Mondweiß
Recordings from the Elektronic Studio at the TU Berlin, the Studio of the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and at Patrick Kosk's own studio
Sui poemi concentrici
Deluxe triple cd boxet "to write music for Dante’s entire Commedia... It was not without trepidation that I accepted the proposal for a television production. Especially to accompany a reading of the text, meaning to follow it step by step, but also to support it with solid architecture. It is the opposite of a background created fragmentarily with the situations to which it relates. [Rather] a complete structure that expresses itself within the poem, a unified plan. I thought of a single arch o…
Crippled Symmetry
orton Feldman's music continues to exert its fascination on listeners and record companies alike. After releasing its highly successful recording of the more than three-hour-long For Philip Guston, Bridge once again returns to the California EAR Unit for Crippled Symmetry, at only 87 minutes a mere bagatelle in terms of Feldman's late output. Well, maybe not. Scored for flutes, mallet percussion, and piano/celeste, Crippled Symmetry does exactly what the title says: it toys with not quite exact …
For Christian Wolff
For Christian Wolff is one of Morton Feldman's final compositions, and stands alongside the four-hours-plus For Philip Guston, the 70-minute For John Cage, and the six-hour String Quartet II. Writing about hearing this work, Christian Wolff says that 'I found the experience of listening to it beautiful and interesting -- it moves away partly from our (Morty's, John Cage's and mine) original preoccupation with just sound and sonority into areas of self-awareness about listening, being a listener,…
Complete String Quartets
Xenakis Edition Volume 10 - Complete String Quartets. On Surround Sound DVD only: The studio recording process was dynamically captured by a multiple camera shoot. Each quartet is given its own visual treatment. Filmed in High Definition Video, widescreen format. 48khz-24-bit high resolution 5.1 surround sound recording. 'Tetras' (1983). 'Tetora' (1990.) 'ST-4-1,080262' (1956-62). 'Ergma' (1994). The Jack Quartet: Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violins. John Pickford Richards, viola. Kevin…
Die Sephiroth
Buwen is both composer and organist, accompanying saxophonist Priesner on this rather academic program of duets. An earnest but dull remnant of late high modernism, the title piece inadvertently points up the limitations of classical sax technique, ignoring the expressive possibilities of the instrument almost completely. Buwen is self-effacing in the extreme, content to provide ground figures for Preisner to bounce off. Strange to think that one could write music this bland about a subject so c…
New Saxophone Chamber Music
Featuring compositions by Hanspeter Kyburz, Christoph Staude, Isabel Mundry, and Walter Zimmermann.
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…
Counting Keys
2009 release **
"In case you're surprised to find a Tom Johnson album on Wandelweiser – after all, I reckon there are more actual notes on Counting Keys than on the rest of the albums released on the über-redux label put together – it's worth remembering that Tom Johnson and Wandelweiser prime mover Antoine Beuger know and greatly respect each other's work. This collection of four pieces spanning nearly three decades of Johnson's career is one of the composer's more accessible (though no less ri…
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…
The theory of impossible melody
Larry Polansky (1954–2024) was a visionary American composer, guitarist, theorist, and educator whose work forged deep connections across mathematics, computer science, intonation theory, and experimental music. His compositions-performed here by collaborators including Jody Diamond (voice), Chris Mann (voice), Phil Burk and Larry Polansky (live computers, fretless electric guitars), and Robin Hayward (tubas)-embody a rare synthesis of rigorous theory and expressive musicality.
Polansky’s 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…