Complete Cello Works
This first complete recording of Roger Reynolds' cello works is being released to celebrate the composer's 80th birthday. This special 2-CD set contains many first recordings. French cellist Alexis Descharmes and Reynolds have a close artistic relationship which led to this composer supervised set. Alexis Descharmes is an internationally regarded musician and specialist in contemporary music. He has worked with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Alternance and Ensemble Court-circuit…
Fleurs d'X
Fabio Selvafiorita is a composer known to the public of experimental music for his massive musique-concrete work Death by Water composed with Valerio Tricoli. This CD is neither musique concrete or “extreme” experimental music: it's a CD of music for solo classical guitar. Consistent to the baroque guitar literature and its short musical forms, Fleurs d'X consists of musics written for a bard of an imaginary future kingdom's court. This is the best way to imagine this astonishing collection of m…
Anfangen (:Aufhoren)
2013 release **"A split disc with five compositions by Stiegler and two by Ablinger, each performed by some combination of violin (Sabine Akiko Ahrendt), cello (Jan-Filip Tupa) and clarinet (Diego Montes). I think I'd only heard Stiegler's work before in conjunction with Hannes Seidl on their early Wandelweiser release, "das wetter in offenbach". Here, he evinces a rather playful approach, especially in the two "Treibut" (flotsam) pieces, 1/2 (2011) and II (2009); playful but with a nicely bitte…
Oyvind Fahlstrom on the Air - Manipulating the World
Enclosed in a 336 pages book published by Sveriges Radios Förlag (ISBN: 91-522-1817-1). It is written in Swedish and English by Teddy Hultberg. The CD's were released by Fylkingen Records only together with the book. The book itself is enclosed in a slipcover. The Swedish texts on the recordings are translated into English in the book. "Birds In Sweden" (1963) was produced by Öyvind Fahlström in collaboration with sound engineer Erik Winlöf at the Swedish Radio studios in the second half of 1962…
s/t
Die Schachtel, for voices, chamber orchestra & tape by Franco Evangelisti / Performer: Valentina Barbarini, Elena Sorbi, / Conductor: Marco Angius / Orchestra: Ensemble Prometeo. Written in 1962-1963 and performed at the Lenz Teatro di Parma. 27’ 4’’.
Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 by Arnold Schoenberg / Conductor: Marco Angius/ Orchestra: Ensemble Prometeo/ Written in 1912 in Wien. Performed at Auditorium Paganini di Parma. 3’ 21’’.
Chamber Works 1992 - 2009
Chamber Works 1992–2009 showcases the breadth and quirks of British composer Laurence Crane over fourteen pieces for chamber ensemble, composed across nearly two decades and interpreted by Apartment House. Crane’s language thrives on the surface simplicity of steady rhythms and legible harmonies - progressions often cycle between just two chords, melodies unfold in minimal, singing arcs. But beneath the façade, odd details and playful subversions quietly destabilize any sense of predictability: …
Ensemble Works 3
'Palimpsest' (1979) for piano & ensemble. Cory Smythe, piano. 'Echange' (1989) for bass-clarinet & ensemble. Joshua Rubin, bass-clarinet. 'Akanthos' (1977) for soprano & ensemble. Tony Arnold, soprano. 'Thalleïn' (1984) for 16 instruments. 'O-Mega' (1997) for percussion & ensemble. Steven Schick, percussion & conductor. Steven Schick, conductor. 'Zythos' (1996) for trombone & 6 marimbas. Benny Sluchin, trombone.
