Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This DVD features interviews with various Iannis Xenakis experts such as Gerard Pape and James Harley, as well as his widow, Francoise Xenakis. This is the first DVD release of one of Xenakis' best known works, Kraanerg.

Classical Music

Strumming the strings of the piano like a harp and performing Beethoven and the Beatles on a toy piano are among the surprising scenes in Evans Chan's documentary, which celebrates the trans-cultural career of Singapore-born, New York-based pianist Margaret Leng Tan.

Walter Zimmermann is a German composer associated with the Cologne School. He studied with Werner Heider and Mauricio Kagel, and computer music at Colgate University in New York. His works are infused by a personal adaptation of minimal technique. One of his best known and iconic works is the group of pieces known as Lokale Musik, these frequently begin with melodic material derived from his native Franconian folk songs, rearranged and transformed in novel ways. Lokale Musik was originally released as a 3-LP set by Theater am Turm Edition in 1982. Mode's release reissues the complete original set, remastered from the analog master tapes, on two albums. The tracks have been reordered to fit the composer's current thoughts on the cycle. This release also includes a third album of more recently recorded supplemental material and performances, and revised versions of works, issued for the first time.

Harawi is a cycle of twelve songs scored for soprano and piano composed in 1945. Harawi (known to Spanish speakers as yarav�) designates a song about a fated love that ends in the death of both lovers. Messiaen remarked that "it is the story of Tristan and Isolde." The surrealistic text of Harawi is Messiaen's own. Using the musical structures Messiaen had created for Harawi, he built massive phrases in these songs, expanding space and time, creating extreme tenderness, vastness, clarity and abysses. In Harawi both lovers are not only human, but beings, which transform again and again. Destruction, pain, death, creation, joy, dance and love are not final - they are all everchanging particles of our interwoven cosmic existence. Already chosen as ONE OF THE BEST RELEASES OF 2019 (from a pre-release review copy) by Lynn Ren� Bayley of Art Music Lounge: "This stunning album... features the still-young and somewhat outr� German soprano Sarah Maria Sun... From the first notes of La ville qui dormait to the dying piano sound in Dans le noir, this is a performance that will absolutely rivet you... This clearly goes straight to the top of performances of this unusual and somewhat difficult song cycle..." Sarah Maria Sun is one of the foremost singers in the contemporary music scene with a repertoire of more than 900 compositions from the 20th & 21st centuries, including more than 320 world premieres. She was nominated for singer of the year by Opernwelt in 2017 for her role as Elsa in Sciarrino's monodrama Lohengrin and as Gwen in 4.48 Psychosis by Philip Venables. From 2007-2014, she was first soprano of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, a chamber ensemble of 7 singers that has been one of the world's leading pioneers of contemporary music for 30 years.

This first volume in a series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets on Mode, performed by the superb JACK Quartet and pianist Stephen Clarke was released earlier this year on CD. It has been greeted with great critical acclaim and sales. And so, a natural starting place for Mode to reenter the LP market. In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His music is linked to the “spectral music” school. Radulescu’s Fifth String Quartet is one of the key works in his output. It is in some ways the richest manifestation of the body of string techniques he had developed for his music. The Fifth Piano Sonata makes abundant use — more so than any of the other sonatas — of Romanian folk material, which is absorbed and integrated into Radulescu’s spectral language.

This release brings all of Subotnick's piano music together on one album for the first time, along with four first recordings, all supervised by the composer. 'Liquid Strata' is an important work in Subotnick's oeuvre. Here the electronic component is what he calls "ghost electronics," and this is the first of 11 Ghost Pieces. In these works, Subotnick sought to address technology in a way that highlights rather than compromises the inherent features and strengths of acoustical instruments. In the Ghost Pieces, Subotnick pre-recorded the vocal "energy shapes" on tape. These audio signals were played back (but not heard), combined with sine tones, and sent to an envelope follower. The voltages generated trigger Buchla-produced pitch, amplitude, modulation and stereo panning. All of the Ghost Pieces are to be performed live on a proscenium stage, with speakers in front of the performer. 'The Other Piano is a continuation of the Ghost pieces. The composer refers to the electronics as "a quadraphonic sound painting [spread] throughout the auditorium, done on the spot, intuitively, by a sound painter.... one always hears the real piano and the transformations are a fantasy, changing in time and space, whirling around the room..." Subotnick drew conceptual ideas for Falling Leaves from Scarlatti sonatas, a "sense of Scarlatti, but not derivative," particularly repeated notes, the virtuosic crossing of hands, and the idea of cadences. The early Preludes Nos. 1 & 2 are post-Webern influenced works. Prelude No. 4 is the first piece where Subotnick worked with the Buchla synthesizer. The electronic component is composed onto stereo tape, which is played alongside the live piano. Liner notes by Bob Gluck and the composer

Classical Music

The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Uitti and Fanous spent 10 minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. Eastern, improvised vs. #through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says:"Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphases. In my case, these were non-western music, as well as chromaticism in both it's contemporary classical and free jazz expressions, all funneled through the techniques of classical and flamenco guitar. In Frances' case, it was a lifelong devotion to and mastery of parallel directions: improvisation, as well as contemporary composition at the highest level. Both were made infinitely more powerful by the deployment of ingenious extended techniques, including her revolutionary two-bow methods. Our backgrounds contained enough shared common experience to allow for a tentacular interdigitation of our improvisational languages, which was effortless and natural." The session began with bouzouki-cello duets, in which drones played a central role, calling up a middle-eastern sound-world. Fanous writes: "As the pieces evolved, they gradually became unmoored and reverted to who they really were, but together. This process of feeling one's way through the darkness was like navigating towards some unknown endpoint, the way the ancients used the astrolabe to navigate using the positions of the stars - Negoum in Arabic."

This album collects for the first time four of the most important works from Radulescu’s later period, all composed for cello, and all performed by his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Radulescu and Tunnell began working together almost immediately upon meeting in 1995.By the time they were married in 1997, Radulescu had already composed for her two of the pieces on this disc (the solo Lux Animae and the cello sonata L’Exil Intérieur), and revised and rededicated her a third, older work (Das Andere, first composed in 1984). L’Exil Intérieur was Radulescu’s first and only work in the format of “sonata for instrument and piano.” A magical, otherworldly spectral composition using the combined sounds of cello and piano combined with folkloristic influences from his native Romania. Das Andere is a work that can be played on any stringed instrument tuned in open fifths. It features heavy use of extended techniques. The notes to the score describe the performer’s role in this work as being to “…create a sense of trance, close to a spiritism [sic] séance…” Pre-Existing Soul of Then for 2 cellos, is heard as on this recording as an “ideal version,” formed by meticulously overdubbing the cello parts in two individual layers. This provides a challenge in terms of both timing and tuning, but the results are far closer to the composer’s original intention than any live version that has been performed so far. Lux Animae is a set of 21 “windows” through which the light of the soul may shine. Radulescu utilizes several of his spectral techniques in service of the larger goal of making the theoretical or imaginary concretely manifest in the physical world, as the whole instrument of the cello becomes an emanation of an impossibly low pitch, and the time in which the work exists a sort of “ring-modulation” of time itself.