Various Artists

Featuring: Dieter Schnebel, Krzysztof Penderecki, Heinz Holliger, Friedrich Cerha

condition (record/cover): NM / NM (price tag on front) Insert included. | The second volume in Wergo's Neue Chormusik series, and one of the most extraordinary choral records of the 1970s. The Schola Cantorum Stuttgart under Clytus Gottwald - sixteen solo voices of astonishing technical command and expressive commitment - perform five works that between them redefine what the human voice can do when freed from the conventions of choral singing. Gottwald's ensemble, founded in 1960, was for decades the indispensable laboratory for new vocal music in the German-speaking world, and this disc captures them at their peak.

Heinz Holliger, known primarily as the great oboist-composer, dominates the first side with two substantial a cappella works. Dona Nobis Pacem for 12 voices occupies nearly twenty minutes - a vast, slow-moving meditation on the liturgical plea for peace, in which Holliger subjects the text to extreme vocal techniques: whispered consonants, microtonal clusters, breath sounds, the words dissolving into their phonetic components before periodically reassembling into moments of shattering clarity. It is one of the most important and least known works in Holliger's catalogue. Psalm for 16 solo voices follows - more compressed, more violent, the voices pushed into territories of cry and whisper that anticipate Holliger's later explorations of madness and extremity in works like Scardanelli-Zyklus.

Side B opens with Dieter Schnebel's :!(madrasha 2), the title combining a punctuation-mark notation with the Hebrew word for school or place of study. Schnebel, who had already explored the physicality of vocal production in works like Maulwerke and Glossolalie, here creates a piece in which the voices operate at the threshold between language and pure sound - syllables, phonemes, breath patterns organized into a dense, shifting texture. Krzysztof Penderecki's Ecloga VIII brings a different sensibility - the Polish composer's characteristic exploitation of vocal clusters and glissandi, but filtered through a pastoral text that gives the sonic violence an unexpected tenderness. Friedrich Cerha's Verzeichnis (Index/Catalogue) for 16 solo voices closes the disc - the Viennese composer, co-founder of the ensemble die reihe and completer of Berg's Lulu, here creates a work whose title suggests the systematic, enumerative quality of the music: voices cataloguing their own possibilities.

LP with liner notes. Released on Wergo, 1974. Recorded by the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, conductor Clytus Gottwald.