This release couples two of Reich’s “sextets” for the first time: the Sextet of 1984 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet of 2007, which also makes its first appearance on LP. A striking difference between the two pieces is that the rhythmic world of Sextet mostly consists of a single-meter grooving, while Double Sextet works in the angular, off-kilter shifting meters reminiscent of Reich’s Tehillim (also of Stravinsky). Ekkozone impart a uniquely chamber music feel and color to these works while maintaining their propulsive character. Liner notes by Adam Sliwinski. LP lacquers and mastering by veteran Scott Hull at Masterdisk. Plated and pressed by RTI, California. Danish percussionist and conductor Mathias Reumert lives and breathes contemporary classical music. An in-demand soloist, he explores new percussive territory while remaining a committed interpreter of yesterday’s masterworks. As creator and leader of the acclaimed ensemble Ekkozone, he explores the bounderies between classical, world and experimental music in performances at rock and jazz festivals. Ekkozone is a Danish crossover ensemble that masterfully explores the lines between classical, world and experimental music. Formed by Mathias Reumert in 2013, the ensemble enjoys a special connection with Reich’s music and has performed a large part of his oeuvre, including several performances of Music for 18 Musicians.

REVIEW:

There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is always more than one way to perform good music. Steve Reich’s Sextet is a long way past being ‘minimalist’, even though there are ostinato elements that recall that particular phase in Western music’s evolution. The first movement and other sections recall Reich’s The Desert Music, while the groovy low piano notes in the final Fast section have something of the finale of New York Counterpoint about them. Multi-layered percussion makes all of this a feast for the ear, and Ekkozone and their hyper-reality studio recording play the piece with a swing and uplifting sense of fun that is very infectious indeed. The bass drums on the second Moderate section are played with musical subtlety but have been balanced in such a way that you’ll enjoy seeing your woofers moving about at reasonable volume. Stereo spread is also a good feature of this recording for all but the piano sound, which is kept very much to the centre channel.

There are numerous recordings of Sextet around. Third Coast Percussion (review) is good, with marginally more measured tempi than Ekkozone and a close-miked balance that reveals superb playing while at the same time being less fun and involving. Steve Reich and Musicians on the Nonesuch label is a classic of course, but uses a rather heavy sounding organ in the opening – this first movement being a little faster than Ekkozone while the remaining movements are as close in timing as makes no difference. The LSO Percussion Ensemble is ok (review), but in this case is too light on the sustained organ notes in the first movement, and there are a couple of moments of imprecision in the ensemble playing elsewhere that dampened my enthusiasm somewhat – understandable for a live performance, but less desirable in repeated listening. Go back to the impact of Ekkozone’s opening after living the LSO for a while and you’ll be hooked straight away.

Double Sextet is also a fine piece, though to my ears not quite the masterpiece that is Sextet. Ekkozone put plenty of dramatic urgency into the first of its three movements, and once again the recording is full of detail and presence. The slow middle movement is soulfully melancholic and atmospheric – a cinematic scene of nocturnal regret, while the finale is even more of a bustling city street than the first.

I greatly enjoyed Ensemble Signal’s recording of the Double Sextet on the Harmonia Mundi label (review). The timings are a little shorter on this version, though not by enough to change the character of the music by a great deal. Ekkozone’s Slow movement has more emotional impact to my ears, their instruments more natural sounding in general, and the vibrato in the string sound adds an extra few ounces of heartstring tug to the cooler sound of Ensemble Signal.

All of these comparative notes are very marginal, and I haven’t come across any recordings of either of these works that are complete duds. As Adam Sliwinski writes in the booklet note for this release, Steve Reich’s music is “like a native language” to percussionists these days, and the chances are that if you walk down the corridor of any decently sized music academy’s percussion department you will hear one or other of his pieces being perfected. Ekkozone’s recordings of both works on this CD are second to none, and should be placed on your wish list forthwith.

