★Kairos
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.
Makrokosmos I-III
Makrokosmos Volume I, whose title reflects Crumb’s admiration for Bartók’s piano series Mikrokosmos, contains 12 pieces, grouped into three parts of four each, and Crumb associates each piece with a sign of the zodiac. This is paired with Volume II, which is similarly structured, after the fashion of Debussy’s twenty-four Préludes. Volumes I and II are filled with references to the history of humankind, myths, Christianity, paganism, occultism, literary works, and the composer’s own mental pictu…
Noch sind wir ein Wort
I would like to refer to Annette Bik’s project Bach gedoubelt, which was the origin of this piece, putting Bach’s b-minor partita, BWV 1002, in direct context with contemporary musical comments. Bach wrote so-called “Double” movements to the standard dances Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande and Tempo di Borea, connected to the original as a kind of variation. Annette Bik commissioned four composers to write such “Double” movements to the four main movements of the Partita. This lead to four contemp…
Süden: Gastón Solnicki on Mauricio Kagel
111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …
Les Soliloques décortiqués
Les Soliloques décortiqués for 16 musicians is dedicated to the musicians performing this piece. Each instrument is a soloist for 90 seconds, time dedicated for him or her to experiment with instrumental techniques that I consider rather “daring”. Meanwhile, the other 15 instrumentalists try to put the soloist’s “discoveries” on their own instrument. - Vinko GlobokarVinko Globokar (born 7 July 1934) is a French-Slovenian avant-garde composer and trombonist. Globokar's work is noted for its use o…
Como una ola de fuerza y luz - Unfolding Waves
Between April and June 1971, after the democratic election of Salvador Allende’s government, Luigi Nono visited Chile for three months, meeting several artists, composers and politicians, among whom was Luciano Cruz Aguayo, one of the leaders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria). Back in Italy, Nono started working on his next musical composition, which was meant to be a piece for piano and orchestra, for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado. In …
The Book Of Serenity
It was Ludwig Wittgenstein, another Austrian, who already in his debut work identified the borders: in his opinion, he wrote in the preface to his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, he had “essentially resolved” those problems accessible to rational thought, and precisely that would demonstrate “how little is achieved that these problems are resolved.” Even greater emphasis is lent to this insight in the famous sentence with which Wittgenstein closes his Tractatus not even a hundred pages later: „W…
Quartetto N.7 - Quartetto N.8 - Sei Quartetti Brevi
Kairos is proud to announce the release of three string quartets by renowned Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, recorded by the brilliant Quartetto Prometeo. The group has worked closely with the composer for years, leading him to dedicate two pieces to it, one of which is included on this CD, the Quartetto No. 8.
The three quartets, Quartetto No. 7, Quartetto No.8, and Sei quartetti brevi were written over a time span of fortyone years, but despite this long range of time, Sciarrino’s idiosy…
For Samuel Beckett
1999 release - For fifty-five minutes the great American composer Morton Feldman weaves his tapestry of sounds, a pattern always the same and yet never the same, an iridescent, thick fabric, full of details, although these never distract the listener's attention. Feldman met Beckett only once in his life (though Beckett later sent him a postcard on which the composer discovered the text for his opera Neither). He created music of a beguiling tonality and beauty, inspired more by painting and lit…
La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura
2000 release - Nostalgic, utopian, future distance\", the title of this piece investigates the possibilities of violin playing, the intimate, physical quality of the sound and the historical dimensions inherent to this instrument.
Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen
1998 release - While standing at the waterfall, we become aware of our thoughts, but not the waterfall itself; if we succeed in letting our thoughts stand still, we hear a melody within the turmoil. Everyone his own. (Peter Ablinger)
Die Sterne des Hungers
The Stars of Hunger, was composed in 2007. It is based on three poems by the Austrian poet Christine Lavant: “Im rueckgrat aufwaerts glimmt ein licht,” “So also geht erleuchtung vor,” “Zeig an mir die kräuter welche bestärken” and “Lösch aus mein gesicht und führe mich blind.” Rather than set the poems themselves to music, Lang used the text generation program Abulafia to produce from them a cut-up in the tradition of William S. Burroughs. The composition contains only fragments of the po…
Les Espaces Acoustiques
Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is a groundbreaking work which defies assumptions about what music “ought” to be. Not for nothing did the composer describe it as “a great laboratory”, exploring the way we listen.The “Acoustic Spaces” cycle, begun in 1974 and completed in 1985, consists of six instrumental works that may be played consecutively, since each acoustic space extends the previous one. The unity of the whole is based on the formal similarity of the pieces and on the two acousti…