condition (record/cover): EX / EX 

Insert included.

The first and, for many years, only document of Jani Christou's late works to reach vinyl - and one of the most important records of twentieth-century Greek music ever pressed. Issued in Athens in 1974 by Columbia / His Master's Voice, four years after the composer's death in a car accident on his 44th birthday, Late Works brings together the Hellenic Group of Contemporary Music under Theodore Antoniou in three major late compositions and one tape work, recorded at Sifilms Studios in Athens in late 1970.

Christou was a figure of almost impossible singularity - born in Heliopolis to Greek parents, educated at Cambridge in philosophy under Wittgenstein and Russell, drawn to Carl Jung in Zurich and to orchestration studies in Rome. By the final years of his life he had developed a radical compositional language beyond serialism or any other school: his own notation system, his own vocabulary of what he called "praxis" and "metapraxis," works conceived as ritual theatre in which music, acting, dance, tape, and psychological cue were fused into what he named Anaparastasis - re-enactment. The four works here form the heart of that late vision. Praxis for 12 (1966) deploys eleven strings, piano, and percussion in a taut field of action and response. Anaparastasis I (1968), for baritone Spyros Sakkas and ensemble, weaves text from Aeschylus' Agamemnon into a ritual of barely contained intensity. Anaparastasis III (1968-69) goes further: an actor, Gregory Semitecolo, moves through instrumental ensemble and pre-recorded tapes in a performance that collapses the boundary between theatrical gesture and sonic event. Epicycle 2 (1968-69), the tape work, was prepared by Christou himself.

The booklet contains notes in Greek and English. A document of profound importance, made with urgency and grief in the immediate wake of an irreplaceable loss. Columbia / HMV, CSDG 68, Greece, 1974.