Chanson
2019 release ** "Rippling piano lines fill the air, once again rethinking the possibly of what contemporary Italian music is and was."
Nachschriften / Ländler
Nachschriften: A set of 26 short pieces that cycle through all the major and minor tonalities, Nachschriften are a series of reflections and variations on themes - sometimes, variations on variations. For the most part they are simple dances - minuets, mazurkas, waltzes and ländler. Ländler: The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more red…
Atwain
*250 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based guitarist/composer Taku Sugimoto and cellist/composer Stefan Thut, who lives in Solothurn, Switzerland, have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Japan. Their duo CD "Taku Sugimoto / Stefan Thut," which was released on the Ftarri label in 2018, was highly praised. The new duo CD by Sugimoto and Thut, "atwain," documents their performance of a single 39-minute work on the riverside in Solothurn in …
Music For Two Exits
*200 copies limited edition* Jun-Y Ciao (born in 1978 in Shanghai) is a musician whose main instruments are sax and clarinet. Having studied in Dusseldorf and Mainz, Germany, in the second half of the 2000s, he is currently based in Shanghai and Dusseldorf. He has numerous releases on Zhu Wenbo's cassette label Zoomin' Night. Beijing-based Zhu Wenbo is known both for his own performance activities and for running Zoomin' Night, which plans events and releases cassettes. A musician with many conn…
Listen! MadeRadioArt Anthology
A dismal moment, try not to think about it so many of us, so restless, a dull chapter worth skipping, mind numbing. Constantly talking, when all we really wanted to do was… As usual perhaps, daily impressions of unremitting danger make people seek refuge in futile obsessions with furniture, food and clothing. Endless words, irritating until we stopped saying them, then sorely missed. A conjunction of multiple evils that could have been avoided, had it only been seen as profitable to do so. Naggi…
OSTN
In the proposed version, for vibraphone and tape, I attempted to enter Pietro Grossi’s sound spectrum of six Ostinati (OSTN) intended as moving soundscapes, maintaining the specific grain of each field as the centre of sound gravity. The vibraphone motor was conceived at different speeds for each field in the search for a vibrant and luminous sound, maintaining, within a sound unit of organic character, two dimensions: figure and background in the dialectic relationship of listening.
In the firs…
The Rain Traces Its Outline
*250 copies limited edition* Composer Taizo Hida was born in 1972 and lives in Osaka. In 2022, the album "of rain," in which pianist Satoko Inoue performs compositions by Hida, was released on Ftarri Classical and received high praise. Two new albums have been issued simultaneously on Ftarri Classical in order to showcase the richness of Taizo Hida's creations. One of these is the CD The Rain Traces Its Outline.
“The Rain Traces Its Outline” is a work for piano that Hida completed in 2023. It wa…
Yunagi
*250 copies limited edition* Composer Taizo Hida was born in 1972 and lives in Osaka. In 2022, the album of rain, in which pianist Satoko Inoue performs compositions by Hida, was released on Ftarri Classical and received high praise. Two new albums have been issued simultaneously on Ftarri Classical in order to showcase the richness of Taizo Hida’s creativity. One of these is the CD Yunagi.
The CD consists of five tracks, "Yunagi 1" to "Yunagi 5." Hida composed "Yunagi 1" in June of 2020. He lat…
La Chambre Des Jeux Sonores
2014 release ** "Alessandra Novaga plays the electric guitar and this is her solo debut, with five songs composed for her by Paula Matthusen, Travis Just, Sandro Mussida, Vittorio Zago and Francesco Gagliardi: all top-notch musicians, who left in Alessandra's hands scores that were very little "classical" on which she was able to give space to her personality by interpreting and shaping the sound. Because the sound is the basis of the whole album, in this case that of an electric guitar and an a…
Give It To The Sky: Arthur Russell's Tower Of Meaning Expanded
*2025 stock* Erased Tapes releasex ‘Give It to the Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded’ by composer and producer Peter Broderick and French 12-piece group Ensemble 0; a complete re-recording of Russell’s epic minimalist orchestral composition originally released in 1983. ‘Give It to the Sky’ also includes unreleased tracks by Russell which have been restored and re-recorded, resulting in an 80-minute reanimation that threads several lost songs into a meticulous and gorgeous rendering…
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Tombstones II
After a first album made up of 11 pieces from Tombstones by Michael Pisaro-Liu — works with delicate tones and dusty melodies that wrap us in an intimate atmosphere — the musicians of the Muzzix collective, brought together under the direction of Barbara Dang, present this second recording, which completes the entire collection. This new opus continues the sonic exploration: timbres become more diverse, textures thicken, and silence — in its rawest materiality or its faintest breaths — becomes a…
The Redness of Blood
Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.The pieces on this disc make for in…
In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World
The music on this recording is drawn from a range of solo, chamber, and orchestral works composed by Brian Fennelly (b 1937) over a period of two decades. In his thirty-year career, Fennelly has contributed more than sixty works to the repertoire of twentieth-century music. His most significant teachers were Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Gunther Schuller, George Perle, and Allen Forte.
