Classical Music

2 sided DVD disc.

“Dream” is a musical journey through the sound of the electric guitar in American concert music, based on sonic research and on the simplicity and beauty of the electric guitar timbre and colors. Sorrentino’s transcription of Dream by John Cage opens the program. This version demonstrates the pure beauty of the electric guitar’s clean sound with only the addition of light reverb. Alpha Aloha by Jack Vees is an experimental composition, where the electric guitar sound is electronically processed. The sounds result from playing guitar through various digital filters which slowly open and close at different rates, the resonance is set in such a way as to let some notes through with more strength than others. It creates an ocean of sound. David Lang’s Warmth, for two electric guitars, explores the warm sound of the tube amp. No effects, only the overdrive and gradually increasing amp saturation. The graphic score Mare Undarum by Elliott Sharp is an invitation to a free improvisation. Quoting Sharp: “Sorrentino uses a variety of techniques on his electric guitar to vividly transform the score into a rarefied and hyperreal landscape. His direct and unadorned Stratocaster tone is rich with harmonics and deep with resonance.” Rose of Beans by Alvin Curran, is an extrapolated fragment for electric guitar solo from a larger ensemble piece. This is the first release the lost electric guitar composition by Morton Feldman, The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar. Originally composed for Christian Wolff, it was reconstructed by guitarist Seth Josel. Both of Christian Wolff’s works for electric guitar are included here.

Classical Music

This historic release couples George Crumb’s earliest work for piano, the Five Pieces for Piano (1962) with his most recent piano cycle, Metamorphoses (2017). Margaret Leng Tan has long been a champion of Crumb’s music, and he composed Metamorphoses (Book 1) for her. This recording is of the German premiere at the legendary Donaueschingen Festival in 2017. Crumb’s Metamorphoses is a natural descendent of his monumental Makrokosmos I & II piano cycle of the early 1970s. With a nod to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, each movement of the Metamorphoses is inspired by a famous painting. And, like the Makrokosmos, it requires the pianist to be a virtuoso not only at the keyboard but playing inside the piano and vocalizing as well. Ms. Tan is regarded at the “Diva of the Toy Piano,” and Crumb has also incorporated the toy piano and toy percussion instruments into some movements. Crumb says: “I have always been most fortunate to have had outstanding pianists who were willing to tackle the formidable technical and musical innovations in my scores. And among the very finest of these is Margaret Leng Tan for whom I wrote Metamorphoses (Book l). Margaret’s technical prowess and superb artistic sensitivity is a combination that must warm the heart of any composer!” The album also includes the early Five Pieces for Piano. All the components of Crumb’s mature compositional language are already evident: a broad palette of coloristic effects along with an extraordinarily sensitive command of nuance, his unmistakable musical gestures, an inherent sense of drama coupled with a magical suspenseful atmosphere and a battery of interior piano effects demanding that the pianist be somewhat of a harpist and percussionist as well.

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REVIEW:

This CD start out with George Crumb’s most recent piano cycle, the Metamorphoses, but closes with his earliest, the 5 Pieces for Piano from 1962.

Though Nocturne may be the most impressionistic piece in the set, the music depicting Dali’s Persistence of Memory is the most abstract, the most like the George Crumb most listeners know from such works as Ancient Voices of Children.

The 5 Pieces for Piano already show Crumb as an individualist, even at this early stage making the pianist play the insides of the instrument. It is, however, much more abstract than the Metapmorphoses, which you would expect in a work less tied to visuals. Although a difficult piece, both in terms of the technique it demands of the player and the listening aspect, it is worth your effort to absorb and understand it.

This is clearly an outstanding album, particularly for the Metamorphoses.

– Art Music Lounge

A major discovery and first recording of an important Cage piece from 1944. In 1944, John Cage was invited to participate in "The Imagery of Chess" exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. The artists included Calder, Noguchi, Motherwell, Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Man Ray, Tanning and other leading surrealists. Cage contributed a painting entitled "Chess Pieces". It was purchased at the show and went into a private collection. For decades it was deemed lost and was (almost) forgotten by Cage afficionados and scholars.

Re-assembling the original artworks for "The Imagery of Chess Revisited" show (2005-06) at the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York led to the tracking down of the Cage painting. Cage expert Margaret Leng Tan set about transcribing the music in the painting into a playable score which receives its premiere recording here.

Chess Pieces is from 1944, an emotional and creative year for Cage; besides echoes of Satie, Chess Pieces contains prophetic touches of minimalism and has features in common with his monumental piano piece, Four Walls, from the same year.