-- MusicWeb International

The saxophone quartet SIGMA Project is based in Madrid. One of their key efforts is to create and promote a broad and diverse repertoire. The quartet came to Mexico for the first time in November 2012. Over the course of the following ten years, it has developed and premiered fifteen pieces by Mexican composers. The five scores recorded here are among them. They have been selected because they represent a wide range of generations and musical aesthetics. Composed by Arturo Fuentes, Víctor Ibarra, Hilda Paredes, Javier Torres Maldonado and Hebert Vázquez, these works were written for, dedicated to, and premiered by SIGMA Project in different concerts and festivals. They strongly collaborated with all of them, testing out their sound materials, making suggestions, and offering their own solutions and new sonorities. This is the first time that these five Mexican composers wrote for saxophone quartet. In 2015, the great Mexican composer Mario Lavista poetically defined SIGMA Project with the following words: “Attending a SIGMA Project concert means embarking on a musical journey of ceaseless joy and wonder. It also means participating in a sort of celebration of a new virtuosity. … SIGMA Project brings an agile and winged virtuosity to life.“

This release brings together two works by Alvin Lucier centered on the pipe organ, a perfect instrument for Lucier’s compositional practice. Both are first recordings. “Swing Bridge” was commissioned by this record’s ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra, for the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ. The score requires that specific pipes be removed from the organ and run into three specially constructed offset chests, each accommodating two pipes (six pitches total). These pipes are manipulated by three or more performers, known as ‘pipe wavers.’ This music explores the phenomenon of the organ making its operation performative and visceral. We hear the way the energy produced by the organ ‘sounds’ the space in which the music was performed and recorded, and, for those who witnessed the performance, we experienced the physicality of air moving through pipes as the wavers shifted the tuning of each pipe microtonally with their hands. This is conceptual work of the highest order but it is also sensual, beautiful, and engrossing, with the textures of the ensemble woven into the pulsations produced by the organ and the resonances of the room. For “Sizzles” the composer writes: “Drums of various sizes are randomly placed throughout the performance space. Fine materials such as lentils, chickpeas, and candy hearts are sprinkled on the drumheads. As low organ tones are sounded, the skins of the drums vibrate sympathetically, causing the drums to sound and the material to move. Each drum is individually amplified with a contact or air microphone and a separate amplifier.”

Classical Music

Classical Music

Steven Schick conducting the International Contemporary Ensemble. Additional musicians: Tony Arnold, soprano, Joshua Rubin, bass clarinet, Cory Smythe, piano.

Throughout Xenakis's career, and particularly during the twenty-year span covered here, his music was influenced tremendously by aesthetic choices, rather than being governed by architectural or mathematical computations. As the composer himself stated, "What I did was a matter of feeling, rather than a purely logical approach. ... It was the sound itself that absorbed my attention. ... Even if I wrote a predetermined piece, it could have parts that did not follow the exact theoretical path, but which depended more on the acoustical result. This freedom was much more interesting and important for me." - Iannis Xenakis

Xenakis' freedom of expression, his innate musicality, is what emerges above all else on this recording." - from the liner notes by Steven Schick, Benny Sluchin, and Kivie Cahn-Lipman.

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

Multi-channel electronic works in Surround Sound

Morton Subotnick was a phenomenon in the late '60s, the first composer to write substantial works for synthesizer that had a wide audience. He has been mentor to generations of composers, and his influence is so pervasive that it would be impossible to trace completely - the electronica movement, for one, reveres him.

This release brings together two of his classic analog electronic works which were previously only available on LP. The DVD allows you to experience these works "spatially" in your own home - in high-definition sound!

SPECIAL FEATURES:

* 24-bit remastering from the original analog master tapes.
* Newly remixed for Surround Sound by the composer.
* Sidewinder is presented with a liquid light show created for the work by Tony Martin. Martin - infamous for his light shows in the '60s in San Francisco at the Fillmore West and New York's Electric Circus for bands like the Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds and the Grateful Dead - is a long-time collaborator with Subotnick.
* Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround encoding for the standard video side (playable on all DVD players).
* Dedicated DVD-Audio 5.1 Surround side.
* CD version contains the two electronic pieces in new dedicated stereo mixes by the composer.
* Liner notes by renowned electronic composer Curtis Roads.

