Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anthony Braxton

Featuring: Marianne Schroeder

condition (discs/cover): NM / NM Postcard included. | A double LP that only Marianne Schroeder could have made - and only hat ART would have released. The Swiss pianist (born 1949, Reiden), who studied with Scelsi in Rome, took composition classes with Kagel and Klaus Huber, and went on to premiere works by Cage, Feldman, Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher, is one of the very few performers equally at home in the European avant-garde and the world of creative improvised music. This set places those two commitments side by side: record one is a trio session with Anthony Braxton (alto and soprano saxophones) and Garrett List (trombone); record two is a solo recital of Stockhausen's Klavierstücke VI, VII and VIII.

The Braxton session, recorded 6 April 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, features compositions by all three musicians - Braxton, List and Schroeder. The credits list all three as composers, which places this firmly in Braxton's collaborative practice of the early 1980s rather than the leader-sideman model. The combination of piano, alto saxophone and trombone produces a spare, transparent texture - three monophonic lines (or nearly so) weaving around one another with the precision of chamber music and the freedom of improvisation. Braxton contributes liner notes.

The Stockhausen Klavierstücke, recorded December 1984 at Studio Sonographic, Schlieren, Switzerland, belong to the middle group of the cycle - pieces VI, VII and VIII, composed between 1954 and 1955, at the height of Stockhausen's engagement with total serialism and its dissolution into something more intuitive. These are among the most demanding works in the twentieth-century piano literature, requiring a pianist who can think structurally while maintaining physical and expressive intensity at every moment. Schroeder's approach - informed by her studies with Scelsi, where the single tone is a universe - brings a quality of sustained attention to each sound event that distinguishes her readings from the more percussive, architecture-first interpretations of Kontarsky or Tudor.

2LP. hat ART 2030, 1984. Produced by Pia and Werner X. Uehlinger. Painting by Klaus Baumgärtner. Liner notes by Anthony Braxton and Reinhard Oehlschlägel.