An exhilarating Xenakis progran, built around works for soloist and ensemble. Most…
Onsets
Ici-bas' (2009) for ensemble & electronic sound. Hyperion Ensemble with members of Talea and the Bergersen Quartet. Tim Hodgkinson, conductor. 'Ulaaraar' (2005) for bass clarinet & strings. Tim Hodgkinson, bass clarinet and conductor. Ioan Marius Lacraru, Cornelia Petroiu, violas. Theodor Iancu, Andrei Kivu, cellos. Ion and Ciprian Ghita, basses. Anon, small gong. 'Amhas/Nirriti' [2001) for ensemble & electronic sound. Hyperion Ensemble. Tim Hodgkinson, conductor. 'Jo-Ha-Kyu' (2000-2010) for str…
Visitazioni
Two works from different periods come together in this "case-book": Ora (1997/2001) and Visitazioni (2011/ 2013). Times ... ways ... experiences intersect. Ora is a single stream of sounds and silences of 120 minutes. It can be "healed" (replaced) according to the feel of the listener. Its division into sections - like the same graphic score - have this unique feature. Headphone listening at a low volume is absolutely privileged. Visitazioni, referring to similar principles but changing the ways…
Pneuma
Pneuma presents five distinctive pieces by British composer Martin Iddon, performed by specialist new music ensembles. The set includes “pneuma.sarx” for Trio Atem (flute, voice, cello), “pneuma.kharis” (flute, cello, voice), “Danaë” (solo piano, Catherine Laws), and two works for larger instrumentations. Iddon’s music occupies unique territory, weaving together sparse, breathy textures and sudden shifts in color and gesture, drawing frequent reference to medieval and early Renaissance models - …
The Works for Organ
This release is the first complete recording of all of Cage's works for organ, plus 4'33' (on the DVD version only). Gary Verkade, organ of Gammelstad Church, Sweden. 'Some of 'The Harmony of Maine' (Supply Belcher)' (1976). 'Souvenir' (1984). 'ASLSP' (1985). 'Organ2ASLSP' (1987). Bonus Track on DVD only: 4'33' (1952). The organ is ideally suited to Cage's aesthetic - its multitude of stops make it the ultimate 'prepared' instrument. The fact that sound emanates from a number of pipes placed at …
Violin & Orchestra
Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Here she turns her attention to one of the pivotal compositions of Morton Feldman. Violin and Orchestra, composed in 1979, marked a new direction, with an almost painterly attention to detail in slowly unfolding music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In t…
Clouds and Sky
Clouds and sky (2010), for piano and orchestra. Jan-Philip Schulze, piano. WDR Sinfonie-Orchester. Peter Rundel. 'rota' (2008) for contrabass-clarinet & string quartet. Gareth Davis, contrabass clarinet. The JACK Quartet. 'red and blue' (1999) for percussion sextet. Ensemble S. 'a self-same song' (2010) for contrabass-clarinet solo. Gareth Davis, contrabass-clarinet. Johannes Schöllhorn (b.1962), is a student of Ferneyhough, Huber and Nunes, and is among Germany's leading younger generat…
The chord catalogue / Within fourths/Within fifths
2013 release **
"The Chord Catalogue is sort of a sister to Music for 88. It is also an examination of pianistic possibilities done with a focus so tight that obscuring any intrinsic aesthetic qualities in the execution seems to be the intention. (Also like Music for 88, Johnson recorded the piece for Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia imprint). Beginning with “The 78 Two-Note Chords” (the section titling further eliminates risk of artistic suggestion), the set of pieces exhausts its way th…
Lost in dreams - works for piano
2013 release **
"Lost In Dreams comprises six pieces - Traumverloren I Für Klavier (2010), unfurling for over 30 minutes, its duration suited to Houben's clarifying this soft insistence embedded within mere repetition; and five dedicatory pieces of much shorter duration, bearing the titles in memoriam - Mussorgsky, Enescu, Schumann, Liszt and Messiaen. These brief epitaths privilege the presence of silence as much as any of Houben's works, with a surprisingly spry turn in the Enescu piece, sound…
YZ3Z2Z1S2, a Five-Letter Sufi Word
"My second complete Sufi word -- or cycle -- consists of five contrasting letters -- or movements -- calling for various combinations of soloists [2, 3, 4, 5], instrumental ensemble [1, 3, 5], and real-time electronics [2, 4, 5]. It confidently extends a global poetic design made of a quest for meaning, a taste for extraordinary adventures, an interest in the perfume of mystical ecstasy, and the pleasure of carefully sculpting the time and shapes that make up writing." Jean-Luc Fafchamps i…
8 duos
Born in 1934, Christian Wolff is the last surviving member of the group of composers that also included Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, which gathered around John Cage in New York in the 1950s. Wolff's own music has remained faithful to that Cageian experimental tradition ever since, and the eight works for pairs of instrumentalists here show how, in the right hands, the varying degrees of freedom his works allow their interpreters can produce astonishingly beautiful results. The common denomina…
The People United Will Never Be Defeated
Frederic Rzewski’s work “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” is based on the Chilean protest song, “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!,” written by Sergio Ortega a few months before Pinochet’s military coup in September of 1973.Frederic Rzewski came to Europe as a young man, lived in Cologne and Rome, and created a sensation as an avant-garde pianist with his premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Klavierstück X”. He worked with the leading composers of the time and was himself a composer.…
Szenen, standbilder. works 1991 – 2009
German composer Michael Reudenbach's works and studies from 1991-2009 are presented in a six-panel digipack with a 22-page booklet of notes, images and photos
In the Beginning
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer/performer known as a pioneer in American experimental music. This series of eight works, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrates a remarkable extension of Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock… series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and sub-harmonic series.
The In the Beginning series exemplifies the idea of model-building as a compositional process. A simple process is def…