Sinfonia per 8 voci - Eindrucke
Luciano Berio was commissioned to write a work for the New York Philharmonic's 150th anniversary. What resulted was the Sinfonia, a masterpiece of the twentieth century musical movement. This work combines many of the Italian composers fascinations - from Mahler to Martin Luther King - and sympathizes them. The result is fascinating, stimulating, and thoroughly enjoyable. Boulez's interpretation is really top-notch. He leads the orchestra with great power, gusto, and energy. This vision is evide…
Laborintus 2
Music performed by the Ensemble Musique Vivante, laying down a turbulent racket of avant-crinkle, over which the 4-piece Chorale Experimentale bellows vocal confusion. Berio has also succeeded in discovering sounds, phrasings, effects of all kinds which have permitted him to venture further and further into areas which had so far been thought impermissible or impossible for the human voice. These investigations are magisterially reflected in the larger works and particularly in 'Laborintus II.
Voice, Books and Fire 3
An outstanding album, Voice, Books and Fire is the result of Jakob Ullmann reflections about the relationships between music and language: language as sound and language as text, the numerous relationships between texts of different cultural and religious traditions, between the work of the human spirit in the present and in the past and the questions arising from the problem of understanding these different traditions, languages and texts and representing them in a present, which has lost knowl…
Works for Instruments
Edition RZ presents John McGuire's Works For Instruments. Performers: Ensemble Modern -- Julia Rempe (soprano); Pellegrini-Quartett: Antonio Pellegrini, Thomas Hofer (violin); Fabio Marano (viola); Helmut Menzler (violoncello); musikFabrik: Hermann Kretzschmar, Paulo Alvarez, Irmela Roelcke, Eun-Ju Kim, Ulrich Löffler, Jürgen Kruse (piano), Christine Chapman, Jodie Lawson, Charles Putnam, Rohan Richards (horns), Dirk Rothbrust, Carlos Tarcha (percussion). Each of the compositions of post-minimal…
Corona - For Away - Piano Distance - Undisturbed Rest
Performed by Roger Woodward (piano). Recorded Decca Studio No.3, West Hampstead, London, 4 May 1973. This is the first International CD release featuring this recording. Was first released on Decca's HEAD label in 1974. For Takemitsu, sound can be beautiful without being significant, can signify beauty without making 'sense'. The quality of the music is thus elusive: it is not something one must necessarily 'understand', but perhaps rather absorb and accept. His works have, all the same, qualiti…
Complete Piano Works
Tōru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. In 1958, the international attention he drew with his Requiem for st…
Helikopter-Quartett
The Helikopter-Streichquartett (Helicopter String Quartet) is one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's best-known pieces, and one of the most complex to perform. It involves a string quartet, four helicopters with pilots, as well as audio and video equipment and technicians. It was first performed and recorded in 1996. Although performable as a self-sufficient piece, it also forms the third scene of the opera Mittwoch aus Licht ("Wednesday from Licht"). The Helicopter Quartet was originally commissioned b…
Como Una Ola De Fuerza Y Luz / Sofferte Onde Serene / Contrappun
Luigi Nono began Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a wave of strength and light) as a piece for piano and orchestra in 1971, at the instigation of Maurizio Pollini. While the composition was in progress, Nono learned of the death of a young Chilean revolutionary and recast the work in his memory, with added parts for soprano soloist and tape. The resulting half hour work is clearly a lament, encompassing various expressions of grief, from stunned sorrow to anguish to the fiercest rage. As a kin…
Clear or Cloudy
With the passing of Gyorgy Ligeti on 12 June, 2006 at the age of 83 in Vienna following a lengthy illness, the musical world has lost a true maverick. An independent thinker, Ligeti charted a singular route in his music with the evolution of a voice that is hard to ignore. In this respect one is tempted to put him alongside figures such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis when considering the major shapers of late 20th century composition.
Berio / Xenakis / Dashow
Recital disc by violinist Tsjuji Mifune, featuring a trio of Iannis Xenakis pieces, plus an early 80s electro-acoustic piece by James Dashow, plus Luciano Berio’s “corale”.
