Composition / Modern Chamber Music

Noriko Baba’s music transforms fleeting details into profound artistic expressions, weaving nostalgia, nature, and her Japanese heritage into evocative soundscapes. From the intimate, lantern-lit glow of Bonbori to the tumultuous echoes of the 2011 tsunami in Shiosai, her works balance delicacy and intensity. 9600 romanticizes the age of steam locomotives, while Au pavillon de (Monsieur) Porcelaine offers a deeply personal meditation on joy and loss through Mahlerian inspiration. With Avant le c…

Didier Rotella’s "Zone Grise" unfolds in a space of perpetual transformation, where sound navigates between density and purity, acoustic and electronic, structure and fluidity. Catharsis combines hybrid instruments and spatialized textures to evoke a dramatic journey of evolution and renewal, while Fragrances draws inspiration from perfume composition, blending musical elements into a rich, multi-layered tapestry. Mogari reflects on ritual and humanity through augmented instruments and poetic ge…

Oriol Saladrigues Brunet’s music crafts intricate interactions between time and communication, turning moments into rich artistic expressions. His compositions treat time as a flexible and multi-layered concept, balancing precision with unpredictability. Musical textures emerge and transform, revealing patterns that are both structured and fluid, creating a space where a dialogue between instruments and ideas unfolds. Through thoughtful exploration of irregularity and balance, Saladrigues create…

bastille musique presents its thirty-third release »Klaus Ospald: Escribí« featuring world premiere recordings by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), Teodoro Anzellotti (accordion), Edicson Ruiz (double bass), WDR Sinfonieorchester and Ensemble Modern, and conductors Enno Poppe, Peter Hirsch, David Niemann and Lin Liao. From a piano concerto and a concerto for double bass with accordion to an ensemble piece and a clarinet sextet, the album combines four of Ospald’s instrumental works from 2014 to 202…

bastille musique presents its thirty-second release »Beat Furrer: Spur« featuring world premiere recordings by Quatuor Diotima, Claudia Chan (piano) and Thorsten Johanns (clarinet). The double album combines Furrer’s complete four string quartets with his piano quintet and clarinet quintet, spanning a period of almost four decades from 1984 to 2021. The WDR recordings are complemented by a 48-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with texts by Harry Vogt, Andreas Karl and an interview with the interpr…

bastille musique presents its thirty-first release »Urquiza, Terranova, Rataj, Djordjević, Kranebitter, Glojnarić, Schüttler: Gassenhauer« featuring seven world premiere recordings by the Trio Catch. The album combines new works for clarinet, violoncello and piano by Mikel Urquiza, Daniela Terranova, Jakub Rataj, Milica Djordjević, Matthias Kranebitter, Sara Glojnarić and Mart*in Schüttler, all commissioned for and premiered by Trio Catch. In addition to the recordings produced by the SWR, it al…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its eighteenth release »Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Sinfonien (live)« featuring Emily Hindrichs (soprano), Anna Radziejewska (mezzo-soprano), Bettina Ranch (alto), Peter Tantsits (tenor), Hans Christoph Begemann (baritone), Otto Katzameier (bass), the WDR Sinfonieorchester and Emilio Pomàrico (conductor). The set comprises Zimmermann’s Sinfonie in einem Satz (1951) and Vokalsinfonie (1957-1963) from Die Soldaten, recorded live at the Kölner Philharmonie by the WD…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its seventeenth release »Lucier & Bach: Sitting in a Room« featuring Hanna Herfurtner (soprano, voice), Clara Blessing (oboe), Joosten Ellée (violin), Linda Mantcheva (violoncello) and Elina Albach (harpsichord, organ). The album combines Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece I am sitting in a room with arias by Johann Sebastian Bach (from BWV 61, 1, 58, 199, 57, 36, 248, 68). Recorded in co-production with Deutschlandfunk, the set also includes a 48-page bilingual …

