★Wergo

Three works by Enno Poppe for Ensemble Resonanz: the viola concerto Filz with Tabea Zimmermann, Stoff in its version for nine strings, and Wald for four string quartets, conducted by the composer. First recordings, co-produced with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …

Six chamber works by Younghi Pagh-Paan, including BIDAN-SIL (Silken Thread) and two TA-RYONG pieces, in first recordings by the E-MEX Ensemble conducted by Christoph Maria Wagner. Co-production with Deutschlandradio, 2020.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces…

Five works by Enno Poppe written for Ensemble Musikfabrik: Fell for drumset, Stoff for nine players, Brot, Haare for violin solo and Zug for seven brass, with Dirk Rothbrust, Hannah Weirich and Musikfabrik conducted by the composer.

Nicolas Hodges alternates Beethoven's Fantasie op. 77, Bagatelles op. 126 and Allegretto WoO 61 with Harrison Birtwistle's Variations from the Golden Mountain, Gigue Machine and Dance of the metro-gnome. WDR recording, November 2019.

"String quartet” seems a rather reductive way of describing any of the four utterly compelling works by Clara Iannotta that the Jack Quartet play here. For as well as demanding that the string players employ every conventional technique, the Italian composer extends their sound world farther, both with electronics and with “found objects” applied to the strings and bodies of the instruments. The four pieces all date from the last seven years. The earliest, A Failed Entertainment, borrows the wor…

Double album of solo and duo works by organist-composer Gerd Zacher, all first recordings, including 75 Event(ualitie)s for organ with Juan Allende-Blin's Siebeneinhalb Dezennien, played by Matthias Geuting, Hasti Molavian, Evelin Degen, Allende-Blin and others.

Portrait CD of the Chinese composer Huihui Cheng: five works from 2016-2019 for voices, prepared piano, piano trio with dancer and ensembles with electronics, performed by Youmi Kim, Claudia Chan, Ensemble uBu, ensemble mosaik and Ensemble Experimental.

Portrait CD of the British composer Naomi Pinnock: String Quartet No. 2, Words, Lines and Spaces and Music for Europe (2010-2016), played by Quatuor Bozzini, Omar Ebrahim with the London Sinfonietta under Beat Furrer, Richard Uttley and Ensemble Adapter.

Works for saxophone, piano and percussion by Helmut Lachenmann, Martin Schüttler, Yu Kuwabara, Martin Smolka and Michael Finnissy, played by Trio Accanto (Marcus Weiss, Nicolas Hodges, Christian Dierstein), with Lachenmann as voice. An SWR production, 2020.

Portrait CD of Zeynep Gedizlioğlu: five works from 2013-2018 for piano duo and string quartet, ensemble, voices and orchestra, played by Quatuor Diotima, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the hr-Sinfonieorchester, recorded 2017-2018.

First recordings of Alberto Posadas's Poética del Laberinto (2016/17), a cycle of three pieces for saxophone quartet, played by Sigma Project (Andrés Gomis, Ángel Soria, Alberto Chaves, Josetxo Silguero), recorded in Burgos in 2018.

*2022 stock* 'Hans Werner Henze was, during his lifetime, probably the most-performed composer of western modern music, and his advanced yet sensuously traditional music remains an important presence on stages around the world today. Henze was deeply attached to Italy, where he spent a large part of his life. The roots of this album go back to a personal meeting between Henze and the Italian double bass virtuoso Daniele Roccato when Roccato was attempting to obtain Henze’s blessing for a theater…

First recording of Michel Roth's Im Bau, fifteen sound spaces after Kafka for mezzo-soprano, ensemble and live electronics, in its radiophonic version, with Anne-May Krüger and ensemble æquatuor, recorded in Basel in 2017.

Decoder Ensemble plays first recordings of works on remix, sampling and copy-paste by Brigitta Muntendorf, Ole Hübner, Stefan Prins, Matthias Kranebitter and Leopold Hurt, most commissioned for its 2017 Big Data Weekend. Coproduced with Deutschlandfunk.

Piano music for two and four hands by Erwin Schulhoff, 1919 to 1927: Piano Sonata No. 3, Ironien op. 34, 10 Klavierstücke op. 30, Musik für Klavier op. 35 and 11 Inventionen op. 36, played by Monica Gutman with Erika Le Roux.

First recording of Manfred Trojahn's String Quartet No. 2 (1979/80) with clarinet and mezzo-soprano, setting three poems by Georg Trakl, played by the Minguet Quartett with Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and Thorsten Johanns. Co-production with Deutschlandradio, 2019.

Edition Musikfabrik: Sampo Haapamäki's Heritage, Martin Smolka's Wooden Clouds and Carola Bauckholt's Voices for Harry Partch, new works for Musikfabrik's replica Partch instruments, recorded in Cologne 2015-2018 under Siân Edwards and Clement Power.

First recording of Enno Poppe's Rundfunk for nine synthesizers (2015-2018), played by Ensemble Mosaik with audio software by Wolfgang Heiniger, recorded in 2019 at the Haus des Rundfunks, Berlin. Co-production with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Eight chamber works (1968-2006) by Uruguayan composer Coriún Aharonián (1940-2017), played by Ensemble Aventure, and the orchestral Mestizo (1993) with the SWF-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden under Zoltán Peskó.

