One of the more fascinating issues in RCA/BMG's Catalyst series is a disc devoted to Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928). After studies with leading native composers, Rautavaara was selected by 90-year old Sibelius as the winner of a scholarhip from the Koussevitzky Foundation to study in the U.S. Listening to Rautavaara's music one would never suspect that he studied with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions at Juilliard, and with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. He has written several operas, chamber music, seven symphonies, and many works for solo voices and chorus.

The featured music on this CD is Cantus Arcticus, written in 1972. This strange 17-minute work is called "Concerto for Birds and Orchestra," combining the recorded sounds of wild birds with the sound of a symphony orchestra. It is an oddly haunting work of quiet, evocative power, with a dark mystic quality that suggests the bleak Nordic climate. There are three sections: The Bog, Melancholy, and Swans Migrating. It is a fascinating score; the pre-recorded sounds of birds are compelling listening, which cannot be said of the other two works on this CD, the String Quartet No. 4, composed in 1975, a three-movement, meditative 22-minute work in which Rautavaara on purpose has limited the scope of the music. Not much happens here to stimulate the listener in spite of the fine performance by the Sirius Quartet, but a lot happens in the other work, Symphony No. 5, written in 1986, a 31-minute, one-movement symphony with enormous percussive, dissonant climaxes disturbing the over-all bleak aural picture. For this listener, it lacks an overall focus that would merit repeated listening. The two orchestral works are beautifully played by the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra directed by Max Pommer. The recordings were licensed from the Finnish label, Ondine, and sound just as good on RCA/BMG. The prime interest here is Cantus Articus; the CD is worth having just for that strange, mystic work.

-- Robert Benson, Classicalcdreview.com

One brief but significant moment in the PassionResurrection narrative forms the basis of James MacMillan's "sacred opera" Visitatio Sepulchri. Standing before the empty tomb, a group of women disciples ask what has become of the body of Jesus. Angels answer them: "He is not here. He is risen." In MacMillan's setting this action is almost frozen by the slow, hieratic delivery and quasi-liturgical repetition. Before it comes a substantial orchestral prelude; afterwards, there's a full setting of the Te Deum.

But if this leads you to expect Tavener-like hypnotic austerity, you're in for a salutary awakening. MacMillan's score is dense with activity, the style wildly and wonderfully eclectic. After an explosive opening—scurrying strings, rapid gunfire from brass and percussion, Birtwistle-like growlings in the bass—the texture gradually melts into something like the keening polyphony and luminous modal harmonies of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. And this time MacMillan doesn't simply swerve from style to style: he layers his textures like Ives—the impression is of a teeming internal drama, so rich and vital that it is hardly able to contain itself.

I think I'm beginning to understand why some musical sophisticates still resist MacMillan. It isn't just that he's so eclectic—it's the fact that he gets away with it. Many composers might have thought of the glorious, unashamed E major resolution at the emotional height of the coda, but few would have had the nerve to write it, let alone the radiant diatonic tune that goes with it. I'd found Visitatio Sepulchri pretty compelling up till then, but at this point the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. However fascinating, gripping, challenging, contemporary music may be, it isn't often that it makes direct human contact like this. The performers must take their share of the credit of course: MacMillan pushes his voices hard, and occasionally the strain shows, and yet the intensity suggests real conviction on everyone's part; the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Ivor Bolton play as though they enjoyed every moment.

I haven't left myself much space for Busqueda, written five years earlier in 1988. The nature of the commission—to write a companion piece for Berio's Laborintus II—has left its mark on the style, which hovers between modernist collage and a more dramatic, more recognizably MacMillanlike mixture. Again the image of the Cross and the Passion is central, though this time there is a direct political comparison—with the sufferings of the Argentinian "Mothers of the Disappeared", and by implication all those whose loved ones have been claimed by paranoically suspicious autocracy the world over. The piece is not musically selfsufficient in the way Visitatio Sepulchri obviously is—you need to follow the text; but with Juliet Stevenson to take you through it, that's no problem. Both pieces are intimately recorded, giving an especially vivid, immediate sound-impression in Visitatio Sepulchri; I certainly enjoyed being plunged into the textures-just don't stand too close to your speakers at the opening.

