★Kairos
Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
** In process of stocking ** “The mystery of incarnation is the most beautiful aspect of divinity – and it is the reason why I am a Christian. I do not consider the differences between Orthodox, Protestant or Catholic: a Christian is someone who understands that God has come.” This was taken from an interview with Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) where he talked about Christmas being the one festival in the Christian calendar most important to him. In his music about the incarnation of God, Messiaen…
Und Du... et al
** Und du… was composed in 1963, commissioned by the Austrian Broadcasting Co. It was supposed to be played “radiophonically,” i.e. on tape and with loudspeakers only, to reach and involve a group of listeners corresponding to the medium’s effective radius. My own involvement with the nuclear situation – the dangerousness of which against the background of Hiroshima was clear, but not nearly to the extent it is today among the broad public – prompted me to take the equally fundamental anxiety I …
Kurtág's Ghosts
** In process of stocking ** György Kurtág's and Marino Formenti's thinking about the course, state and future path of music history runs along similar lines. Formenti's 'Kurtág's Ghosts' enriches the experience from early polyphony to the present.
Perhaps György Kurtág will one day be remembered as one of the greatest composers of our time. Discovered late, the Hungarian has only been considered an essential representative of New Music since the 1980s. Only Luigi Nono, however, wrote such convi…
Confluence / Divergence
** In process of stocking ** Double meanings, allusions and strange mirrors appear throughout the music of the Finnish composer Sebastian Hilli. The titles of several of his pieces take the form of puns, such as Kohta (2013) for chamber ensemble (the Finnish word ‘kohta’ means both soon, and place, section or point); Delta (2012) for string quartet and percussion (referring to the Greek letter and the river feature); and Snap Music (2017 – 18) for orchestra, winner of the 2019 Teosto Prize (the …
Schreiben
** In process of stocking ** If music’s relationship with reality is to be more than just a theoretical presumption, it cannot be limited merely to work titles, comments, dedications or quotations, but must also extend to permeate all musical dimensions: material, structure, form and content. And from the very beginning, Helmut Lachenmann has propagated the idea of a work that is based on the integral cohesiveness of all levels. For Lachenmann, thinking here in the tradition of Theodor W. Adorno…
Original Soundtrack to "Goodnight Mommy"
** In process of stocking ** Written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala in 2014, Goodnight Mommy (original title: Ich seh Ich seh) received outstandingly wide and positive international reviews. Even the two-minute trailer to this movie is dominated by Olga Neuwirth’s sounds, and the online journal dvd-forum.at when reviewing the cinema premiere particularly noted that Goodnight Mommy was “accompanied with mesmerizing music by Olga Neuwirth.” The fact that this is only partially tr…
Kaleidoscope
** In process of stocking ** Kairos presents Kaleidoscope by Eunho Chang. Born 1983 in Daegu, Republic of Korea, Eunho Chang began his musical studies with piano lessons at the age of seven. He studied composition at the Keimyung University, Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and obtained his PhD in musical composition at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music under the supervision of professor Marcin Błażewicz. He has been selected for various workshops and masterclasses, such as Impuls Acade…
Dr. Futurity
Kairos presents Dr. Futurity by Bernd Richard Deutsch. Dr. Futurity for 16 instruments is the last and most complex of three works that were written in immediate succession (the other two works are Mad Dog and the 2nd String Quartet) and— to conceptual, musical and dramaturgical similarities—could be united to form a triptych. The new piece is divided into three movements: I. ...trip – from Mars to here II. Chimaera III. Red Alert! Although the character of the score is often orchestral, several…
Orchestral works
José M. Sánchez-Verdú was no more than 35 years old when Spain, his homeland, awarded him its national prize. That is certainly the highest distinction he has received thus far, but is by no means the only one. Three years earlier the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation awarded him a composition prize and he has also received numerous other prizes in Spain, Germany, Japan and Latin America. His catalogue raisonné includes more than 120 works, he teaches composition at the Music University in Düss…
Bunny Games
Bunny Games is not only semantically loaded by the solo passages in the foreground in which the instruments constantly seek to draw attention to themselves, but also through references to the music of Domenico Scarlatti and Edgar Varèse as well as the Madonna numbers “Nothing really matters and Hangup”, the latter a cover version of the ABBA song “Give me a man after midnight.” The relation to popular music, which - between the lines - was always present with Bernhard Gander breaks through conti…
Iridescent Notation
Kairos presents Iridescent Notation by Samuel Andreyev. Recording Date: 22-27 Sep 2018. One of the most compelling voices to have emerged from the Canadian new music scene in the last decade is that of Samuel Andreyev. His music is equally communicative. The new disc offers half a dozen pieces which span his entire career. Luigi Gaggero conducts various combinations of the Ukranian Ukho Ensemble and provides an interesting booklet note which wavers between helpful explanation and subjective refl…
Flute and Bass
Kairos presents Flute and Bass, a Bernhard Lang's composition performed by Manuel Zurria on Flute and Dario Calderone on double-bass. Recording Date: 4 Nov 2018 & 16 May 2020. Recording Venue: tudioZ, Amsterdam/Netherlands. The work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is difficult to fit into any one musical category. His oeuvre references a wide variety of musical styles and genres, ranging from free jazz and improvisation to hip hop and DJ culture. The three works on this release show…
Music For 18 Musicians
With Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the French ensemble Links presents a classic of the 20th century: Written in 1978, it was Reich’s first work for a larger ensemble. From today’s perspective, it is an icon of American post-minimalism which has not lost any of its fascination.
