Markus Trompete Stockhausen
*2022 Stock. Includes a 128-page booklet.* Markus Trompete Stockhausen features Markus Stockhausen performing Licht-related chamber works highlighting trumpet, piccolo trumpet, and flugelhorn. This CD also includes tracks created for a newly-recorded television broadcast presentation of Examen (from Act 1 of Donnerstag aus Licht). - Stockhausenspace.blogspot.com
Sternklang
*2022 Stock.* Sternklang features a roaming studio recording, documenting the five spacially-separated electro-acoustic chamber groups of Sternklang, a harmonically-modulating piece structurally similar to the all-vocal Stimmung. Some soloists are also highlighted in the mix as they migrate from one group to another. This 2 CD recording features members of the English new music groups Intermodulation and Gentle Fire, as well as Annette Meriweather (vox), Harald Bojé (synth), Michael Vetter (vox,…
Stimmung – Pariser Version 1968 In Zwei Aufnahmen Von 1969 Und 1982
*2022 Stock. Includes 124-page booklet in German and English.* “Stimmung” was a commission from the City of Cologne, for an ensemble at the Rheinische Musikschule; Collegium Vocale Köln. It was written early 1968, in February and March, in a house on Long Island Sound in Madison, Connecticut, where Stockhausen and his wife Mary Bauermeister and their children lived a couple of months. This commission for a vocal work took on a completely new direction when Stockhausen – out of consideration for …
Gruppen / Carré
*2022 Stock. Includes 32-page booklet in German and English.* On volume no. 5 in the ongoing Stockhausen Edition we meet large-scale orchestral works for the first time in the series. The first piece on this CD originates in a commission that Stockhausen received from the WDR, but nobody – perhaps not even Stockhausen – could foresee the kind of music that would eventually come out of this commission. The end result was no less than revolutionary, in its totally new concept of music moving in sp…
Kontra-Punkte / Zeitmaße / Stop / Adieu
*2022 Stock.* The best, most efficient way to hear Stockhausen's works is through his official record label and publishing house. The Stockhausen Edition CDs are meticulously assembled with often voluminous booklets in English and German, filled with sketches and other documentary artifacts. Almost all of the recordings originally released on Deutsche Grammophon, Wergo, Nonesuch and other labels were reacquired by Stockhausen, and then remastered and repackaged under the Stockhausen Edition cata…
Formel / Schlagtrio / Spiel / Punkte
*2022 Stock.* Starting off with a merry, but very cautious fairytale melody, the little figures trip down a spiral staircase, then move in sudden rash movements across the stage, hide behind a tree or a rock, stick their heads out in a peek-a-boo-manner, look cautiously around with big apprehensive eyes, then dart forth again, to the next hiding spot – until they feel more at ease, and expose themselves center stage, holding hands or arms, dancing around, still looking and listening, in the spot…
Chöre Für Doris - Choral - Drei Lieder - Sonatine - Kreuzspiel
*2022 Stock. Includes a 32-page booklet in German and English.* This first volume of the Complete Edition highlights voice-driven student works and two chamber works. Kreuzspiel (Crossplay) is probably Stockhausen's first "key work". Although these works were composed in the early 1950s, these premier recordings are comprised of performances from the 1970s. Listening to the first works being issued in the large-scale the Stockhausen Edition series, one might expect some give-aways as to a possib…
Música Azul
*Limited edition of 150 copies.* Música Azul is a gulfstream of melodies originally written for Spencer Clark’s Avatar Blue exposition at Het Bos in Antwerp, march 2019. I got the original melody lines from a photoshop mock-up in which Spencer showed his ideas for the expo. I then performed the piece - partly improvised - on the opening night as to activate the several artworks that were displayed in the installation. Afterwards I edited and reworked the composition for optimal home listening.
La Tempesta Colorata
Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases.
Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our mo…
Halleluja / Alle Vittime Senza Nome
*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…
Suite 8 & 11 per pianoforte
*2022 stock* Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of…
Heliogabalus Imperator / Works For Orchestra
*2022 stock* The relationship between Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen was one of great mutual respect. The German composer admired the British conductor and composer for electrifying performances of Henze’s own and other composers’ works. Knussen was an untiring and enthusiastic champion of his friend Henze’s music. The recordings collected here display Knussen’s deep understanding of Henze’s music. Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in sensitive and meticulous performances of comp…
For Philip Guston
*2022 stock* Performed by Julia Breuer (flutes), Matthias Engler (vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells), Elmar Schrammel (piano, celesta). Recorded 2007. One of Feldman's classic long-term late works, written in 1984. Wergo is proud to present Morton Feldman's four-hour-long trio For Philip Guston, performed by the ensemble Breuer-Engler-Schrammel. Feldman disagreed with those who regarded his works since the 1970s as being too long. 'In music, it's very difficult to distinguish betw…
Canti Del Capricorno
*2022 stock* Michiko Hirayama inspired Giacinto Scelsi to write his twenty-part cycle "Canti del Capricorno" between 1962 and 1972. To this day the Japanese singer (b. 1923) is a unique performer of this spiritual yet energy-filled work for solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment for certain songs: Scelsi’s notes in his own hand in the score; that is her treasure, when she comes to Ulm in May 2006 to give a concert in the series neue musik im stadthaus. Michiko Hirayama is a vocal power stat…
Nothing Is Real ...
*2022 stock* The focus of the pieces by Alvin Lucier on this CD is on the phenomena of resonance – sympathetic vibration – in many variations. “Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece,” says Alvin Lucier.The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsesse…
Phase Patterns / Pendulum Music / Piano Phase / Four Organs
*2022 stock* "What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" (Steve Reich, 1968). Minimal music, which numbers Steve Reich among its founders and as one of its most significant representatives, existed for hardly more than ten years. The Ensemble Avantgarde presents a wonderful survey of Reich's minimal music-compositions. The conceptional concentration in the musical work on the structurally simple means of its creation is seen especially…
s/t
Yiran Zhao makes use not only of musical elements but also of objects, bodies, movements and light-sources as compositional material. Many of her pieces inhabit the various boundary states between instrumental music, performance, sound-installation, and video-art. Leonie Reineke describes the composer in the CD-booklet as a “prudent researcher“, who encounters the sonic cosmos of her environment with great earnestness, and comes microscopically close to things.
In the composition “Piep“ she focu…
Earthing
"String quartet” seems a rather reductive way of describing any of the four utterly compelling works by Clara Iannotta that the Jack Quartet play here. For as well as demanding that the string players employ every conventional technique, the Italian composer extends their sound world farther, both with electronics and with “found objects” applied to the strings and bodies of the instruments.
The four pieces all date from the last seven years. The earliest, A Failed Entertainment, borrows the wor…
Mantra
*2022 stock* 'Composed in 1970, Mantra, for two pianos and ring modulation, was one of the decisive turning points in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s career. The 70-minute piece not only signalled a break with the text-based intuitive works, relying heavily on improvisation, that had come to dominate his output towards the end of the previous decade and a return to fully notated scores, but also introduced the idea of melodic formulae, the “mantra” of the title, which Stockhausen would eventually develo…
Musica Da Camera
*2022 stock* The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki used to write chamber music even as a student in Krakow. He was writing the chamber music works for himself, then already an accomplished violinist, and his fellow students (The title "Sonata for Violin and Piano" from 1953 has only recently been published.). A specialty of these early works are Penderecki's inventions with which he altered the sound of the stringed instruments, indeed almost to the point of being completely unrecognizable. W…