Atlas Eclipticalis With Winter Music
Featured compositions: "Atlas Eclipticalis' (1961, for chamber ensemble); "Winter Music" (1957, for 3 pianos); "Atlas Eclipitcalis" (1961, for orchestra); "Winter Music" (1957, for 20 pianos). Cage's relationship with the Cornish Institute in Seattle dates back to the 1930s, when he taught there and performed as accompanist for many dance pieces. Cornish was also the scene of several of his musical discoveries and innovations. Cage's celebrated return to the Cornish Institute in 1983 led to thes…
Sonatas And Interludes / A Book Of Music
Sonatas And Interludes' for prepared piano (1946-48) performed by Joshua Pierce. 'A Book Of Music' for two prepared pianos (1944) performed by Joshua Pierce (left channel) and Maro Ajemian (right channel). Only one copy available.
Etudes Australes For Piano
Etudes Australes is a set of etudes for piano solo by John Cage, composed in 1974–5 for Grete Sultan. It comprises 32 aleatoric pieces written using star charts as source material. The etudes, conceived as duets for two independent hands, are extremely difficult to play. They were followed by two more collections of similarly difficult works: Freeman Etudes for violin (1977–90) and Etudes Boreales (1978) for cello and/or piano. Only one copy available.
Electronic Music
First in a series of albums from the mid-late 1960s consisting of contemporary classical composers in the experimental/electronic field. It contains Fontana Mix by John Cage, Visage by Luciano Berio and Agony by Ilhan Mimaroglu.
Clavecin 2.000 (Harpsichord / Cembalo 2.000)
Original first pressing (silver cover, green label) of this legendary LP with works by Berio, Ligeti, Constant, Clementi, Miroglio, Donatoni "The listener is expected to play this recording at full volume and in total darkness." is suggested on the estensive liner notes on back cover. Excellent copyTracklisting:A1 Continuum Composed By - György LigetiA2 Profil Sonore Composed By - Graciane FinziA3 Insertions Composed By - Francis MiroglioA4 Intavolatura Composed By - …
Harlekin
Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Harlekin' ('Harlequin') for clarinet; and 'Der Kleine Harlekin' ('The Little Harlequin') for clarinet (performed here by Suzanne Stephens). Only one copy available.
Persephassa
Persephassa is a piece for six percussionists composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1969. The piece was commissioned for the first-ever Shiraz Festival (organized by the Empress of Iran), held at the historic desert site of Persepolis. The title refers to the goddess Persephone, "the personification of telluric forces and of transmutations of life." Persephassa gains much of its effect from having the six percussionists distributed around the audience. The treatment of space as a musical parameter is on…
Pranam II for ensemble
It is scored for two flutes, violin, viola, cello, bass clarinet and electric organ. This is a really beautiful piece of tranquil music, full of touching sweetness.
Collection vol.1
The first in a series of recordings devoted to the music of Giacinto Scelsi, devised by Stradivarius in conjunction with the Isabella Scelsi Foundation. The series comprises new, original recordings made in 2005, marking the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth.
Lohengrin
2008 release ** Lohengrin, Salvatore Sciarrino's "azione invisibile", is both a gloss on Wagner's opera and a sly debunking of it. It was conceived by its composer as an opera with action invisible, for one singer/actress who assumes all the charactersn Sciarrino's monodrama, based on one of Jules Laforgue's Moralités Légendaires, episodes from the story are viewed through the distinctly jaundiced eyes and ears of Elsa, the woman Lohengrin marries and then deserts. A single voice narrates and ta…
Vortex Temporum - Pèriodes
Gérard Grisey's cycle of compositions, Les Espaces Acoustiques, is considered one of his most significant works. Written between 1974 and 1985, it consists of six discrete pieces, for ensembles ranging in size from a solo viola with resonators to an orchestra of 84 players. In the cycle, the pieces progress from the smallest ensemble to the largest, and Périodes (1974), for seven players, is the second. The piece is a relatively early example of spectralism, a method of composition developed by …
Music in the shape of a square
On 30 June 1999, the ensemble Alter Ego performed a concert of works by Philip Glass at the Opera Paese Gallery in Rome, one of the most innovative musical venues in the city and where Alter Ego has played regularly since 1996. Glass himself was present at this performance which was a replica of his own famous debut concert at the New York Film-Makers Cinemateque in September 1968. Under the guidance of Pietro Fortuna, the artists of the Opera Paese Gallery faithfully reconstructed the geometric…
Esplorazione del Bianco
Sciarrino's work is avant-garde, and he is known for his use of isolated sonorities, extended playing techniques, frequent silences, and ironic or confrontational quotation of previous music (for instance, American pop music) or stories (such as in Lohengrin). His works include a large body of chamber music, including many pieces for wind instruments, five piano sonatas, and several operas or theatrical works: Da gelo a gelo, Infinito nero, Macbeth, Perseo ed Andromeda, Lohengrin, and Luci mie t…
Chants de la Mi-mort
Alberto Savinio was a very particular figure of poet, writer, musician, painter of primarily surreal subjects. His dramatic poem, "Les Chants de la Mi-Mort", played in Paris in 1914, seems to prefigure the mannequins that appear in so many of De Chirico's works: "voiceless men, without eyes or faces".
Concrete
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…
Da Cantare - Vocal Works 1951-1983
LAST FEW COPIES, long sold out: this important double CD box edition is the ultimate collection of the vocal compositions by one of the leading figures of Italian contemporary and aleatory music. The first piece -- 'Rot' -- is the complete version of the piece originally written in 1973, as the vocal parts have been added in July 2004 for its 2nd performance ever, held in Rome during the celebration of the 'Guaccero'year'. It is therefore different from the piece presented on the LP, which is pu…
L'oeuvre pour piano
A beautiful boxed edition with an outstanding version of Satie's piano music performed by Ciccolini, who is totally inside this music and makes the most of its contrasts of mood and atmosphere. Ciccolini's playing is pliant and graceful, and under his fingers the music seems to breathe and come alive: in many ways this is the most distintive and 'definitive' Satie piano music
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
The People United Will Never Be Defeated! by the left-wing composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski is a landmark in American piano literature. The work comprises 36 variations on a protest song of the same name by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Almost every bar is laden with pianistic virtuosity, yet the listener is carried through some very complex music in a wholly natural way. The variations themselves all symbolize the different phases and aspects of a struggle: from angry, highly-energiz…
The Desert Music
The Desert Music is a work of music for voices and orchestra composed by Steve Reich based on texts by William Carlos Williams. It consists of five movements, and in both its tempi and arrangement of thematic material, the piece is in a characteristic arch form (ABCBA). The piece is scored for a chorus of 27 voices: nine sopranos, and six each of altos, tenors and basses. It calls for a woodwind section comprising four flutes with three doubling on piccolo, four oboes with three doubling on cor …
Passio
Settings of the Passion are part of an ancient tradition within the Church in which all four Gospel accounts of the Passion are sung to plainchant in Holy Week. Over the centuries the three main elements of the story were separated out onto different reciting tones, and later given to different singers: a priest to sing the words of Jesus, a deacon the main narrative, and a sub-deacon the words of other minor characters including the crowd, Pilate and Peter. One of the earliest surviving Passion…