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…
Piano Works
Apart from musical considerations, it is entirely appropriate that the work of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) stands beside the compositions of three younger Americans on this program of recorded premieres. By example and deed, Bernstein served like no other major American artist as a true role model for at least a couple of generations of aspiring musicians in this country. Moreover, his eclecticism as a composer and performer exemplified the polyglot nature of the arts in America.
Among the com…
Songs, Capriccios, and Octoechoes
Michelle Ekizian (b 1956) and Louis Karchin (b 1951) represent a generation of American composers that has seen postwar American serialism enriched by other compositional approaches, both new and old. The process of stylistic synthesis and individualization, evidenced in the works presented here and in others, continues unabated today.
Written in between the first and second installments of her ongoing orchestral cycle, The Exiled Heart Series, which now includes “The Exiled Heart” (1986), “Morn…
Winter Pages, Bright Music
Ned Rorem's music strives for clarity. He distrusts the convoluted, the pompous, the grandiose. To some degree this is a legacy of his years in Paris and his exposure to figures such as Poulenc, Auric, and Cocteau. However, Rorem treated the neoclassical aesthetic not with French irony and emotional distance, but with American openness and first-name intimacy, adding clarity of emotional expression to intelligibility of means. Winter Pages and Bright Music exemplify Rorem's subtle, direct style …
Chamber Works
The woodwind quintet is to the wind instruments as the string quartet is to the strings. Composers have treated the heterogenous ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn as a unity for so long now that it has become a musical commonplace. The challenge in composing for the woodwind quintet is to weave a consistent musical fabric while respecting the disparate characters of the five instruments. The four composers represented on this recording meet this challenge with imagination and …
H'un (Lacerations) And Other Works
The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…
Works By John Harbison And Ezra Laderman
Eclectic but distinctively original, John Harbison's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra reflects an artist of deep sensibility and training. Harbison (b 1938) is a recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and has received commissions from numerous ensembles and foundations. The brittleness sometimes found in Harbison's harmonic language bears the imprint of Roger Sessions, with whom he studied at Princeton; yet the lyricism of Harbison's melodic line is very much his own, a quality strikingly apparent…
Paula Robison, Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, Solisti New York, Alasdair Neale, Brian Zeger, Douglas Webster, Robert Beaser, Paul Schoenfield, Joseph Schwantner
FlutesIn 1986, three composers and three flutists met in a novel commissioning project supported by a National Endowment Consortium Commissioning Grant. Flutists Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, and Paula Robison, each a longtime supporter and performer of new music, asked Joseph Schwantner, Paul Schoenfield, and Robert Beaser to write new works for flute and orchestra. On this recording, each solo artist presents the orchestral work composed for him or her, as well as a flute and piano "encore" by the s…