First Life: The Rare Early Works
Before the premiere of his legendary WPA political musical The Cradle Will Rock, and his opera Regina (based upon Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes), Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) produced striking chamber music that deserves a wider audience. Yet these scores, by the only American to study composition with both Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger, remain unpublished and rarely played over the past 80 years. Other Minds is pleased to introduce these forgotten treasures, an unknown aspect of Bli…
Ring of Fire
Home to earthquake swarms and volcanic eruptions, the countries of the Pacific Rim also produce some of the world’s most groundbreaking composers. San Francisco’s Del Sol String Quartet leads an inspiring seven- country tour. 20-page booklet essay by Charles Amirkhanian with photos. Works by: John Adams, Jack Body, Kui Dong, Gabriela Lena Frank, Hyo-shin Na, Peter Sculthorpe, Chinary Ung, and Zhou Long. Performed by the Del Sol String Quartet: Kate Stenberg, Rick Shinozaki, Charlton Lee, and Han…
Songs of Ned Rorem
Originally released on LP by Columbia Records in 1964, this album features some of the most outstanding soloists of the day: Charles Bressler, Phyllis Curtin, Gianna D’Angelo, Donald Gramm, and Regina Sarfaty, accompanied at the piano by the composer, Ned Rorem. The original recordings were digitized and re-mastered on a Sonic Solutions system to minimize tape hiss and other sound artifacts. The resulting clarity and brilliance far surpasses that of the original release offering a fresh look at …
Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound
Between 1920 and 1933, the American poet Ezra Pound composed two complete operas and several pieces for solo violin, all in a very personal language that drew from sources as diverse as troubadour music and Igor Stravinsky. The resulting body of music is of surpassing beauty and casts new light on the practice of prosody, the elusive craft of setting texts to music. The first and only available CD recording of its kind, Ego Scriptor Cantilenae features outstanding historical performances from En…
Antheil Plays Antheil: The Rare SPA Recordings and Private Audio Documents 1942-1958
The rare SPA recordings and private audio documents, 1943-1958. Composer George Antheil (1900-1959) is most remembered for his mechanistic piano music hailed by 1920s Paris, but by 1948, when he’d become the third most-played American-born composer of orchestral music, his style reflected a more emotional, more mature personality. This centennial collection highlights selections from Antheil’s later “neo-romantic” period and includes the only recordings of Antheil himself at the piano. A 60-page…
Lost Works, Last Works
Hidden treasure is always thrilling, particularly when it means recovering the forgotten works of a great artist. This historic CD offers a selection of previously unrecorded rarities by composer Conlon Nancarrow, including Piece for Tape, a dazzling rhythmic exercise in musique concrète. Listeners are also treated to the composer’s own recording of his study for prepared player piano, as well as a rare interview with the composer himself.
The Virtuoso Pianolist
This CD marks the first time that Igor Stravinsky’s own pianola version of his famous composition Les Noces has been released commercially. In addition, Rex Lawson’s ingenious arrangements of well-known classics, including Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Solomon, and the ballet Pineapple Poll by Sir Arthur Sullivan.
Chromatic Fields
Limited Edition of 50 numbered copies. Chromatic Fields by Jamie Crofts are compositions for piano that make use of the entire keyboard. Explorations of the expressive range and depth of the instrument taking a unique view of the instrument's sonic potential. Chromatic Fields is the fruit of a world of relationships. The relationships between the sound of a piano, the space of a blank page, silence and emptiness, color and sound.The chromatic sound fields of Jamie Crofts, the result of a profoun…
Música Callada / See the Welter
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and…
Stain Ballads
Four chamber works by the Toronto-based composer Martin Arnold, whose previous album ‘The Spit Veleta’ sold out last year. Beautifully played by Apartment House. "There are number of ways that the word 'ballad' could be applied to a lot of the music I make - clearly, I'm devoted to lyrical (if endlessly meandering) melodies, slow melodies that invoke a kind of vague, indistinct sentimentality. But it's significant to me that the word 'ballad' comes from the from Old French balade, from Provençal…
Explorations (1970 - 1973) 3CD Box
The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, "Explorations (1970 - 1973)" offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early 1970s.
Adagios From The Underground
In the Understage area of the Alexandra Trianti Hall, the musical saw in the hands of Nikos Giousef, and accompanied by piano, samplers and analog synthesizers, is transformed into a voice. 'An otherworldly child's voice', 'a Siren's voice' or 'a castrato voice', as it has been described, it easily climbs to tonic heights that the human voice can only reach with great effort. The pieces chosen for the program reflect this criterion, with works such as the aria 'Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott' from the …
Rise, Follow
* Edition of 200 * A composition for two bass Renaissance flutes. Performed by Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz. Rise, follow is a dialogue of long tones played by two bass Renaissance flutes, featuring subtle but persistent changes over the duration of one hour. It is performed in one sitting without interruption. The composition adopts the principle of instrumental ‘consort-style’ playing in Europe during the 16th century: a family of similarly pitched and constructed instruments performing polyp…
Prisma Interius VII & VIII
* Edition of 500 * In Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius series the unpredictability of the outside articulates the field of perception through precise bandpass filters, while acoustic instruments and musicians guide the unfolding of its harmonic space. A series of nine pieces exploring the potential of the Secondary Rainbow synthesizer, an instrument developed in 2016-2017 with Bryan Eubanks, that uses the live environment outside the performance space as a noise generator for basic subtractive s…
Gioseffo Zarlino - 2015/2019
* Edition of 500 * Marc Sabat's Gioseffo Zarlino is "the third in a series of pieces inspired by ideas in the history of music theory, which I seek to experience and unfold in a sounding world" (taken from the liner notes by the composer). In the piece, unfolding cyclically over 70 minutes, voices, strings, harp, and flute, weave through each other exploring a novel tonal space developed by the Renaissance Italian Composer-Theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino in 1558 and reinterpreted in the 21st Century …
Vortice Rosso
Putojefe Records is proud to present Vortice Rosso, the first album by Italian composer Flavio Bonometti: a tumultuous journey through the languages of the avant-garde masterfully synthesized in 12 pieces of contemporary classical. After a brilliant career as a violist at La Scala Theatre in Milan and in many other orchestras, Flavio Bonometti gave up the stage to dedicate himself exclusively to his music. The tracks of Vortice Rosso, produced and recorded over the last 10 years, are born from t…
Cleopatra's Songs
“Give me some music!” These words from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which open Cleopatra’s Songs, seem particularly well chosen to characterize Agata Zubel’s relationship to music. Music: a vital need, a thirst, but also something that you give.
This portrait album with three major works, performed by leading ensembles, including the Klangforum Wien and Ensemble intercontemporain, follows her receipt of the Erste Bank Kompositionspreis in 2018.
The Arrow Of Time
We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into …
These Are the Generations
The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b 1954). These are the generations... is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol'd'ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth verse of the first book (B'rey'sheet) of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky's Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels.
The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky's musical …
Seven Deserts
Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. Seven Deserts (2019), rather than operating from a fixed narrative structure with predetermined events, lays out the ground rules for a manifestation that is absolutely identical in every performance in its operations and sonic vocabulary, but with ea…