Iannis Xenakis

condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Insert included. Synaphai / Aroura / Antikhthon on RCA Red Seal presents Iannis Xenakis in quasi-concertante guise: Synaphai is a concerto for piano and orchestra, a genre the composer approaches as if he'd never heard of Frédéric Chopin or Franz Liszt. The pianist doesn't dialogue with the orchestra; he collides with it, sinks into it, emerges covered in sound like mud after battle.

Aroura means "arable land" in ancient Greek, and the piece treats the orchestra as field to be plowed, surface to be furrowed with sonic plows. Antikhthon, the "counter-earth" of Pythagorean cosmology, evokes that invisible planet the Greeks imagined on the sun's opposite side. Xenakis doesn't illustrate these concepts; he uses them as form generators, pretexts for architectures that need justify themselves to no one.

RCA Red Seal, label associated with Arturo Toscanini and the great repertoire, bets on music that dynamites that very repertoire. The editorial choice says something about the 1970s: for a moment it seemed the avant-garde might conquer the mainstream, that records like this could find place alongside Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. It didn't happen, but the attempt remains noble.