Kurtág's Ghosts
** In process of stocking ** György Kurtág's and Marino Formenti's thinking about the course, state and future path of music history runs along similar lines. Formenti's 'Kurtág's Ghosts' enriches the experience from early polyphony to the present.
Perhaps György Kurtág will one day be remembered as one of the greatest composers of our time. Discovered late, the Hungarian has only been considered an essential representative of New Music since the 1980s. Only Luigi Nono, however, wrote such convi…
Confluence / Divergence
** In process of stocking ** Double meanings, allusions and strange mirrors appear throughout the music of the Finnish composer Sebastian Hilli. The titles of several of his pieces take the form of puns, such as Kohta (2013) for chamber ensemble (the Finnish word ‘kohta’ means both soon, and place, section or point); Delta (2012) for string quartet and percussion (referring to the Greek letter and the river feature); and Snap Music (2017 – 18) for orchestra, winner of the 2019 Teosto Prize (the …
Schreiben
** In process of stocking ** If music’s relationship with reality is to be more than just a theoretical presumption, it cannot be limited merely to work titles, comments, dedications or quotations, but must also extend to permeate all musical dimensions: material, structure, form and content. And from the very beginning, Helmut Lachenmann has propagated the idea of a work that is based on the integral cohesiveness of all levels. For Lachenmann, thinking here in the tradition of Theodor W. Adorno…
Kaleidoscope
** In process of stocking ** Kairos presents Kaleidoscope by Eunho Chang. Born 1983 in Daegu, Republic of Korea, Eunho Chang began his musical studies with piano lessons at the age of seven. He studied composition at the Keimyung University, Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and obtained his PhD in musical composition at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music under the supervision of professor Marcin Błażewicz. He has been selected for various workshops and masterclasses, such as Impuls Acade…
Dr. Futurity
Kairos presents Dr. Futurity by Bernd Richard Deutsch. Dr. Futurity for 16 instruments is the last and most complex of three works that were written in immediate succession (the other two works are Mad Dog and the 2nd String Quartet) and— to conceptual, musical and dramaturgical similarities—could be united to form a triptych. The new piece is divided into three movements: I. ...trip – from Mars to here II. Chimaera III. Red Alert! Although the character of the score is often orchestral, several…
Orchestral works
José M. Sánchez-Verdú was no more than 35 years old when Spain, his homeland, awarded him its national prize. That is certainly the highest distinction he has received thus far, but is by no means the only one. Three years earlier the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation awarded him a composition prize and he has also received numerous other prizes in Spain, Germany, Japan and Latin America. His catalogue raisonné includes more than 120 works, he teaches composition at the Music University in Düss…
Bunny Games
Bunny Games is not only semantically loaded by the solo passages in the foreground in which the instruments constantly seek to draw attention to themselves, but also through references to the music of Domenico Scarlatti and Edgar Varèse as well as the Madonna numbers “Nothing really matters and Hangup”, the latter a cover version of the ABBA song “Give me a man after midnight.” The relation to popular music, which - between the lines - was always present with Bernhard Gander breaks through conti…
Iridescent Notation
Kairos presents Iridescent Notation by Samuel Andreyev. Recording Date: 22-27 Sep 2018. One of the most compelling voices to have emerged from the Canadian new music scene in the last decade is that of Samuel Andreyev. His music is equally communicative. The new disc offers half a dozen pieces which span his entire career. Luigi Gaggero conducts various combinations of the Ukranian Ukho Ensemble and provides an interesting booklet note which wavers between helpful explanation and subjective refl…
Fold Unfold
Fold Unfold is the debut album by violinist Katrine Grarup Elbo from the Danish collective We like We. As a solo artist she steps out from the safety of group performance and presents a vulnerable portrait using only her classical training and analogue electronic setup.
