Brian Ferneyhough, Thomas Kessler

condition (record/cover): NM / EX (import sticker on back)
Gatefold sleeve with booklet attached inside.

The document of what is, by broad consensus, one of the most significant works for cello and electronics composed in the twentieth century - and the LP through which Brian Ferneyhough's Time And Motion Study II (1973-76) first reached a wider public. Rohan de Saram, performing under the direction of Jürg Wyttenbach, navigates a solo part of extraordinary difficulty - a continuous, unbroken arc of notated complexity in which the extended cello techniques required (harmonics, sul ponticello, simultaneous bowing and voice production) are organized into structures so densely specified that the music they produce sounds simultaneously over-controlled and barely contained. The live electronics - processing the cello sound in real time - extend the instrument's timbral world into a shadow-space that the acoustic instrument alone could not inhabit.

Paired with it on this Musicaphon LP, two works by the Swiss composer Thomas Kessler (born 1937): Piano Control and Smog. Kessler - who had studied with Nono and Globokar and whose work occupied the intersection of live electronics, political theater, and rigorous compositional technique - brought to these works a very different temperament from Ferneyhough's, more interested in the social staging of musical production than in the extreme notational pressure Ferneyhough applied. The combination makes this LP one of the more interesting documents of the European new music scene in the mid-1970s: two composers, working from adjacent premises, arriving at entirely different territories. Musicaphon, BM 30 SL 1715.