★BIS
Ex Oriente
Atmospheric music by the spiritual leader and composer One of the great mystics of the early 20th century, George lvanovich Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol on the border of Russian Armenia and Turkey. As a young man, he began to travel east as far as Tibet, Afghanistan and Central Asia, in search of spiritual enlightenment. Visiting ancient temples, Gurdjieff learned from spiritual teachers and absorbed music from all the places he visited. On his return to the West, he gathered a group of fo…
Piano Music And Transcriptions
Michael Habermann made the first, and in many respects the best commercial recordings devoted to Kaikhosru Sorabji’s ridiculously difficult and overwrought piano works. As with Habermann’s previous three Sorabji discs, the present recital offers several sides of the composer: variation writer, miniaturist, paraphraser, and transcriber. Sorabji’s 1945 transcription of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnol largely stays faithful to the original, save for decorative showers of bitonal arpeggios and runs that a…
100 Trascendental Studies
“Volume 2 of this much-anticipated continuation of Sorabji’s mammoth set of studies takes us almost half way in terms of number, if not in playing time (perhaps a third or thereabouts). The reason for this is encapsulated in the first entry on this new disc; with No.26 the composer appears for the first time to take a decisive step back from writing pieces with some ostensibly pedagogical intent — “studies” per se — and interjects a larger, more musically intricate piece; in this case a ravishin…
Open Percussion
this CD is an amazing achievement. Kjos Sørensen is a brilliantly gifted performer, but clearly an imaginative and creative one too. A very special issue, continuing BIS’s tradition of opening our minds and our ears.
Ten Temperaments/Situation I/Ur Undrens Tid
Performed by Ragnar Grippe, electronics. "Ten Temperaments was commissioned by the music section of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation for performance in the Swedish Spinrg Music programme for 1982. Ten Temperaments is above all a work that has been consciously projected between different forms of expression, borrowing characteristics from modern serious music only to alter the listening experience at the next moment with the idioms from popular music; these leaps between styles have gi…
Pléiades
Featured works: "Pléiades" and Psappha." Performed by Kroumata Percussion Ensemble; Gert Mortensen, percussion. "Xenakis has been very interested in percussion music -- ever since his orchestral piece 'Terretektorh (1966) in which the instrumental forces are spread throughout the hall, by way of 'Psappha' (1975) for a lone percussion virtuoso all the way to 'Pléiades' (1979) for six percussionists -- perhaps the largest composition in the entire percussion repertoire, and the most daring …
100 Transcendental Studies For Piano 1-25
Sorabji's style was deeply indebted to the music of the Middle East, some forms of which, during performance, last for hours or days at a time: his piano writing is typically elaborate from the torrential upward sweep in Mouvementé (I) via the wild and spiky V to the grotesque hammering angularity of XXV - a fantastic Medtnerian march. The dramatic and passionate writing in between …