Atwain
*250 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based guitarist/composer Taku Sugimoto and cellist/composer Stefan Thut, who lives in Solothurn, Switzerland, have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Japan. Their duo CD "Taku Sugimoto / Stefan Thut," which was released on the Ftarri label in 2018, was highly praised. The new duo CD by Sugimoto and Thut, "atwain," documents their performance of a single 39-minute work on the riverside in Solothurn in …
Music For Two Exits
*200 copies limited edition* Jun-Y Ciao (born in 1978 in Shanghai) is a musician whose main instruments are sax and clarinet. Having studied in Dusseldorf and Mainz, Germany, in the second half of the 2000s, he is currently based in Shanghai and Dusseldorf. He has numerous releases on Zhu Wenbo's cassette label Zoomin' Night. Beijing-based Zhu Wenbo is known both for his own performance activities and for running Zoomin' Night, which plans events and releases cassettes. A musician with many conn…
Listen! MadeRadioArt Anthology
A dismal moment, try not to think about it so many of us, so restless, a dull chapter worth skipping, mind numbing. Constantly talking, when all we really wanted to do was… As usual perhaps, daily impressions of unremitting danger make people seek refuge in futile obsessions with furniture, food and clothing. Endless words, irritating until we stopped saying them, then sorely missed. A conjunction of multiple evils that could have been avoided, had it only been seen as profitable to do so. Naggi…
OSTN
In the proposed version, for vibraphone and tape, I attempted to enter Pietro Grossi’s sound spectrum of six Ostinati (OSTN) intended as moving soundscapes, maintaining the specific grain of each field as the centre of sound gravity. The vibraphone motor was conceived at different speeds for each field in the search for a vibrant and luminous sound, maintaining, within a sound unit of organic character, two dimensions: figure and background in the dialectic relationship of listening.
In the firs…
The Rain Traces Its Outline
*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 creations. One of these is the CD The Rain Traces Its Outline.
“The Rain Traces Its Outline” is a work for piano that Hida completed in 2023. It wa…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Works By Irving Fine, Gian Carlo Menotii, Carl Ruggles, Harold Shapero
At the outset of his career, Harold Shapero (b in 1920) was widely recognized as one of his generation's most promising composers. While in his twenties, he undertook to study closely the musical phraseology and rhetoric Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as a discipline to help him sharpen melodic contours and better manipulate larger musical forms. When the brief piano sonata he set out to compose based on classical principles took only a few days to finish, he decided to write two more. Although t…
The Flight Into Egypt ·The Natural World · Double Brass Concerto
A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions." Grand and general though it is, the statement seems a good place to begin describing the music on this record.
Sketches for all the pieces preceded their commissions, but the institutions and frie…
Violin Works
Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of …
Aftertones of Infinity, Chiaroscuro, Into Eclipse
Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical past into his work.
The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set o…