'Morton Feldman has proved one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. Yet he remains one of its most enigmatic, and his late works retain an aura of mystery steeped with the grandeur, anxiety and quietly changing colour he adored in abstract expressionist painting and, latterly, Anatolian rug design. Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is perhaps the most rhythmically active of these famously long, static pieces, which showed his increasing preoccupation with matters of form, scale a…

Portrait CD plus DVD of Oxana Omelchuk: eleven works from 2004-2018, from solo viola d'amore to ensemble and video, played by Ensemble Musikfabrik, Studio Dan, Schlagquartett Köln, Rie Watanabe and the composer herself.

Edition Musikfabrik: Brian Ferneyhough's La Chute d'Icare with clarinettist Carl Rosman, Stephan Winkler's Von der Gewissensnot der Insekten and Oscar Bettison's Livre des Sauvages, played by Ensemble Musikfabrik under Diego Masson, Clement Power and Emilio Pomàrico.

Portrait CD of Lula Romero: three works for instruments or voices and live electronics (2013-2017), performed by Zafraan Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora and the singers Aki Hashimoto, Silke Evers and Noa Frenkel, with Deutschlandfunk and the SWR Experimentalstudio.

Andreas H. H. Suberg's Leonardo-Zyklus, ten music scenarios after Leonardo da Vinci's prophecies, for countertenor (Daniel Gloger), trumpet and alphorn (Paul Hübner), percussion (Olaf Tzschoppe) and electronics (Suberg). Recorded September 2017.

Mark Andre's hij 1 for orchestra (WDR Sinfonieorchester, Mariano Chiacchiarini, 2015) and hij 2 for 24 voices and live electronics (SWR Vokalensemble, Marcus Creed, SWR Experimentalstudio, live 2013). First recordings.

Edition Musikfabrik: Steffen Schleiermacher's Das Tosen des staunenden Echos, Kaija Saariaho's The Tempest Songbook (Olivia Vermeulen, Peter Schöne) and Michael Wertmüller's antagonisme contrôlé with Peter Brötzmann, Dirk Rothbrust and Marino Pliakas, recorded live in Cologne 2009-2014.

Emmanuel Nunes's Minnesang for twelve voices a cappella on texts by Jakob Böhme (SWR Vokalensemble, prepared by Marcus Creed) and Musivus for orchestra in four groups (WDR Sinfonieorchester), conducted by Emilio Pomàrico.

*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…

*2022 stock* The relationship between Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen was one of great mutual respect. The German composer admired the British conductor and composer for electrifying performances of Henze’s own and other composers’ works. Knussen was an untiring and enthusiastic champion of his friend Henze’s music. The recordings collected here display Knussen’s deep understanding of Henze’s music. Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in sensitive and meticulous performances of comp…

A prolific composer, performer, and author, Curtis Roads says he “pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and technology.” He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, co-founded the International Computer Music Association in 1979, and was a pioneer in the development of granular synthesis. Roads developed the Creatophone, a system for spatial projection of sound in concert, as well as the Creatovox, an expressive new…

Alberto Posadas's six-part piano cycle Erinnerungsspuren (2014-2018), echoes of Couperin, Debussy, Schumann, Scelsi, Stockhausen and B. A. Zimmermann, in first recordings by pianist Florian Hoelscher.

Percussionist Leonie Klein's debut: solo works by Stockhausen (Zyklus), Xenakis (Psappha), Lachenmann (Intérieur I), Nicolaus A. Huber (Póthos), Peter Eötvös (Thunder) and Johannes Julius Fischer (Gathering, first recording). Recorded May 2018 with SWR2.

Portrait of Karola Obermüller with ten works from 2006-2018, several on Sappho, played by Ensemble Musikfabrik with Kai Wessel, Emanuele Arciuli, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Camilla Hoitenga, Ensemble Phorminx and Ensemble Modern.

Portrait of the Ukrainian-born composer Anna Korsun with five works from 2011-2017 for organ, guitar, voices, ensemble and objects, with Korsun as soprano, Dominik Susteck, Flavio Virzì, Looptail and members of Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.

Rolf Riehm's Die schrecklich-gewaltigen Kinder (Piia Komsi, Ensemble Modern, Hermann Bäumer, Frankfurt 2003) and O Daddy for orchestra and recorded sounds (SWF-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden, Kazimierz Kord, Donaueschingen 1984), both live premiere recordings.

Three chamber works by Marco Stroppa, Un segno nello spazio for string quartet, Hommage à Gy. K. for clarinet, viola and piano, and Osja for piano trio, in first recordings by Ensemble KNM Berlin. A WDR production.

Jörg Widmann's Polyphone Schatten (Lichtstudie II) for viola, clarinet and orchestral groups and Drittes Labyrinth for soprano and orchestral groups, in their 2002 and 2014 Cologne premiere recordings with the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Heinz Holliger and Emilio Pomàrico.

Stockhausen's complete Klavierstücke I-XI (1952-61) played by Sabine Liebner, with Klavierstück XI in two versions. Two CDs, a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk, released by Wergo in 2018.