Chamber Works
One of the mysteries surrounding Jesús Rueda is the question how he was able to find a voice of his own, the various influences to which he was exposed during his development as a composer notwithstanding. He bid farewell to the constructivist rigor of Francisco Guerrero, and his pieces to do not immediately betray influences by Luis de Pablo, Giacomo Manzoni and Luigi Nono. Characteristic of his compositions are fast tempos, present in “slower” parts as brisk figurations, his sense of harmony a…
Chamber Music
It is with great shrewdness that Uroš Rojko has almost maxed out the unusual juxtapositions of an accordion with a viola and a piano, respectively. His fondness for the accordion may have its roots in his folk music past. On the present recording, however, these roots are not in evidence. Even the Tangos speak a language of their own, which Rojko creates by juggling characteristic fragments of tango, thereby reducing them to their essence. Even the first bars of his pieces exhibit the correspond…
Integrale de la musique de chambre
Long deleted, this is a must have cd collecting all the Scelsi pieces for string orchestra. "An internal struggle, stemming from the introductory tremolo, all through its serene yet chaotic means of lumonisity"
New Music
Henry Cowell ha inventato e perfezionato la gran parte delle speciali tecniche per suonare il pianoforte utilizzate negli ultimi 70 anni; nel corso della sua vita (1897-1965) ha composto un impressionante numero di musiche sinfoniche, vocali e da camera ed ha pubblicato il pionieristico libro "New Music Resources". Il suo contributo che più ha influenzato la scena contemporanea è però la sua opera per pianoforte, considerata di fondamentale importanza per la musica del XX secolo. "New Music" pro…
Olson III
A piece of unrelenting intensity, Olson III may be one of the most powerful compositions from minimalist composer Terry Riley. Based on the same phasing principals of In C, Olson III is filled with short motives that each ensemble member must play and repeat before moving onto the next. A chorus singing "To begin" joins into the droning fray of string instruments, sawing away à la In C. For 53 minutes here, Riley (on soprano saxophone) and a teenage student orchestra at the Nacka School of Music…
Orchestral Works
From this combination of ancient styles and arts of the past with contemporary music arises a series of particularly impressive works. In his Ausstrahlung, for instance, Maderna uses texts from an ancient Persian anthology and poems by various Persian authors in English, Italian, French and German translations, which are recited, sung and played from tape. Some ten years before, Maderna wrote the Konzert für Oboe und Kammerensemble out of fondness for the oboe. Another two concerts would follow …
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Hardly any other composer has ever been as far removed from conservatism as Helmut Lachenmann. In all his oeuvre his listeners are never permitted to lean back comfortably even for a moment in expectation of the well-known and familiar. Again and again Lachenmann succeeded, and still succeeds, in shaking the "aesthetic apparatus," the system of conventional formulas and phrases established throughout decades and centuries, to its very foundations. Intérieur I (1966), a piece for percussion solo,…
Piano Music
Music as a message without words from far away – from our inner selves. Piano music as metaphor for the thrilling adventures of human existence.
Klaviermusik
The sovereign and immediate approach Lachenmann takes in his Fünf Variationen über ein Thema von F. Schubert (1956) lends Schubert's slight Deutsche Tanz D 643a special and almost heroic flavor. But only five years later, Lachenmann had already travelled a considerable distance since those days as his Echo Andante of 1961 shows. Like Wiegenmusik (1963), the piece has been shaped by Lachenmann's studies with Luigi Nono whose influence and inspiration are clearly audible. A perfect example of the …
Ausklang / Tableau
The title Ausklang (Final Notes, or Fading Away) is intended to be understood literally. Lachenmann's Musik für Klavier und Or-chester is centrally concerned with final notes and sounds fading away. In particular, it is concerned with piano sounds created with certain techniques (playing silently at the keyboard, special ways of operating the piano pedals, etc.). It is also concerned with the fading away of sound as the sounds of the piano are being picked up by the orchestra just as they are ab…
Symphony No. 3
Charles Ives (1874-1954) earned his living by selling insurance policies to his contemporaries. Besides, he took a great interest in literature, philosophy and, first and foremost, music. And what came of it? The most original modernist music one could imagine. Ives's Third Symphony was inspired by his memory of camp meetings, the Christian "evangelistic gatherings" common in his youth. However bizarre these meetings may appear to us, they were a familiar feature of rural America especially duri…
Universe Symphony / Second Symphony
The most ambitious and grandest of his projects would of course never see completion. For over forty years, Ives continued to supplement the material for his Universe Symphony, adding both notes and details. At some point, the scenario he envisaged got somewhat out of hand, Henry Cowell reported. “Several orchestras and large parties of singers, male and female, were to be placed in valleys, on mountain slopes and on summits,” and “6 to 10 different orchestras on several mountain tops, each movi…
Konzert für Violine und Orchester / Fasce
Rhapsodic, lyrical, virtuoso, and, in the end, even amusing: all these attributes come to mind as Cerha's violin concerto is finished off with a charming punch line.
