Cornelius Cardew, David Bedford

Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning," is a great example of his struggles to reconcile his innate musical aesthetics and his intellectual belief that the "avant-garde" was inherently elitist. Written for a mix of musicians & non-musicians, it is a grand improvisatory work that nicely exploits the talents of whomever is performing it. Two of the seven "Paragraph's" are performed here by  The Scratch Orchestra, who give the expected first rate performance. Bedford is known to many in the rock world, having worked with artists as disparate as Mike Oldfield to Elvis Costello to Barry Manilow. In his earlier years, however, he was one of the up-and-coming British experimentalists. The nicely done works here give a glimpse of what economic necessity took from the world of art.