condition (record/cover): NM / EX (light edges wear)

Insert included. | One of the most sustained and demanding choral works to emerge from the post-war Austrian avant-garde. The Requiem by Erich Urbanner arrives on Amadeo in an authoritative recording that reveals the full measure of its ambition. Born in Innsbruck in 1936 and formed in Vienna under Karl Schiske and - crucially - Friedrich Cerha, Urbanner belongs to the generation that inherited Viennese serialism not as orthodoxy but as open field: a set of procedures to be extended, humanized, and pressed toward expressive ends that Schoenberg himself could not have anticipated.

The Requiem is a work of enormous scope, marshaling soloists, chorus, and orchestra into a structure that does not aestheticize death but confronts it with the full apparatus of the modern European tradition. The serial language here is not cold - it has been warmed by something older, a liturgical weight that presses against the formal architecture from within. Austere, demanding, and deeply serious. A cornerstone of the Austrian choral repertoire that remains too little known beyond the German-speaking world. Amadeo, 415 829-1.