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra / Sixty-Eight
For each of his compositions for prepared piano Cage created a specific piano preparation chart, setting out in meticulous detail the strings to be prepared, and the materials and manipulations to be used for preparing them. For the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), 53 tones of the keyboard must be prepared; and in this case Cage himself was astonished at the complexity of these preparations. The range of sounds is further expanded by an extra bridge installed in the pian…
Works For Prepared Piano
John Cage was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schönberg and made use of innovations of both of his teachers, promptly integrating them into his own creativity – and turning them into something completely different. He adopted Henry Cowell's idea of altering the sound of a piano by interfering with the strings, thereby expanding the instrument's range of expression to a downright undreamed of extent. And as for Schönberg's twelve-tone system, Cage playfully extended it to a 25-tone system, o…
Music For Percussion Quartet
As early as in 1942, in Credo in Us, Cage employed not only a percussion ensemble but also sounds from the radio and records. Therefore, quite in accordance with what the composer would have wished, the materials used by the Percussion Ensemble Mainz in this recording range from Beethoven's fifth symphony (vinyl record, including the rustling) to ABBA, Tina Turner and advertising slogans. It goes without saying that rhythms play an important part in music for percussion. Cage, though, was also i…
Sonatas & Inteludes
The sonata originated in the Baroque as a small, one-movement form, which nevertheless already contained the core of the sonata to be later developed and composed in elaborate detail by the Viennese Classics. In his Sonatas and Interludes John Cage stuck to the concise, one-movement form, thus establishing a link to Scarlatti and Bach's preludes as well as to Chopin's Préludes and Satie's piano pieces. Other than many of his later, freer works, these small but complex gems are fixed and noted do…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
A conductor enjoys the privilege of being able to reconsider his attitude to musical works over and over again. The composer Boulez adheres to the same maxim: of his own compositions he regards only very few as being finished; most of them are, to him, "work in progress." The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again. Later on, Polyphonie X (1951) in view of its extremely strict serial procedure appeared to hi…
![Ekphrasis [Continuo II] / Coro](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/013/luciano-berio-ekphrasis-continuo-ii-cor.jpg.500.jpg)
Ekphrasis [Continuo II] / Coro
The renowned American architects Sullivan, Wright and Mies van der Rohe are the center of attention in the composition Ekphrasis [Continuo II], even though originally Berio had no such thing in mind: "While I was working on Continuo, it was not my intention to compose a metaphor for architecture, or write a homage to the famous Chicago architects... Neither did I refer directly to the amusing but nevertheless solid constructions by Renzo Piano... However, as the work progressed I became aware th…
Un Re In Ascolto
A king listens: its subtitle identifies Un Re in ascolto, this special combination of music and drama, as a "musical action by Luciano Berio and Italo Calvino". A dialogue between composer and writer, between different forms of theater – and also, if you like, between Shakespeare and Thomas Bernhard. And, indeed, he is a "Theatermacher", an impresario, this Prospero (Theo Adam), who is accompanied by the director (Heinz Zednik) and the actor "Friday" (Helmut Lohner) and to whom a musical and sce…