Brian Ferneyhough

condition (record/cover): NM / NM
Insert included.

The major statement of Brian Ferneyhough's early maturity, and the work that established him, in the mid-1970s, as the most demanding and most seriously engaged compositional intelligence of his generation working anywhere in Europe. Transit (1972-75) - for six solo voices, chamber orchestra, and live electronics, conducted by Peter Eötvös on this original Decca HEAD pressing - is a large-scale work in which Ferneyhough's characteristic approach to musical time reaches its first fully realized expression: the layering of multiple simultaneous processes at different rates of change, the notation so densely specified that the performers' attempts to execute it produce a kind of controlled turbulence, a sound-world in which every parameter is over-determined and the musical result is therefore irreducibly complex, irreducibly alive.

The texts Ferneyhough worked with - from Gnostic sources and alchemical writings - are not illustrations of a philosophical position but acoustic material like any other: the voices move through, around, and against the instruments in a texture that never settles into the kind of foreground-background hierarchy that conventional ensemble music assumes. A work of extraordinary difficulty and extraordinary reward. Decca, HEAD 18.