2024 stock bastille musique presents its thirteenth release »Claude Vivier: Lonely Child« featuring five works by Vivier from 1977 and 1980: Lonely Child performed by Katrien Baerts (soprano), the WDR Symphony Orchestra and Bas Wiegers (conductor), Shiraz by Akiko Okabe (piano), Pulau Dewata and Zipangu by the Holst-Sinfonietta and Klaus Simon (conductor), and Love Songs by the Neue Vocalsolisten. In addition to these recordings produced by the WDR, SWR and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the set also i…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its first release »Claude Vivier: Kopernikus« in a SWR studio recording by the Opera Factory Freiburg, the Holst-Sinfonietta and Klaus Simon (conductor). Besides the CD containing Vivier’s chamber opera from 1979, which he called opéra-rituel de mort, the lavish package includes a 64-pages trilingual booklet (EN, FR, DE) and two photo leaflets with previously unpublished pictures of Claude Vivier as well as the artists during a staged performance.

Time of year and day, light; warmth, coolness; wind, rain; breath of air, babbling of the stream; People and other beings going about their lives: a strangely unpredictable mix of expected and unexpected events that contribute to the precise conditions of the moment in which we find ourselves. The here and now conveys a special feeling and a unique sound identity. Mason enables us to connect with times, places, people and situations that go far beyond the here and now. Mason is one of the most i…

*2025 stock* Olympia 1972 and the musical avant-garde. A look back at the music program created for and around the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich causes astonishment. The people in charge give space to contemporary music. It is quite natural and apparently normal to rely on the avant-garde. This extraordinary musical framework program for the 1972 Olympics has almost been forgotten. The architecture with its transparent, glass tent roof is remembered as a sign of a new, cosmopolitan, modern and de…

"Spektralmaskin, a collaborative album by the Norwegian musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne and Peder Simonsen, owes its name to a sort of prospecting: the process of sliding e-bows—small magnetic motors of adjustable speeds used to sustain sounds, here of Lysne’s own design—along guitar strings to produce harmonics. As these harmonics can occur erratically, the technique rewards the musician patient enough to scoot the e-bow about the string, waiting for the delicate sounds to crest. The duo’s fasci…

Ainon, a Helsinki-based ensemble founded by cellist-composer Aino Juutilainen, returns on We Jazz with their second album, out 6th September. On Within, the four-piece plays music influenced by jazz, contemporary music and classical music, all morphed together into a highly inspired musical vision that echoes the legacy of the likes of Abdul Wadud and Jimmy Giuffre. The music of Ainon might be best described as "avantgarde chamber jazz", with original compositions and the individual voices of th…

Major contemporary composer finally getting the vinyl treatment he deserves! Grosskopf has been a key figure in the Berlin new music scene since the 70s - his string quartets are precise, luminous constructions that breathe and pulse with an inner logic all their own.

Adrián Demoč writes "gentle and soft, non-violent music." The Slovak composer, based in Spain, reduces chamber music down to near-monody—single melodic lines articulated through subtle timbral shifts and microtonal deviations. Zamat, his fourth Another Timbre release, presents three chamber works where Apartment House navigates music that moves "back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes." The title track—zamat means "velvet" in Slovak—deploys clarinet, bass clarinet, viola, and cello…

"Maybe I'm like a still life painter," Linda Catlin Smith says, "looking at the same objects again and again over the years." Yet this survey of chamber works—spanning 1986 to 2024—shows a composer whose perspectives continually shift, finding something fresh in each iteration. Hers is "a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty." The Guardian awarded five stars, placing it #3 in their Top Classical Releases of 2024. Apa…

Anglo-German composer Eden Lonsdale returns to Another Timbre with an ambitious double album that represents his most mature and expansive work to date. Following the critical success of Clear and Hazy Moons, Lonsdale presents five major compositions that explore the boundaries of chamber music through rigorous formal constraints, microtonal explorations, and an extraordinary attention to harmonic metamorphosis. The first disc, performed by the acclaimed Apartment House, features three pieces fo…

Inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, Rewild seeks new strata in musical parameters, exploring the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. Like a giant body or ecosystem slowly breathing, Rewild’s constantly transforming sound-world orients temporal perception toward global listening. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual …

