Brian Ferneyhough

Featuring: Pierre-Yves Artaud

condition (record/cover): NM / NM
Gatefold sleeve. Insert included.

An intimate encounter between a composer and a performer at the frontier of what the flute could be asked to do - and one of the more unusual documents in Brian Ferneyhough's discography. The flutist Pierre-Yves Artaud was among the most important extended-technique specialists of his generation, a performer whose investigations into the instrument's multiphonic, microtonal, and breathy registers had opened new territories for composers willing to follow him into them. Ferneyhough's flute writing - concentrated, obsessive, requiring the performer to sustain an intensity of physical and intellectual engagement that few instruments demand over such extended durations - found in Artaud a collaborator uniquely equipped to meet it.

The Rencontre format - encounter, meeting - suggests something more dialogic than a straightforward LP release: a document of the process of collaboration as much as its results, the disc issued on the small French label Stile Libero in an edition that reflects the intimate scale of the project. Works for flute and ensemble, in which Ferneyhough's treatment of the instrument as simultaneously an acoustic phenomenon, a performative body, and a vector for notated complexity reaches some of its most concentrated expressions. Stile Libero, 3108 S83.