The DVD includes additional video:

* Subotnick and Tony Martin in conversation about their histories and collaborations (about 60 minutes).
* Subotnick speaks about his childhood through early years of composing (about 30 minutes).
* Documentary showing Tony Martin's process to create the liquid light show for Sidewinder.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Giacinto Scelsi was out of his mind, but in a good way. He is best known for having a nervous breakdown and recovering, so to speak, by banging on single notes of a piano until he decided to continue writing music based on tiny permutations of individual tones. The result was the Quattro Pezzi (and subsequent pieces), a fascinating study in sonority in which each movement treats a single pitch, altering it timbrally and microtonally, and sometimes a bit more. This epochal work, along with Uaxuctum ("The legend of the Mayan City which they themselves destroyed for religious reasons"), for ondes Martenot, seven percussionists, timpanist, chorus, and 23 instruments, was very nicely recorded by Jürg Wittembach and the Cracow Radio and Television Orchestra for Accord. These newer versions are no less accomplished, if perhaps a touch less atmospherically engineered--but they will be much easier to find.

La nascita del Verbo (The Birth of the Word) is the earliest piece here, dating from 1946-48, Scelsi's "pre-one-note" period. It has four substantial movements that together last slightly more than 30 minutes, and features the choir either vocalizing wordlessly or muttering "big concept" Latin words like "Deus", "Lux", and "Amor". Whether you find its mystical leanings cosmically atmospheric or merely pretentious will be a matter of personal taste, but there's something curiously compelling about Scelsi's music--tonal, atonal, one-note, and everything in between. It probably stems from his evocative feeling for sonority, combined with a basic sincerity and austerity that is the very opposite of decadence. In any case, this disc offers an ideal introduction to his art, and to his compositional range, making it an easy recommendation to modern music fans.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The first recording of his 32-minute grand cantata La nascita del Verbo. Steeped in chromaticism, with hints of Scriabin and a sea of percussion, Nascita boasts a vast double fugue (one of the most imposing in the history of music) and a forty-seven voice canon in twelve keys. This work, "truly written in blood," left Scelsi "in a deplorable state," afterwards he stopped composing for several years.

One of Scelsi's infamous pieces is the Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola). Each piece is limited to one pitch with micro-fluctuations of sound (vibratos, slurs, spectral changes, tremolos...). Because of the nearly total abandonment of harmonics, the listener concentrates on new sonorous subtleties, on the orchestra's timbre as a whole.

In 1966, he completed the ferocious, tormented, complex Uaxuctum. The myths and mysteries of this Mayan city is reflected in Scelsi's compositional process: new instrumental and vocal techniques (breathing noises, nasal sounds, muted or inhaled gutturals...), rhythmic incantations, a petrified flow of time. Few woodwinds, a string section consisting of six double basses, lots of brass, and, in addition to a timpanist, no less than seven percussionists!

Hi-resolution 48khz/24-bit recording.
NOTE: this DVD contains no video.

REYNOLDS _Symphony [Myths]. 1 Whispers out of Time. 2 _Symphony [Vertigo] 3 • Kotaro Sato, cond; 1 Edwin London, cond; 2 Harvey Sollberger, cond; 3 Tokyo PO; 1 Cleveland CS; 2 La Jolla SO 3 • MODE 183 (73:51)


I recently read Roger Reynolds’s dense but engaging little book, Mind Models , a set of essays from 1972 concerning trends in advanced music. In retrospect, it’s quite impressive how much he got right about what would come to pass under the aesthetic/cultural impact of technology, communications, globalization. Reynolds (b. 1934), while probably most often typed as a modernist composer, composes a sort of music that isn’t written much here anymore. More important, it probably hasn’t ever been written much in America. What I mean by this is that Reynolds’s music is saturated with ideas , but not just ones about musical technique. Instead, it plays with concepts and artifacts from such points of departure as non-Western culture, literature, geography, architecture, science, to name a few. In this omnivorous intellectual curiosity, and his desire to distill these disparate sources into the common field of musical language, he bears more resemblance to European aesthetics than to American. (Not surprisingly, Xenakis was a friend. Reynolds also has a very close connection to Japanese art, traditional and contemporary, and Takemitsu was another close colleague.) The play of symbols , embodied in sonic gestures, is at the core of his work. While rigorously intellectual, his music isn’t particularly academic. Reynolds has always had a foot in experimentalism as much as modernism. To attempt such a synthesis is questing and risk-taking. And at its best the result has real power.