Bruno Maderna Oboe Concertos
Italian composer Bruno Maderna was one of the most misunderstood and mistreated of the 20th century's composers -- particularly by his peers. His vast body of work, ranging from his early works (at ten) to his later, introspective statements, reveal a man genuinely in touch with the inner wellspring of his own creative language, but also with the defining tonal and timbral capabilities -- as well as the idiosyncratic natures -- of the instruments he wrote for and their larger role in the articul…
His Master\'s Noise - The Institute Of Sonology
His Master's Noise presents works produced in the Institute of Sonology (Instituut voor Sonologie) in Utrecht and in The Hague, Netherlands. The Institute of Sonology was founded in 1960 after the Laboratory of Natural Sciences (Natlab, Philips Industries, Eindhoven) had decided to shut down its small 'electronic' studio (which was existing since 1952 and where Varèse made his Poème Electronique). Initially called STEM, projects were set out for scientific and compositional research. This compil…
Music for Merce Cunningham
2008 repress, featuring a 24-bit Hi-Definition remaster; originally released in 1991. Volume 4 in the Music of Cage series. The first audio document between John Cage & Merce Cunningham. It includes a 55-minute piece called "Five Stone Wind" performed by David Tudor (live electronics), Takehisa Kosugi (amplified violin, live electronics, bamboo flute) and Michael Pugliese (clay pots and tapes) as well as a 19-minute version of the classic "Cartridge Music" (same 3 performers, "using phonograph c…
Film Scores: Neverwas Recording Archive Vol. IV
Philip Glass' score to the film Neverwas is the fourth release from the Philip Glass Recording Archive. Neverwas, a film starring Ian McKellen, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Nolte, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Lange and William Hurt, is a fantasy-mystery with a bold, playful and fantastical score by Philip Glass. The film never received wide distribution and was largely forgotten. The 53-minute film score (composed the same year the composer's celebrated music for The Hours) possesses some of Glass' most acce…
The World Upside Down
2004 repress. Branca's long anticipated foray into orchestral music. Recorded in Nov, 1990. Performed by The New York Chamber Sinfonia, 'The World Upside Down' is a masterpiece of bright, organic structures & tones tempered in the eerie darkness typified by Branca's best work...Sonically and emotionally boundless, seemingly comprised of interplanetary musics from the netherworlds, 'The World Upside Down's celestial nature will especially appeal to fans of Branca's crystalline 'Symphony No. 3' re…
Pléïades
Cheap mid-line pricing on these classic avant garde titles out of the Harmonia Mundi catalog. Pleiades is a percussion piece performed by Les Percussions de Strasbourg (vibraphones, marimbas, xylophones, etc.); richly defined, timeless music that will sound good for the rest of your life. "The whole source of this polyrhythmic composition is the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful, unfaithful copy... still greater variations of an even greater complexity, due …
Phlegra, Jalons, Keren, Nomos Alpha, Thallein, Naama, A l\'lle d
This Apex reissue includes two discs at a low price -- the Ensemble Intercontemporain (EI) performing three 1980s Xenakis works along with two solo works, and on the second disc, four pieces that X wrote for harpschordist Elisabeth Chojnacka. In general Xenakis excelled with large forces, an orchestra or large ensemble. It was his organization of sounds, chaos careening nearly out of control, yet somehow also moving purposefully, that was his genius.
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970, Acustica, for experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers, is one of Mauricio Kagel's radical and extraordinary works, in which his constant search for ways of escaping from the restraints and conventions of traditional musical performance took him into a world of exotic instruments and almost surreal invention. The instrumentation for Acustica is a huge array of sound sources: there are folk instruments collected from around the world and from different periods…
Musique Pour Piano Solo
Mention "minimalism" and certain names will pop up, both within and outside of the classical world: Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams. The most famous one, however, would be Philip Glass. Unlike most 20th Century composers, Glass has reached far beyond the concert hall: his work includes film soundtracks (THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE THIN BLUE LINE), multimedia presentations ('1000 Airplanes on the Roof"), and collaborations with pop/rock writers/performers (his SONGS FOR LIQUID DAYS album). With SOL…
Einstein on the Beach
First in a Glass Trilogy of operas about men who changed the world through the power of their ideas, "Einstein"'s sub-text is science. The opera is non-narrative in form, and the producer has two options: to reproduce the original Robert Wilson production (which exists on videotape), or to create a new series of stage and dance pictures based on themes relating to the life of Albert Einstein. Opera in four acts, composed in 1976. Remastered reissue of the original 1979 Tomato Music Company / CBS…