1990 release ** Luciano Berio: Ricorrenze Salvatore Sciarrino: Quintettino #2 Luca Francesconi: Attesa Ludovico Einaudi: Ai margini dell' aria Armando Gentilucci: Cile 1973 Giorgio Federico Ghedini: Quintetto #1 "The collection here draws together pieces from the "hard" wing of post-World War II composers. The Arnold Quintet plays all this music with flair, wit, and understanding. Berio is probably the best-known name on the disc, and I enjoyed his Ricorrenze ("Recurrence") more than the other pieces. It's a curious thing. All sorts of influences float in and out, most notably and strangely Stravinsky's Le Sacre, with the ideas, frightening in the large orchestra, showing up with real charm in the woodwind quintet. The music bubbles and spurts. It's like seeds sprouting in Spring. For all its attraction, it poses great challenges for the wind players from its opening bars - killer unisons broken up among the various instruments to test pitch-matching to its limit. Sciarrino's Quintettino #2 seems little more than a compendium of special effects - blowing through the instruments without producing tone, rapping on the instruments, and so on. Francesconi's Attesa is the kind of small-ensemble piece that most conservatory composition students used to write in the Sixties and Seventies. Ludovico Einaudi's Ai margini dell' aria manages to say a lot with a little. All the "themes" move mainly by sequential half-steps. The piece lasts about ten minutes, but there's enough variety and the scoring falls pleasantly on the ear. To some extent, it's an exercise of ingenuity, as he rings all kinds of changes on rising and falling half-steps, but the piece is also filled with lovely moments. Gentilucci's Cile 1973 elegizes the overthrow and murder of Allende."