The works presented here make use of a variety of harmonic systems: the complex and sophisticated serialism of In…
Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra
Gary Graffman and I have been staunch friends since we met as students at the Curtis Institute in 1943. The notion of pooling our talents, however, arose only when we returned to that Institute nearly five decades later, Gary as director, I on the faculty. Now Gary, who has not made professional use of his right hand since 1980, felt an urge to expand the admirable but restricted literature of left-hand works (most of them composed long ago for the elder brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstei…
Dream Sequence (Chamber Music)
Andrew Imbrie (b 1921) is a composer whose independence and singularity of purpose have endowed a prodigious output that awaits wider discovery. His method of composing is not in and of itself remarkable. He is, rather, of a tradition wherein achievement is measured in terms of individuality, depth of expression, and craft.
His music reveals a preoccupation with line, which in turn generates form, harmony and color. Line also motivates the forward motion and energy that characterizes so much of…
Over The Edge
Eric Chasalow (b 1955), who grew to aesthetic maturity as Postmodernism was evolving, points (not at all surprisingly) to jazz as part of the family tree. In 1983, Chasalow created a set of three works for soloist and electronic sounds. The composer fashioned each, for cello, for soprano, and for flute, with particular accomplished performers in mind, taking his inspiration, he says, "from their personal styles and energy."
Chasalow composed Hanging in the Balance (1983) for the redoubtable cell…
Wes York
In a robustly maximalist age that gladly permits the fusion of unrelated styles and the flaunting of eclecticism, Wes York's (b 1949) music stands out as reductive, elliptical, elusive, implying diversity rather than spelling it out. It is a music that is unusual in its reconciliation of what had previously seemed two incompatible forms of Minimalism: the propulsive, harmony-and-rhythm driven sort pioneered by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and the more mysterious and intangible ways of Morton F…
American Works For Balinese Gamelan Orchestra
This recording is the product of a remarkable intercultural musical experiment. It contains five strikingly varied works, each one the fruit of musical cross-pollination between America and the island of Bali. The three American composers represented here－Evan Ziporyn, Michael Tenzer and Wayne Vitale, along with their peers in the Sekar Jaya ensemble－have, since 1979, devoted an extraordinary amount of effort, intelligence, and talent to the study and performance of traditional Balinese music. T…
Portraits and other Works
Virgil Thomson's piano music can best be described as pure direct American plainsong. Hymn tunes get transposed, rhythms overturn or collide, often with comic results; cowboy songs turn into fugues. Thomson made use of all materials, from Sunday School ditties he learned as a child in Kansas City, to the tangos he heard in Paris in the Twenties, to the counterpoint of his formal musical education. Thomson's portraits often have the feeling of line drawings by a visual artist. This is because he …
Doppio Concertino / Flamenco Cyclothymia / Concerto For String Orchestra / Piano Quartet
Carlos Surinach (b 1915) is an American composer whose Spanish heritage, together with the rigors of German musical training, has enabled him to produce an oeuvre that "achieves an effect of novelty by exploiting all the familiar clichés of the `Spanish idiom' with new technical resources and with a completely non-impressionistic sensibility," as Gilbert Chase wrote in Music of Spain.
Like Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, the Doppio Concertino (Double Concerto) of 1954 is basically neocla…