Formed in Cambridge in 1969 by Tim Souster and Roger Smalley, Intermodulation started out as a 4 piece group with the addition of Robin Thompson and Andrew Powell (who soon moved on to other Cambridge projects, including a pre Chris Cutler Henry Cow). Powell was replaced by Peter Britton, and this incarnation of the group remained for the duration of their existence.  Having releasing a box set of works by Gentle Fire it felt necessary to do the same with Intermodulation and thus complete the ot…

"Today’s wine tasting is once again hosted by sommelier Claudio Sanna. He presents more local Sardinian varieties with a round of flights, much like the 2022 release Compositori Sardi Contemporanei. Instead of grape cultivars and vintner, Sanna presents multiple composers and performers for you to sample, not with your tongue but your ears. Just like a wine tasting experience, these tracks are a sample of the rich and fertile Sardinian landscape of creative musicians." – Mark Corroto

On Inhabit, Stefan Prins extends his signature post-digital language into a dense, porous ecosystem where instruments, electronics and mediated bodies co-exist, blurring performer and environment until listening itself feels like entering an unstable architecture.

Reminiscenze: vague and distant memory, nearly lost in oblivion. Form and structure of the past to which the author refers consciously or unconsciously. The pieces aim to translate the sound quality of the voices of Renaissance music into acoustic saxophones through the use of multiphonics. The structure of the composition Reminiscenze is based on In te domine speravi by an anonymous composer, Miserere mei Deus by Fabrizio Dentice and Per non dir ch'io moia by Michelangelo Rossi. The material of…

Other Minds is pleased to present Polytempo Music, a new recording by American composer Brian Baumbusch with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Polytempo Music draws influence from Indonesian gamelan music and minimalism, with their interlocking rhythms, stable harmonies, and kaleidoscopic instrumental colors. Conceptually, it also owes a debt to Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic experiments. Building on those foundations, Baumbusch invites us to explore an advanced heterophony—multiple ins…

Chinese-American composer Kui Dong draws inspiration from old forms, employs unusual instrumental combinations, and even commingles four languages within her compositions on this collection of world premiere recordings. The major work Shui Diao Ge Tou and Song is performed brilliantly by San Francisco’s adventurous choir Volti, led by conductor Robert Geary, who also presents the heartfelt Let Frogs and Crickets Carry It On with the Piedmont Children’s Choir. Pianists Sally Pinkas and Evan Hirsc…

"Zensolence" embodies the auditory canvas of Osmo Tapio Räihälä, a synaesthetic composer who transforms the visual into the musical. For Räihälä, art forms transcend their mediums and speak a universal language through diverse expressions. His experience of colours, shapes and textures in music is reflected in this eclectic album, where the traditional meets the innovative. Räihälä draws inspiration from the abstract and translates it into a musical lexicon that is as diverse as it is distinctiv…

Pianist Eunmi Ko’s latest double album, 12 Views on Life, offers a profound musical reflection on the tumultuous years of 2020 and 2021. Through two major projects, SPAM! for solo piano (and other objects she could find around her house) and Project GŪT for ensemble, Ko, alongside the Contemporary Art Music Project [CAMP], delve deep into the existential questions posed by the global pandemic and personal struggles with identity and creativity. Conceived for livestreaming from home, SPAM!, embra…

Samuel Andreyev’s music is incredibly varied, from the sparse resonance of the Sonata da Camera, the ‘cartoon music’ – as the composer puts it -of Vérifications, characterised by primary colours and strong instrumental timbres; the Sextet in Two Parts which in contrast focuses on minute timbral shadings; and of course the cantata for solo voice and ensemble which is the title track of the album. Performed by Ensemble Proton Bern, conducted by Luigi Gaggero with the magical soprano voice of Peyee…

Georgia Denham (b.1997) draws on anecdotal experience to create her music. She studied with Andrew Hamilton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and now with Richard Causton at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. She lives with her husband, a theoretical computer scientist, and their many beloved plants. “This collection of chamber music from 2018–2022 wakes scores I thought were long since sleeping, where I first learned to write the delicate sounds I loved. With music written during my studi…

Griffin works in Toronto on rational intonation and on process as a way of making form. One critic described the result as putting the listener in a kind of sonic microgravity, which is a fair account of what happens when the tuning stops beating.