A renowned Cage interpreter, Ms. Tan worked closely with the composer from 1981 to 1992. Cage was particularly appreciative of her performances of his works for the prepared piano. This is Ms. Tan's long-awaited recording of Cage's prepared piano masterpiece, the Sonatas and Interludes of 1946-48.

Also included is the first recording of the only other musical score from "The Imagery of Chess" show, neo-classical composer Vittorio Rieti's Chess Serenade.

Also available as a surround sound DVD (MOD-DV158) with full performance videos of Chess Pieces and Chess Serenade, plus 2 documentaries: Mr. Cage's Prepared Piano (Ms. Tan takes an in-depth look at the prepared piano), and CAGE: Music/Art/Chess (a closeup look at Cage's and Rieti's pieces in the Noguchi Museum's "The Imagery of Chess Revisited" show).

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTARY VIDEOS:
* Mr. Cage's Prepared Piano: an insightful look at the history of the prepared piano narrated and performed by Ms. Tan, who also demonstrates how to (and not to) prepare a piano, and describes the preparations in detail both visually and sonically. She prepares and performs excerpts from Bacchanale, Cage's first prepared piano work, and Sonatas & Interludes.
* Cage and the Art of Chess: a visit to "The Imagery of Chess Revisited" exhibit at the Isamu Noguchi Museum with curator Larry List and Ms. Tan. Together they describe Cage's relationship to the show and examine the "Chess Pieces" painting in detail - they also discuss Rieti and his Chess Serenade. Mr. List explores a separate feature on Cage's wife, Xenia Cage, and her Chess Table (Xenia was an artist and also had a piece in the show) and sheds additional background on her life and work.

24-bit surround sound DTS and Dolby Digital surround.
Dedicated 24-bit stereo mix.
English, French, German and Spanish subtitles.

NOTE: Sonatas & Interludes is not accompanied by video.

R E V I E W S

"The seventh volume of John Cage's piano works -- or Volume 34 of the Complete John Cage Edition, if you prefer -- features a transcendent performance of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1948) meticulously rendered by avant-garde keyboardist extraordinaire, Margaret Leng Tan. Yet Volume 2 in this series features a 1994 recording of the same work, played by Philipp Vandre. For those aiming to collect the full series, this may be an annoyance, but others catching these CDs as they are released will surely appreciate having Tan's superb interpretation of the Sonatas and Interludes, with premiere recordings of Cage's long-lost Chess Pieces for piano (1944) and Vittorio Rieti's Chess Serenade (1944) as bonuses, rather than search for the older disc of the single work. But despite seeming redundant, this CD is clearly one to get: Tan is simply remarkable in the Sonatas and Interludes, giving a realization that is scrupulous in execution, deep in sonic dimensions, and luminous in color; and she offers what is actually a 'period performance,' since she plays a piano identical in its specifications to the small Steinway Cage originally prepared in the process of composition. The differences in sonorities between this album and others are immediately noticeable, especially in this recording's superior resonance and crystalline details; anyone who already knows this work will recognize that Tan's interpretation is truly Cagean in its poetic nuances and hypnotic power. So without disparaging other recordings for being less authoritative -- certainly, Tan holds a considerable advantage for having worked closely with Cage in his final years -- it is safe to say that fans of his most popular piano work will give this album full marks. Mode's sound quality is ideal, too, so this CD receives the highest recommendation. --- Blair Sanderson, allmusic.com, March 2006

John Cage allowed for some of his works to be combined and performed simultaneously. Percussionist Bonnie Whiting has created uniquely virtuosic solo-simultaneous realizations of some of these works for "speaking percussionist." 51'15.657" for a speaking percussionist is Whiting's solo-simultaneous realization of all of 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554" for a percussionist. Cage wrote 45' for a speaker to perform himself. He wrote on thirty-two subjects and added a series of gestures (gargling, lighting a match, etc.) to be performed during the delivery. Like the percussion piece, each page is one minute long. Between 1984 and 1987 Cage composed 17 pieces called Music for ____. Any of these pieces can be performed alone or together in any combination. Here Whiting combines one of the percussion versions with the version for voice. Her recital is completed by Cage's two beautiful, classic, early pieces for voice and piano: The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and A Flower. Here the piano is used as a percussion instrument, never played on the keys but rather knocked and slapped on by th epianist. As in the larger works, Whiting gives a tour de force performance of both parts simultaneously. As a bonus, Whiting's mentor Allen Otte performs his work for speaking pianist/percussionist which is created around works of Cage and utlizing Cage's compositional "tools" for both the music and text.

