman, whose music he acknowledges as an influence Walter Zimmermann (b.1949) is fascinated by the relationship between painting and music, and how material of an apparently simple nature played by apparently “normal” instruments is capable of almost infinite subtlety. Frankfurt’s HCD Ensemble are also members of Germany’s infamous Ensemble Modern. They are joined here by the superb violinist Peter Rundel and cellist Michael Bach. Wüstenwanderung [Wandering in the …
Final Fragments - Piano Music of David Kotlowy
** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** By the time I landed in Adelaide somewhere in the mid 1990s, to complete my secondary schooling and get the hell out of dodge – the tiny country hamlet that I’d been living in, in the northern parts of the Upper Hunter in New South Wales, at the foot of the Barrington Tops – I’d already been indoctrinated into a set of ideals through my reading, listening, and the questionable guidance of a few family members. Foremost was a kind of id…
Idle Hands - Music of Luke Altmann
Comes in a four panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany with Professor Tibor Szasz. In 2008, Konstantin won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. Konstantin has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, O…
La Terre et le Feu
** 2021 Stock ** This disc of French composer Joël-François Durand’s music amplifies his ongoing interest in the classical ‘four elements’: air, earth, fire and water. World class performers include the London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Pierre-André Valade, and renowned Swedish organist Hans-Ola Ericcsson. The oboe concerto, La terre et le feu features a hallmark of Durand’s work: rising figures that gradually strain upwards. The work consists of an introduction and four prin…
Out of Chaos
** 2021 Stock ** An American who came of age in the late 1980s, Jason Eckardt’s music captures the essences of the genres that led him first to performance (as a guitarist), and then to composition: heavy metal and art rock, jazz, gagaku and p’ansori, the Second Viennese School, American post-serialism, and the new complexity. It evokes the power of inspired, virtuosic improvisation, the incisiveness of classical ensemble playing, and the raw expressivity of ethnic music. The first complete CD o…
Labyrinthe de Minotaur
** 2021 Stock ** French composer Alain Bancquart (b.1934) is one of the leading composers of microtonal music in Europe. Labyrinthe du Minotaur explores the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinthe. This large scale piece constantly delves into microtonal and harmonic relationships together with a lyrical polyphony. It is based on texts by his wife, author Marie-Claire Bancquart. The unusual instrumental ensemble incorporates (in addition to the above musicians): pianos in quarter- and sixteenth-…
Shadow of an Idea
The influence of two American composers – John Cage and Morton Feldman – has been decisive on Walter Zimmermann. With Cage, it was his music from the late forties – works like the String Quartet, the Suite for Toy Piano and the Six Melodies – that caught his attention: works underpinned by precise numerical construction, yet with an engaging directness of expression. Feldman has been an inspiration to Zimmermann’s lyrical impetus, and Cage to his constructivist urges. Yet the two do not always …
Another Sunrise
** 2021 Stock ** Peter Garland’s music is uniquely American; a blend of minimalism with influences from South/Central America, Asia and the Native Americans; along with American mavericks John Cage, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Edgar Varèse. Born in 1952, he studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney. The works on this record share a special meditative, and at times ecstatic, spirituality. Garland has a long artistic association with the performers on this disc. Essential Music’s…
Look She Said (Complete Works For Bass)
** 2021 Stock ** “The double-bass – the paradox of its large size and basically quiet sound, and its low registral grounding – has long attracted me. I’ve also been fortunate in knowing outstanding double-bass players.” – Christian Wolff This disc collects all of Wolff’s large body of works for the bass, including a piece for solo electric bass guitar. Two of the works were written specifically for Robert Black, who prepared these pieces with Wolff. The composer attended all of the recordings se…
Octet • Music For A Large Ensemble • Violin Phase
*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…
NuDaf
A 65-minute electroacoustic composition featuring Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon. NuDaf (2020) is the second longest piece in Phill Niblock's repertoire of recorded audio works. NuDaf is a departure from his previous pieces in that he makes extensive use of multiphonics and constructed the work with fewer tracks than usual, creating uniquely transparent and ephemeral textures. The piece is the result of a collaboration between Niblock and the stellar bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. Her music…
In Memoriam Paul Zukofsky
** 2021 Stock ** CP² Recordings presents In Memoriam Paul Zukofsky. This album presents the last music program designed by the late violinist/conductor Paul Zukofsky. Both Monkeys At Play and Josef Hauer’s Zwölftonspiel are first recordings. The program served as his New York memorial concert in 2017 played by pianists Aaron Likness and Andrew Zhou. All recordings were made at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, NY on August 22-24, 2019, recorded and edited by Ryan Streber, mastered by Ian Turner.
Ch…
Shapey - Riegger - Piston - Crumb - Sollberger - Berger
** 2021 Stock ** CP² Recordings presents Shapey - Riegger - Piston - Crumb - Sollberger - Berger. Ralph Shapey: (1921-2002) Evocation For Violin, Piano, And Percussion; with Raymond Desroches, percussion; Publisher: Theodore Presser Co. Wallingford Riegger: (1885-1961) Sonatina; Publisher: E. B. Marks Music Corporation. Walter Piston: (1894-1976) Sonatina; Publisher: Boosey and Hawkes, Inc. George Crumb: (1929-) Night Music Ii; Publisher: C.F. Peters, Inc. Harvey Sollberger: (1938-) Solos; with …