Eden Lonsdale is a composer of acoustic music living and working between London and Berlin. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co- exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre, melody and rhythm. Often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. The three pieces from this alb…

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Gran…

In 2021, the Galan Trio – an epic classical piano trio hailing from Athens – built a bridge from Greece to the USA in the form of ten new works for piano, violin, and cello from composers based in the Southeast and Northeast. The project, aptly named Kinesis, met with such acclaim that their odyssey now continues with another phase: twelve commissioned works covering the Midwest and South Central states. Praised by Fanfare magazine for the “open ears and flexibility they display in so many idiom…

Violinist, Hanna Hurwitz, is a musician who champions the very latest contemporary classical works – she is a member of Chicago’s cutting-edge Grossman Ensemble and Ensemble Dal Niente after all – but she is equally at home among solo and chamber works from past eras. For this album, she goes back one hundred years into neglected jewels of the repertoire from that time, bringing her fresh perspective to current ears. She writes, “I wanted to highlight my orientation toward collaboration through …

Catherine Lamb works at the boundary between perception and illusion. In Curva Triangulus (2018/21), the American composer takes Bridget Riley's geometric forms as starting point for "warping" Renaissance materials through geometric musical figures. The result is a 41-minute composition for eight instruments where the distinction between melody and harmony dissolves: one generates the other, rather than existing as separate entities. The score demands an exceptional ensemble. Bern's Ensemble Pro…

Ian Antonio discovered Jürg Frey via algorithm. About 15 years ago, SoundCloud kept leading him to the same piece, maybe Circular Music No. 2. "I wouldn't notice the piece starting but then realize I was in fact listening to it closely," he recalls. "The stillness and closeness and warmth were somewhat new to me." At the time, Antonio played "a lot of very loud and often very fast music" with groups like Wet Ink, Talujon, Zs, and Yarn/Wire. Frey's music was "very much the opposite." This double …

If music grows out of a sense of place, then it follows that related places might have related musics. That idea is the springboard for this album that nods at 400 years of links between two vibrant cities. When the Dutch founded Nieuw Amsterdam in the 17th century, they provided the impetus for the growth of a city that shared many values of its model. The multitude of languages, ethnicities and nationalities, as well as an atmosphere of religious tolerance, made for an astounding uniqueness of…

The journey of River of January began in early 1969, when as a freshly arrived 14-year-old from Los Angeles, standing by the ocean in Rio de Janeiro [transl., River of January], Rick Baitz heard a crescendo of rhythmic chanting, followed by a parade of women sashaying down the sidewalk, joyfully singing and swaying to the beat of their own samba. He didn’t know at the time that one day he would write a piece honoring the name of that city, but In 1991 he was commissioned by The Juilliard School …

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-fifth release »Saunders, Boucourechliev, Clarke, Riehm: Archipels« featuring world premiere recordings by Nicolas Hodges (piano). The album combines new works for piano by Rebecca Saunders, James Clarke and Rolf Riehm with three different interpretations of André Boucourechliev’s open form composition Archipel 5d from 1970. In addition to the recordings produced by the SWR, it also contains a 48-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with articles by Ni…

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-third release »Iannis Xenakis: Eonta« featuring recordings by Ensemble Schwerpunkt, Lorenzo Soulès (piano), Edicson Ruiz (double bass), Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) und Peter Rundel (conductor). The album includes Iannis Xenakis’s music for brass from four decades, from Eonta (1963-1964) to Linaia-Agon (1972), Khal Perr (1983) and Mnamas Xapin Witoldowi Lutosławskiemu (1994), amongst others. In addition to the recordings produced by the WDR, it al…