Carter: Symphony of Three Orchestras - Varèse: Deserts, Equa

This album marks the third release in the collaboration between the Ensemble Intercontemporarin and Alpha. This time the musicians of the ensemble and their conductor, Matthias Pintscher focus on American music: Intégrales by Edgar Varèse, Music for Wind Instruments by John Cage, Instruments I for six instruments by Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter's Concerto for clarinet and ensemble, Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 for string quartet, Sean Shepherd's Blur, and David Fulmer's Within his bending sickle's compass come for solo horn and ensemble. More than ninety years of creativity and musical profusion at the heart of the global city that the Ensemble Intercontemporain celebrates today. This album is being released to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the EIC: forty years of discoveries and of promotion of contemporary music at the highest level of performance.

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REVIEW:

This excellent compilation — excellent in its musical choices and in its performance — is a marvelous balm to my ears. The two youngest composers demonstrate that at least some American music produced today challenges my expectations and proposes new possibilities for form, timbre, and harmony.

– American Record Guide

‘Going all the way back to the Celts and the Druids, the term nemeton designates a place where forces and energies are crystallized, generally clearings where solemn or ritual actions were performed. The best-known nemeton is certainly Stonehenge. The architectural marvel of Chartres Cathedral is built on a nemeton. In composing this piece for solo percussion, I wanted to depict a “place” of this kind by means of sound. I’m utterly fascinated by the instrumentarium of this work, consisting chiefly of metal, wood and skin instruments that don’t have their own “specific” resonance. The trajectories between the different tones condition and define the energy charge, rather as if two beings, in the mad hope of an encounter, were rushing towards each other’, writes Matthias Pintscher as an introduction to one of the pieces in this monograph of works composed between 2000 and 2018: it also includes his violin concerto Mar’eh, the concerto for piano and ensemble Nur, Beyond for flute, Verzeichnete Spur, Lieder und Schneebilder, Celestial Object I & II and Occultation.

Alpha Classics continues its collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and presents a programme devoted to compositions by its conductor and artistic director, Matthias Pintscher. bereshit, ‘in a beginning’ in Hebrew, is a piece on the subject of divine creation. The architecture of the work refers to the idea of the growth of the elements out of nothingness to their finished state: the colours, the harmonies are therefore always redefined by what precedes and follows them. Songs from Solomon’s garden – still in a highly spiritual dimension – explores amorous passion through the shir ha shirim (Song of Songs). The poetic density of this text is underlined here, with the only repeated phrase of the work taking on a quasi-incantatory signification: ‘she-cholat ahava ani’ (for I am sick of love).

Classical Music

The Ensemble Intercontemporain and its new music director Pierre Bleuse pay homage to György Ligeti, whose centenary we celebrated in 2023: ‘Ligeti is one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century and certainly one of those who first made a powerful aesthetic impact on me personally!... This recording, which combines concertos and chamber music, highlights the EIC’s qualities as soloists and chamber musicians. And I’m not forgetting that Ligeti is an integral part of the repertoire of the Ensemble, which has performed his works extensively… So this is an ideal way of beginning my own story with the EIC’, says Pierre Bleuse, who brings his personal conception to these works and seeks to approach each score like ‘a virgin forest’. A noteworthy feature here is the new cadenza composed by Philippe Maunoury for the Violin Concerto, with Hae-Sun Kang as soloist. Renaud Déjardin (cello) and Dimitri Vassilakis (piano) perform the other concertos of this tribute program.

REVIEW:

The Paris ensemble’s new music director Bleuse sets out his stall with a wonderful all-Ligeti disc that honors a composer it has long been associated with. The violin concerto and the concerto for piano and orchestra are among the works on this beautifully realized recording. Utterly engrossing.

-- The Sunday Times (U.K.)