Things heat up when the phenomenal E-MEX Ensemble joins forces with the outstanding vocal soloists Monica Benvenuti and Renatus Meszar on their new GENUIN album to bring Sylvano Bussotti's first major work to life: his "Pieces de Chair II" from 1958. These "Flesh Pieces" are a masterpiece of immense curiosity and experimental fervor. Their provocative sounds remain thrilling and fresh even today. Under the direction of Christoph Maria Wagner, the E-MEX Ensemble creates an entire sound cosmos unlike anything previously captured on audio!

After her first b records album, the result of her residency at the Royaumont Foundation, Claudia Chan, ambassador of the contemporary pianistic repertoire, presents her new record dedicated to the Italian school. From the masters Salvatore Sciarrino and Sylvano Bussotti to the new generation led by Francesco Filidei, Simone Cardini and Giulia Lorusso, the performer reveals the richness of a national heritage marked by a free spirit and the sensuality of the sounds that resonate under her fingers, sometimes even before they activate the keys. A program with a high potential for discovery!

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked it's entry into the 20th century was a very modern one: the Tombeau that Manuel de Falla dedicated in 1922 to Claude Debussy was pioneering at the time. The instrument had everything it needed to be 'modern': a small, but captivating chamber music sonority, a glorious past (at least in the then halfforgotten noble ancestor, the lute, whose place it took), and a technique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schonberg's use of the guitar as early as 1924 in his Serenade, mainly owing to Andres Segovia - the main architect of the instrument's renaissance in the 20th century, who long dominated the scene with his own predilections and idiosyncrasies -, the repertoire remained linguistically linked to that debut moment until the 1970s: modern, but no longer contemporary. It was then thanks to the work carried out in Darmstadt by Leo Brouwer (1939), a talented Cuban guitarist and composer, and a few other performers - among whom we should mention at least Siegfried Behrend (19331990) and Angelo Gilardino (19412022) - that the first compositions for guitar built on elements that the composers of the second half of the 20th century had already been using for decades came to the public at large: aleatorism, serialism, free atonality, and extreme timbral research. When contemporary composers finally embraced the instrument, they did so with conviction, developing it's full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languages of our time.

In the month of what would have been his ninetieth birthday, this record comes as a tribute to Sylvano Bussotti. One of the most singular and emblematic composers on the international contemporary classical scene, Bussotti passed away in September 2021. This music comes to us thanks to Jonathan Faralli on percussion and Roberto Fabbriciani on flute, an equally emblematic performer and constant point of reference in the musical production of our century, as well as a great friend and close collaborator of Bussotti himself. A must-have for lovers of the genre as well as the curious newcomer, the album offers masterful work by the two performers as they stage Bussotti's famously theatrical scores, full of dramaturgy, poetry and scenography for both eyes and ears.

Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021) counts among the most original and underappreciated composers working in the second half of the last century. He became famous – notorious – in the 1960s for ‘graphic’ scores which required considerable realization on the part of the performer. His early work, however, is invested with a rhythmic regularity, a clarity of phrase structure and a lyricism reminiscent of Luigi Dallapiccola. Pierre Boulez saw Bussotti as an anachronism when they met and (in the composer’s recollection ‘completely rejected everything that I had written so far, compositions in his view largely influenced by that lyrical mediterranean dodecaphonic style which he particularly detested.’ In retrospect Bussotti’s music takes its place alongside that of his elder Italian contemporary Bruno Maderna as a oblique and distinctively Italian, discursive and colourful view over the variegated and sometimes alienated landscape of postwar serialism.

Beyond The Rara Requiem, recorded by Sinopoli for DG, most of Bussotti’s large-scale projects such as a ‘Passion according to Sade’ have so far failed to find a place in the record catalogues, where he is mostly represented by various pieces with or for the flute. However, Bussotti also wrote prominently for the guitar throughout his career. This new album from Alberto Mesirca is the most complete survey yet recorded, beginning with Ermafrodito (1999), a ‘mythological fantasy’ for guitar which evokes a magical ballet with a body that gradually emerges in the background and takes over the scene. Bussotti’s other substantial work for guitar is Ultima rara (Pop Song), which from the beginning undermines the promised concept of ‘last things’ with a teasing textual commentary (spoken here by Luca Scarlini) and a playful use of the kind of refrain which extends pop songs beyond the organic life of their material.