Peaceful scenarios of natural beauty that hover like calm mist over cold streams are interrupted by spine chilling forces. Naked passages and electroacoustic electronics together create ripples in time as the pieces mold into flo…
Density 2036
In 2013, Claire Chase instigated a project designed to cultivate an entirely new body of work for flute. A MacArthur Fellow, Harvard professor, and indomitable musical force who co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, Chase began commissioning work, with the idea of doing so until the centennial of Edgard Varése's seminal flute solo "Density 21.5," in 2036. This deluxe 4-CD set is the first fruit of these commissions, realized in the first three years of the project, featuring 17 wor…
Promises
** Limited 180 Gram edition ** Apparently it's been over a decade since avant jazz deity Pharoah Sanders recorded any new music, it took Sam Shephard aka Floating Points to coax the 80 year old out of near-retirement. Anyone familiar with Sanders' work will know how life-affirming his music can be, from his early work with John Coltrane, through 1967's mind-altering "Tauhid" to his spiritual pairing with Alice Coltrane on "Journey in Satchidananda". Here, he takes a more restrained role, offerin…
Pietra e Oggetto
A sparse and subtle jungle comprises the pieces that make up "Pietra e Oggetto". It is subtle, as such it remains in the memory. Thanks to the device of silence, which is like the air in between things, it allows time for what we have heard to imprint on our acoustic sketchpad. Like closing your eyes to preserve a memory and then moving on to the next. We feel a certain privilege in listening to these undecidable environments; these composite and hybrid objects filled with synthetic biodiversity…
Saturations
Saturations is a composition by Danish multidisciplinary artist Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, and features a clarinet choir consisting of 19(!) clarinet players. Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard (b. 1979) considers his work to be a basic research in realities working within the domains of imaginary & physical sound as well as other non-sonic media, and since 2012 Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard has experimented with creating music that lets the instruments transcend their inherent sonic norms and reappear in another for…
Verdant
As a composer, David Dunn is probably best known for his interdisciplinary work that crosses the boundaries between art and science. This has included the fields of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, interspecies communication and scientific sonification while creating a body of innovative sound work that has contributed to projects as diverse as sensory enhancement of healthcare environments and intervention strategies for forest and agricultural pests. He has invented microphones to record such p…
Suite No.9 / Quattro Illustrazioni / Un Adieu
Shira Legmann is an Israeli concert pianist, with a wide repertoire from Baroque to contemporary and experimental music. This album contains three piano works by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi: Suite No.9 "Ttai" (1953), Quattro Illustrazioni (1953), and Un Adieu (1978/1988). This is Legmann's second CD on Elsewhere Music, following the 2019 album "Barricades" in which she was the pianist for Michael Pisaro's composition for piano/electronics.Legmann's clean, supple yet solid piano sounds, whic…
L'Air, L'Instant - Deux Pianos
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.Frey wrote two compositions for two pianos in 2017-2019: Entre les deux l'instant (2017/20…
Infinite Ascent
This is French composer/pianist Melaine Dalibert’s fifth solo album since 2015, all featuring his own compositions. This time, the album consists of melodically structured song pieces, an area that Dalibert has been exploring in the last couple of years as a new compositional approach outside his signature algorithmic method of composition. This series of eight short pieces appeal in a new way from his previous music, and shows his maturity as a composer. Dalibert wrote all eight pieces in 2019 …
Popol Vuh
"The Popol Vuh- the Book of Counsel“ of the K'iché-Maya belongs to the most important creation myths of the early advanced civilizations in the world. A Maya from the K'iché people, who had learned Spanish during the conquista, wrote down the the texts in K'iché with Latin letters between 1545 and 1555. Before that, the texts were only passed on orally. Father Francisco Ximenéz copied this book and translated it into Spanish. Then he returned the original to the K'iché people. In this way the b…
Sais.
* 2021 Stock * Sais. is a piece about cows. Cows are a topic quite familiar for a composer who lives in an Austrian mountain village at 1000 metres hight. He finds them right in front of his door. The cows that are grazing on a juicy green under a bright blue sky - so we might imagine - are one side of the trio. Within the 100 page long score we meet them in the shape of a line of overtones. Just as natural as the life of a cow on an alpine meadow is the musical material that builds SAIS. as a s…
Augmented Studies
* 2021 Stock * "When I imagine, as I sometimes do, that evolution were possible, Complexity is not its goal, but perhaps the safety net for a possible Immediacy. This opens up the possibility to exercise sufficient safeguards in an ever finer woven net of abstractions ? if not to escape directly ? to at least be able to risk a glimpse through the netting: a glimpse unfiltered through abstraction, signs, predetermined patterns, a glimpse of unaltered reality." - Peter Ablinger