-- Gramophone [4/1995]

I would agree that the Homenaje to the murdered poet Lorca was one of [Revueltas'] most significant achievements—a long trumpet-led lament curiously interspersed with vivid dance-like episodes ''like El Salon Mexico on mescal'', as Page remarks about the last of the enjoyably pungent (but also lyrical) Alcancias (perhaps ''expansive bullets'' though, bewilderingly enough, it can also mean ''piggy-banks'' or ''brothel keepers''!). These latter pieces are brilliantly played by the London Sinfonietta, which then sobers up for the austere Planos, which the composer described as ''functional architecture''. Ocho x rondo is a scherzo (with a gentler central section) for octet, perhaps more immediately striking is a Toccata from the same year (1933), which demands (and gets) virtuoso playing from a chamber group. Revueltas's best-known work, the snake-killing ritual Sensemaya, is taken by Mata at the same deliberate pace he adopted with the Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela (Dorian, 11/93) but sounds more decorous at the hands of the New Philharmonia.

There is, however, nothing sedate, except, very properly, in the evocative and beautiful third movement (''Night in Yucatan''), about the performance by the Jalapa (or Xalapa) Symphony under Fuente (whose Sensemaya for Pickwick was reviewed in 12/93) of the four-movement suite drawn from the music for the film La noche de los Mayas: its finale, with an orgy of manic percussion and brass would almost rouse the dead (which presumably was the scene it accompanied). A fascinating disc.

-- Lionel Salter, Gramophone [2/1995]

Selections recorded February 22-23 and March 2-3, 1994.

For every album of this release sold, Catalyst will make a donation to Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS (a non-profit organization).

COMBO PLATTER MARIMOLIN

Here's a double-barrelled surprise: gripping new music for violin and piano and a performing style that revisits a sweet-scented immediacy more typical of previous generations.

Here's a double-barrelled surprise: gripping new music for violin and piano and a performing style that revisits a sweet-scented immediacy more typical of previous generations. Maria Bachmann, a pupil of Ivan Galamian and the late Szymon Goldberg, has a bright, winsome tone and a heartwarming interpretative manner. The works that particularly suit her are Corigliano's 1963 Violin Sonata and the two pieces that were written with her in mind, Albert Glinsky's Toccata-Scherzo and Paul Moravec's Sonata. Of the latter two, the Glinsky is the more memorable—a sort of Sarasate for the 1990s, its lyrical centre-piece flanked by brilliant outer sections. The Moravec is busy and pleasant, but even Bachmann's dextrous advocacy can't quite mask its stylistic anonymity. The Corigliano, on the other hand, harbours the kind of juicy 'tunes' that modern players search for in vain but hardly ever find in contemporary music. The Lento is strikingly memorable, whereas elsewhere Corigliano demands all the tricks of the fiddler's trade—harmonics, pizzicatos, sal pondcello and so on, all couched in an appealing musical context that might best be described as Stravinsky-cum-Samuel Barber.

Turning then to Fratres and comparing Bachmann with Gidon Kremer (ECM), I was interested to note how Bachmann arpeggiates pizzicato chords, a gesture totally in keeping with her warmer, less spidery approach. Ksemer's rougher-edged but rather more ethereal reading still gets my vote, but Bachmann provides an engagingly demonstrative alternative. Messiaen himself said of his "Praise to the Immortality of Jesus" that it "specifically addresses the second aspect of Jesus, namely His human aspect, the Word that has become flesh, resurrected immortal to give Him life." And it's as well to bear that in mind when listening to Bachmann's unusually sensuous performance, an affectionate, this-worldly option to the more withdrawn manner of, say, Luben Yordanoff (with Barenboim on DG).

Bachmann receives sympathetic support from Jon Klibonoff and both are nicely recorded. I thoroughly enjoyed this recital, and I sincerely hope that there's another on the way. But if and when it arrives, I do hope that RCA drop their tiresome idea of fold-up annotation: within a day or so, my copy was already beginning to look like an old shopping list. Booklets are far better. Incidentally, why photograph the immensely personable Maria Bachmann entangled in net curtains?

-- Robert Cowan, Gramophone [12/1993]

Steve Martland burst onto the musical scene with his strongly impressive orchestral work Babi Yar (1983)... He went on composing music characterised by raw energy, sometimes akin to the so-called Dutch Minimalism of Louis Andriessen.

-- Hubert Culot, MusicWeb International

MACMILLAN: SEVEN LAST WORDS FR