These three orchestral works listed in the headnote date from 1990, 1988, and 1987, respectively. (It’s a sad commentary on our culture that it appears to have taken two decades to get them to a commercial recording.) All three works aspire to a sort of stately grandeur and mystery. Great sweeping gestures occur, which we can’t really anticipate nor explain, yet they are usually satisfying. Movements trail off into silence abruptly. At times the music seems frozen harmonically, yet there may be several layers of detailed and often fast activity occurring simultaneously. Indeed the predominant rhythmic sense here I would call geological , with bands of sonic activity slipping and grating against one another like tectonic plates.


Symphony [Myths] fits the above description well, drawing its inspiration from two pairs of seaside rocks that serve as shrines in Japan and Greece. The music seems appropriately elemental in its sound. Whispers out of Time is for string orchestra (with a concertino quartet), and relates to a John Ashbery poem about a self-portrait by the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, itself a portrayal of the artist in the reflection of a concave mirror (this begins to give a sense of the layers of meaning and reference which inform Reynolds’s work). It’s a dark, mysterious, imagistic work, with the titles of its movements taken from lines in Ashbery’s poem (“Like a wave breaking on a rock” really sounds like such, with successive sound-crashes and resultant spray). It also uses shards of the Beethoven “Les Adieux” Sonata and the Mahler Ninth Symphony, which increase the elegiac quotient and suffuse it with a more tonal veneer.


Only Symphony [Vertigo] doesn’t quite work for me. Its distinctive technique is the use throughout of a prerecorded part made of computer-processed piano sounds, derived from improvisations by Reynolds’s colleague Cecil Lytle. The result is the only work that sounds a little modernist generic, with its mix of electroacoustic and acoustic, its somewhat more strident gestures, and often-discontinuous flow. Some will find this exciting for the use of the technology and the interaction of the different worlds of sounds. I enjoy the composer’s risk-taking here, but the gamble doesn’t quite pay off.


But overall, this is an excellent portrait of a composer of great imaginative, aesthetic ambition. The performances are committed, though at times feel not as fully shaped as one might like, considering the wealth of detail that needs to be balanced to pull off the works’ desired impact. This is not for everyone, but I recommend it as an important, questing voice in the American scene. There is a real mind, heart, and ear at work here. Yes, it’s not easily ingratiating, but who said we should never work for our aesthetic pleasures?


FANFARE: Robert Carl

This release couples two of Reich’s “sextets” for the first time: the Sextet of 1984 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet of 2007, which also makes its first appearance on LP. A striking difference between the two pieces is that the rhythmic world of Sextet mostly consists of a single-meter grooving, while Double Sextet works in the angular, off-kilter shifting meters reminiscent of Reich’s Tehillim (also of Stravinsky). Ekkozone impart a uniquely chamber music feel and color to these works while maintaining their propulsive character. Liner notes by Adam Sliwinski. LP lacquers and mastering by veteran Scott Hull at Masterdisk. Plated and pressed by RTI, California. Danish percussionist and conductor Mathias Reumert lives and breathes contemporary classical music. An in-demand soloist, he explores new percussive territory while remaining a committed interpreter of yesterday’s masterworks. As creator and leader of the acclaimed ensemble Ekkozone, he explores the bounderies between classical, world and experimental music in performances at rock and jazz festivals. Ekkozone is a Danish crossover ensemble that masterfully explores the lines between classical, world and experimental music. Formed by Mathias Reumert in 2013, the ensemble enjoys a special connection with Reich’s music and has performed a large part of his oeuvre, including several performances of Music for 18 Musicians.

The first volume in a series combining the complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets – there are six of each – by Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008). His music is linked to the "spectral music" school.

The Fifth String Quartet is one of the key works in his output. The Second Sonata is inspired by the Tao of Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu. The Fifth Piano Sonata makes abundant use – more so than any of his other sonatas – of Romanian folk material.