Rhythmic precision, a large dynamic spectrum and a unique range of colors guarantee for an unforgettable listening experience.
Fluxus
“All works of this album are part of my Fluxus cycle, which is inspired by physical phenomena associated with fluid mechanics. Space is not a mere concept: It is an experienced reality where frames, forces and fluxes interplay in a creative dynamic – which I strive to convey in my music”, says Portuguese composer Jaime Reis about this recording.
Reis’ music is informed by both his keen interest in cutting-edge research in the natural sciences, and his abiding attention to Asian musical – and ind…
Cleopatra's Songs
“Give me some music!” These words from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which open Cleopatra’s Songs, seem particularly well chosen to characterize Agata Zubel’s relationship to music. Music: a vital need, a thirst, but also something that you give.
This portrait album with three major works, performed by leading ensembles, including the Klangforum Wien and Ensemble intercontemporain, follows her receipt of the Erste Bank Kompositionspreis in 2018.
La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura
Experiencing La lontananza utopica futura has enriched my musicianship. The unusual openness of the original materials by Nono required the establishment of an interpretive path through tapes and scores. This need has led to the emergence of a creative approach to performance, where the lines between roles and figures are blurred; with La lontananza, we cannot identify the composer as the provider of clear and direct instructions, and the performer cannot remain an invisible score-reproducer. A …
Scelsi Revisited
In the project Scelsi Revisited the tape material is for the first time reflected in the medium of art: seven composers (Ragnhild Berstad, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail, Michael Pelzel, Michel Roth, Nicola Sani) were commissioned by Klangforum Wien to create new works from Scelsi’s tape music; Uli Fussenegger had prepared data packages consisting of excerpts from two to three tapes each, which Scelsi apparently had not used for the elaboration of definitive works, the latter …
Makrokosmos I-III
Makrokosmos Volume I, whose title reflects Crumb’s admiration for Bartók’s piano series Mikrokosmos, contains 12 pieces, grouped into three parts of four each, and Crumb associates each piece with a sign of the zodiac. This is paired with Volume II, which is similarly structured, after the fashion of Debussy’s twenty-four Préludes. Volumes I and II are filled with references to the history of humankind, myths, Christianity, paganism, occultism, literary works, and the composer’s own mental pictu…
Noch sind wir ein Wort
I would like to refer to Annette Bik’s project Bach gedoubelt, which was the origin of this piece, putting Bach’s b-minor partita, BWV 1002, in direct context with contemporary musical comments. Bach wrote so-called “Double” movements to the standard dances Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande and Tempo di Borea, connected to the original as a kind of variation. Annette Bik commissioned four composers to write such “Double” movements to the four main movements of the Partita. This lead to four contemp…
Èclairs sur l'Au-Delà...
“I will say: I have given this flame to these eyes; I have drawn from the ambiguous smile of the moon […] these two naïve stars open to the infinite”, wrote the poetess Cécile Sauvage in 1908 to her unborn son, Olivier Messiaen. It is amazing that the poem in a sense expresses in a prophetic manner Messiaen’s interest in and passion for themes that were to accompany him throughout his life: the cosmos, infinity. It goes without saying that the poetic lifestyle of his mother was to have a strong …