This is a great gift to all interested in music of the recent past. Iannis Xenakis conceived of a multimedia installation in 1976–78, which consisted of a pre-recorded electroacoustic score, titled La légende d’Eer, and a structure in which it would unfold, called the “Polytope.” The latter was constructed on the plaza in front of the newly opened Pompidou Arts Center in Paris; it is a fluid series of intersecting parabolic forms, in essence, a tent that is a predecessor of the more sophisticated structures of Frank Gehry and other contemporary constructivist architects. It also hearkens back to Xenakis’s original training as an architect, and his work as Le Corbusier’s assistant in the famous Phillips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, for which Varèse wrote the Poème électronique. Inside, hundreds of flashing lights and mirrors, and four lasers were coordinated by computer into a constantly mutating series of “constellations.” The effect seems to have been one of a sort of transcendent sensory overload, a confrontation with the overwhelming scope and force of the universe (I heard the composer lecture once on the piece, and showing a picture of the Polytope, he quipped, “Here you see many people going in, and a few coming out.”)

Disques Montaigne has already released the original tape piece on MO 782058. This DVD is the first chance we have to experience something of the full piece, through the visuals of Bruno Rastoin. I say “somewhat,” because alas (and amazingly) no video walk-through of the work was ever made (though admittedly the technology at that point would be quite primitive by current standards). Instead, hundreds of slides of the piece in progress were made, and Rastoin has essentially arranged them into a Powerpoint presentation, flowing from one to another in conjunction with the music. There’s no indication whether the sequence of images corresponds to the original sequence of the piece (or even if that sequence was set in a predetermined loop, or more random). While hardly ideal, working with what was available, this at least gives some sense of a visionary project.

The music itself is spectacular, one of the great landmarks of “pure” electroacoustic music. Lasting 47 minutes, the piece moves through a series of overwhelming climaxes. Some are shatteringly ugly, but all are bracing in their uncompromising power. (I heard the piece at the above-mentioned lecture, which was at the International Computer Music Conference, with one of the most knowledgeable audiences in the world for such. Even here a large portion of the audience fled, perhaps because of the sonic onslaught, perhaps out of aesthetic disagreement, probably a combination of both.) This DVD claims to have restored about three minutes to the original tape, and I honestly don’t know where, but it’s welcome and doesn’t change overall the impact any would know from earlier encounters.

Finally, there’s a 67-minute interview with Xenakis in 1995 at his Paris center CCMIX, conducted by Harry Halbreich, one of the most knowledgeable, imaginative, and enthusiastic of European musicologists devoted to contemporary music. The production quality of the document is very poor—an unstable camera, variable focus, moments of blackout—but it remains important nonetheless. Xenakis eventually would suffer the tragedy of dementia in his last years, but in this, six years before his death, there’s almost no sign of any mental decay, and amazingly enough, the whole interview is conducted in English, in which both participants are fluent. One only laments that if one-tenth the resources devoted to a VH-1 documentary on a washed-up 1970s band could be given to chronicling the life and ideas of one of the great revolutionary musical geniuses of the century, this video product would be at least 10 times better. But we deal with what we’ve got, and I’m very grateful for it.

It may seem I have quibbles here, but this really does have my highest recommendation. Mode is carving out an exceptional catalog of new music DVDs (I already know their Carter and Cage releases), and this one is a heroic rescue operation, a treasure. Bravo to all concerned.

Robert Carl, FANFARE

XENAKIS Phlegra. Anaktoria. Dhipli Zyla. Waarg. VARÈSE Octandre. ROMITELLI Mediterraneo I & II • Stefan Asbury, cond; Asko Ens; Marieke Koster (mez) • STRADIVARIUS 33871 (72:34) Live: Milan 11/6/2005


GERVASONI Meta della ripa. MANZONI Ode. Sembianti. WEBERN Passacaglia • Lothar Koenigs, cond; RAI Natl SO • STRADIVARIUS 33872 (69:16) Live: Milan 11/4/2006


Thanks to the cost-cutting and absence of commercial considerations that occur as more orchestras, ensembles, artists, and in this case festivals issue their own recordings or find new outlets for them, audiences now have an increased opportunity to experience more unusual repertory, especially contemporary music. The Milan Music Festival has specialized in the latter since 1991, and these two concert recordings—Volume 2 featuring the Xenakis, Volume 3 the Gervasoni, et al.—show how they are frequently able to establish helpful thematic, stylistic, or conceptual connections between familiar and lesser-known works in their programming.


The Netherlands’s Asko Ensemble, featured in Vol. 2, has a long history of exceptional performances of 20th- and 21st-century works (see its large and impressive catalog of recordings at askoschoenberg.nl), and by anchoring its concert with Edgard Varèse’s Octandre , it focuses the listener’s attention on the variety of ways in which kindred composers Iannis Xenakis and Fausto Romitelli construct surprising tonal environments out of sometimes subtle, sometimes extravagant timbral and textural resources. The four Xenakis selections wisely reflect different periods, and thus distinct characteristics, from his career. Dhipli Zyla (1952), the earliest, is a contrapuntal dance for violin and cello, showing Bartók’s influence on the composer’s use of Greek folk material, while Phlegra (1975), for 11 instruments, suggests a Stravinsky-like rhythmic lilt and an almost slapstick humor to the ever-more-insistent harmonic disorientation. The harsh juxtaposition of colors swells and recedes in Anaktoria (1969), while the separate layers of activity in Waarg (1988), like isolated lines drawn in the air, twist and blend in the wind. Heard together, they are good preparation for Romitelli’s Mediterraneo (1992). Divided into two parts, the first sets contrasting qualities in instrumental groups against each other—sliding strings, resonating chimes, sustained wind tones—as if the sounds were reaching out from a common nucleus; the second part, including mezzo-soprano Marieke Koster’s intonation of an elliptical text by the French poet Paul Valéry, is equally dense but more compact, implying a nevertheless vague tonal center toward which the pitches are now drawn.


Though placed at the end of Vol. 3, Anton Webern’s richly textured, lyrically abstracted Passacaglia (1909) conceptually sets the stage for the music of Stefano Gervasoni and Giacomo Manzoni, whose works imaginatively reorganize the orchestra into patterns of colors rather than instrumental sections. The shimmering motives and static but evocative sonorities in Gervasoni’s Meta della ripa (2002–03) may seem reminiscent of some spectral strategies, but the fluctuating events, alternately chilly and heated, form a cohesive, gradually emerging drama. Likewise, Manzoni’s two compositions are full of shifting textures and dynamics creating dramatic tension, but obtained through unpredictable, partially indeterminate, devices. In Ode (1982), the orchestral material is divided into five “tracks” that progress horizontally in and out of sync with each other, although the blend of sounds is altogether natural and convincing. Sembianti (2003) is a kind of Enigma Variations , with parts of the composition dedicated to friends, using pitch motives derived from their names, mixing in solos from all sections of the orchestra, and inserting free rhythmic episodes—less of a storytelling enigma, however, à la Elgar, than a structural one.


Both the Asko Ensemble and the RAI National Orchestra make a strong case for the new music as well as the more familiar items they are presenting. Recommended to adventurous listeners.


FANFARE: Art Lange

Jean Geoffroy writes: “This recording in itself defines the ensemble in its cohesion, its willingness, its imagination, its enthusiasm and its talent. Between the historical recordings of the 1970s and today, there is only one short step, which builds on those trodden by the four generations that have played a part in this wild adventure, one further step like a baton passed down from generation to generation, if only to ensure that the movement initiated by all the composers who have written for the Percussions de Strasbourg, Iannis Xenakis high among them, will never stop."