★Kairos
Lauschgut. Works for (Inside) Piano (1989–2022)
“In art, you can have a look at the world as the world wouldn’t see itself. I find that incredibly exciting,” says Charlotte Seither, presenting ten outstanding works for piano written between 1989 and 2022 – over a period of 33 years. All of these works on make use of playing techniques in which the grand piano is not structurally altered. The sounds are therefore only created in the act of playing and make the individual work a risky event. Some pieces were created in closer succession to each…
Born In Waves
“Born in Waves is Estonian composer Elis Hallik’s first album, a gateway into the sounds and thoughts of an original artist. The album mainly features chamber compositions that represent important ideas from her oeuvre over the past decade. A versatile soundscape unravels before the listener through nine pieces, shaped by composition studies in Estonia and France, and in particular by her contact with the expressive means of spectral and electronic music. At the heart of her musical thought are …
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Zeitgeist and Otherworldly Resonances. George Crumb praised her superb 2018 Kairos release (0015029KAI), declaring, “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!”
Propagation of Uncertainty
"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make music is two frequencies – though Yazdani has a clear preference for notes extremely close in pitch. His music is full of tightly coiled beatings, both stationary and set in motion. These beatings function like black holes in his works, drawing other s…
Femenine
"Femenine stages Eastman’s shaping and buildingof the black queer masculine form – caught notnecessarily between two poles of gender, but withhis work constantly driving his own self-making.He was an inventor and sculptor, reminiscent of Jean Tinguely and Harry Bertoia. Clanging, noisy, joyful, and playful in turn, the sound sculptureemerges from these primary elements, mouldingand pressing, jiggering and jolleying, through alinear flow of sound and insistent chordalpunctuations. The contin…
Quaderno Di Strada
"Sciarrino is an important, and distinctive, figure in the Italian avant-garde. The present work is a setting of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve songs and a proverb) for baritone and 14 instrumentalists – the booklet notes say fifteen, but only fourteen are named. It puts before its hearer fragmentary, skittering sounds, sudden changes of dynamics, as sounds loom out of silence and disappear just as quickly. There are fluttery, fugitive sounds, repetitive …
Annunciation Triptych
"All is alive in Liza Lim's music, permeated by unstressed urgency. It's hard to think of anything less Kafkaesque than her Annunciation Triptych, in which she shatters the Romantic trope to pieces, rebuilds it in other ways, and uses the orchestra as a historical and cultural prism wherein the women - Sappho, Mary, and Fatimah - are portrayed as sources of transhistorical light in every movement. Each 'prism-orchestra' is, moreover, an assemblage itself, filtering its figure's radiance in unpre…
Encyclopedia of Pitch and Deviation
Matthias Kranebitter has written the odd piece without electronics in the past. However, the use of electronics in his music usually is a given. At the same time, the way in which electronics are employed in his work is anything but a matter of course. They are not simply an instrument amongst others, they don't serve as an atmospheric background, a synthesized ear-tickler, or formal glue which is meant to cover up fractures within the musical material. Rather, they themselves embody such fractu…
Sensational Bliss
"In the past, I was interested in themes of sound, such as, 'new sound', 'expressive sound' and 'metaphoric sound'. In fact, I still enjoy these expressions. However, my obsession with expressing sound itself has decreased, and I instead want to express my feelings, my thoughts and my life, with sound. With this change, I have enjoyed taking a closer look at my temperament, personality, and life, and have tried to display the results through sound. To better articulate myself, I have avoided any…
Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in the political-social spheres. The Aleph Guitar Quartet and soprano Daisy Press present a selection from Smolka's oeuvre that spans almost 25 years.
Moon on the Sea – Sea in the Moon
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in the political-social spheres. The Aleph Guitar Quartet and soprano Daisy Press present a selection from Smolka's oeuvre that spans almost 25 years.
Trostlieder
"Commenting on the folly of war, eight independent voices and texts compete for attention, reflecting the tumult of emotions...The impeccable recording quality allows us to appreciate the fine..." — Gramophone Magazine
A Thing Made Whole
In music, we don't tend to talk about things. We're too concerned about the meaning of the story, about the dynamics of the performance, the reception, the syntax, the gesture, the movement; we're too concerned about how a sound got here, where it came from, how it was made, where it's going and why. We pretend that music is a language. Greenwald asks us to get busy with things. About a minute's worth of material becomes a cycle of seven works, performed in full for the first time on this album …
Little Jimmy
e piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place.
Avalanche
*In process of stocking* In nineteen movements of varying lengths and moods, Denis Doufour’s monumental piano piece “Avalanche” invites us on a voyage across the infinite variation of the forms taken by snow, and the rich vocabulary established by the Innuits for it since their arrival on Greenland, the continent of ice. At work in this piece is a transposition, inspired by morphologies, of a certain kind of energy onto the relationships between the physical and musical realms. Thanks to his prac…
Works for Flute
Toshio Hosokawa explains his special interest in the flute as follows: “For me the flute is the instrument which can most deeply realise my musical ideal. The flute can produce a sound by means of the breath, and can be a vehicle by which the breath transmits the sound’s life-power.“ When playing the flute, the breath flow is directed upon a sharp edge or notch. The resulting vibrations excite the air contained in the resonant cavity within the flute, which can be heard as …
The Expanded Body
This CD by Alessandro Perini combines electronic sound manipulation with the creation of electromechanical and electroacoustic instruments and a reflection on sound environment, tending toward the exploration of unusual compositional solution. In short, it is experimental music and as such, it deserves to be listened to and commented upon. A few words about the composer. Alessandro Perini is a young musician: he studied composition (with Luca Francesconi and Ivan Fedele among others), electroni…
L'Afrique Et L'Asie D'Après Tiepolo
Inspired by frescos by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted in the residence of Würzburg, again two so rich universes of intoxicating sonorities. Let us quote the composer: “Nothing is more inclined to suggest space than color, which becomes the true mean of the musician”. Difficult to imagine two pieces as dissimilar as this Africa and this Asia. Tiepolo's allegorical depictions of Africa and Asia inspired the French composer Hugues Dufourt (*1943) to write two of his most powerful ensemble works.…
Works for Cello and Piano
With their 2018–2019 Isang Yun Recording Project, ItalianCellist Luigi Piovano and Pianist Aldo Orvieto pay homageto the late Korean composer and the tragic course of his life. “The events that marked Isang Yun’s life emblematically show the miserable short-sightedness of the human being, unable to act authentically and with love towards others, in striving for a common good and reach a common spiritual elevation. When confronted with the exceptional musical depth and the dramatic power of Isang…
Musiche per il "Paradiso" di Dante
"Salvatore Sciarrino's Musiche per il "Paradiso" di Dante is divided in three movements:
Alfabeto OscuroThe alphabet mentioned in the title (as if speaking, it’s written at the top of the score) refers to the language of sounds that desperately tries to transfigure into words: the orchestra seems to want to talk,” writes Sciarrino. “The nature of the instruments would not allow it, yet they obsessively act, and we hear almost without understanding. Almost. In their lack of humanity, the machines…