An Album
Five typically matter-of-fact (but also very beautiful) chamber works by one of the UK’s most under-rated composers.
In the Asylum
This album collects works for piano through piano quartet by Irish composer Gerald Barry. All, except for In the Asylum are first recordings.
In Freundschaft
*2022 Stock.* The Stockhausen Edition no. 105 contains chamber works recorded between 2011-15. In Freundschaft was written as a clarinet solo for (and dedicated to) woodwind player Suzanne Stephens for her birthday and was first premiered by her in 1978, though a flute version was performed earlier during Stephens' actual birthday celebration. In the following years, Stockhausen composed versions for many more instruments, including recorder, oboe, bassoon (w. teddy bear costume), basset horn, b…
In Freundschaft
*2022 Stock.* The Stockhausen Edition no. 102 contains five new arrangements of the solo work In Freundschaft (In Friendship). In Freundschaft was written as a clarinet solo for (and dedicated to) woodwind player Suzanne Stephens for her birthday and was first premiered by her in 1978, though a flute version was performed earlier during Stephens' actual birthday celebration. In the following years, Stockhausen composed versions for many more instruments, including recorder, oboe, bassoon (w. ted…
In Freundschaft
*2022 Stock.* The Stockhausen Edition no. 101 contains four new arrangements of the solo work In Freundschaft (In Friendship). In Freundschaft was written as a clarinet solo for (and dedicated to) woodwind player Suzanne Stephens for her birthday and was first premiered by her in 1978, though a flute version was performed earlier during Stephens' actual birthday celebration. In the following years, Stockhausen composed versions for many more instruments, including recorder, oboe, bassoon (w. te…
Hoffnung
*2022 Stock.* Hoffnung (Hope, 9th Hour from Klang, for string trio, 2007) and Glanz (Brilliance, 10th Hour from Klang, for septet, 2007) both adapt and re-sequence melodic and rhythmic material from Schönheit (on The Stockhausen Edition no. 87) to create a similarly hypnotic web of lyrical polyphony, approaching and receding from the listener. - Stockhausenspace.blogspot.com
Balance
*2022 Stock.* Balance (7th Hour from Klang, 2007) and Glück (Bliss, Eighth Hour from Klang, 2007) are both wind trios which adapt and re-sequence melodic and rhythmic material from Schönheit (on The Stockhausen Edition no. 87) to create a similarly hypnotic web of lyrical polyphony, approaching and receding from the listener. - Stockhausenspace.blogspot.com
Harmonien
*2022 Stock.* Harmonien (Harmonies, 5th Hour from Klang, 2006) consists of three adaptations (for bass clarinet, flute, trumpet) of a composition for a solo melody instrument, in which broad melodic fragments are answered by brisk cycles of related arpeggio figures (or broken chords). These ostinato figures are modulated dynamically so that they subtly approach and recede. In Schönheit (Beauty, 6th Hour from Klang, 2006) the material from the three arrangements of Harmonien are layered and synch…
Michaels-Ruf / Bassetsu / Synthi-Fou / Quitt / Komet / Trumpetent
*2022 Stock.* Chamber Works from Licht, for Brass, Reeds, Percussion & Electronics.
Night Will Fade and Fall Apart
"As I perceive it, in much of Magnus Granberg’ work, going back as far as projects such as Sheriff, there’s an in-drawing nurturing of self. However one may read the beautifully poetic, frequently melancholic nature of the titles of the pieces, this is far from a flattening of the nature of existence but rather a celebration of the interior life of the individual, both of the composer and his growing, attentive, audience, accumulated over time due to a remarkably consistent series of releases. T…
...Of Late
Astral Spirits presents ...of Late by Jessica Pavone String Ensemble.
Jessica Pavone - composer / viola; voice on track 3Aimée Niemann - violin; voice on track 3Abby Swidler - violin on tracks 1,3,4; viola on tracks 2&5; voice on track 3
Music for Woodwinds
Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888–1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultramodernism, but her activities as a c…
Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians
*In process of stocking* Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings. Radio…
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Monteverdi | Pianocloud
"The Coronation of Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi garnered the interest of Gian Francesco Malipiero, who emphasized a second copy of the manuscript found in Naples in the rooms of the Conservatory Library, and showing a series of pages not included in the Venetian manuscript. Among these, a Prologue that constitutes, together with other fragments taken from the work, the main plot of monteverdi | pianocloud.
As is known, the Coronation was performed in Naples in 1651 and is ignored, given that Mon…
Watercolors and Psychograms
"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds – either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively de…
String Quartets
Defining the character of a composer’s music is always hazardous, especially if the composer is restless. But around Stefano Scodanibbio’s music we often return to the concept of wandering, which moreover reflects his life. This is testified by his writings, which tell us how travel, lack of stability, desire were factors to be found written or improvised in his works. An important and restless philosopher introducing the volume that collects those writings (Not enough for me, Quodlibet, 2019) g…
Painted Lights
Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
3 String Quartets
Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…