John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion.

This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other worldly mixture of resonant sound unlike any heard before it. Second Construction prominently features one of Cage’s greatest inventions, the prepared piano. Finally, Third Construction brings the greatest degree of complexity and the widest range of instrumental timbres yet, creating one of the first landmark pieces in the percussion chamber music literature.

There are very few recordings of the early works Quartet and Trio.

The surprisingly beautiful sounds of everyday objects come forth in Third Coast Percussion’s recording of Living Room Music, recorded onsite at the futuristic Ford House in Aurora, IL, designed by one of America’s most iconoclastic architects, Bruce Goff, in 1947. Third Coast utilize the house itself as an instrument for the first movement.

Liner notes by Gregory Beyer and David Skidmore.

Take one Italian guitarist active in the Downtown Improvisation and New Music scene – combine with youthful influences of movie music and Spaghetti Westerns – mix well with a love of ‘60s Surf sound bathed in reverb – top with bass and drums… and you get the Italian Surf Academy! The Italian Surf Academy are back, bringing their surf-rock/jazz/improv sound to the musical soundtrack of Roger Vadim’s 1968 psychedelic science fiction sex comedy — the cult classic Barbarella! This new release is a terrific follow-up to their first album, "The American Dream", revisiting the sound of '60s/'70s spaghetti westerns, noir and horror soundtracks (on Avant 13).

Includes six world premiere recordings of the Irish composer's work!

Review:

"How music engenders a sense of speed remains notoriously elusive, with theories of musical time sometimes putting forward the idea of an ongoing motion which underlies perceived processes of change. Drawing upon the suggestion that a number of such processes can be understood without reference to this sense of movement, the current discussion proposes that the concept of ‘quickness’, as formulated by Italo Calvino, forms a useful interpretative lever through which to approach a number of compositions by Irish composer, Gerald Barry. Examinations of Bob, 1998 and In the Asylum suggest ways in which Barry’s approach to musical material plays with perceptions of speed and slowness, and how his work represents a number of different solutions to the problem of creating convincing musical forms." --Contemporary Music Review (Daniel March)

Sam Dunscombe writes: “This release marks Volume 4 in Mode’s Rădulescu Edition. The three works on this release explore different aspects of Rădulescu’s theory of Sound Plasma as it evolved over the course of the 1970s, from Rădulescu’s early to middle periods. Capricorn’s Nostalgic Crickets (1972) presents a simple pulse of spectrally dense sound events, described in the composer’s own words as a “PULSE-TIDE of MUSIC and SILENCE.” The seven clarinetists should transcend their instrumental selves, coming together to evoke the sounds of the natural world — the timbres of electronic music, the magical and phonetic aspects of language, even other instruments. This is to be done in the most fluid way possible, never dwelling on any one interaction but rather creating a sense of a whole universe of sounds constantly evolving and decaying. Small Infinities’ Togetherness (1972) is the shimmering articulation of a single sound spectrum (that of a low ‘D’) that shifts between harmonicity and inharmonicity, spectral narrowness and spectral width. The version presented on this album features two archival recordings of Rădulescu playing organ (the original tape from Fountains of My Sky) and synthesiser (initially intended as a backing track for a duo version with Fernando Grillo). These are augmented with two sound groups recorded in the period between 2018–21, one of electronics (analogue and digital synthesis together with tape manipulation) and one of acoustic instruments (a set of Rădulescu’s original Romanian folk wooden flutes, and a specially tuned sound icon). In Opus 42: Inner Time / Outer Time (1980-83), paired compositions presented together here for the first time, a spectrum of odd number harmonics is deconstructed and rebuilt by overlaid flutes and clarinets, the instruments’ natural variations of pitch causing the total sonic mass to seethe and boil.”

On April 6, 1327, a 22-year-old Italian poet named Francesco Petrarca caught a glimpse of a young woman, Laura, in a church in Avignon. He later reported that “living sparks issued from two lovely eyes”. Those sparks enflamed Petrarch such that he spent the rest of his illustrious career coming to terms with them. In the 16th century, madrigals were developed by Adrian Willaert and Cipriano de Rore, which took Petrarch’s agonized images as justification for violating the rules that had guided musicians since before the beginnings of notated music. Those living sparks have leapt ahead seven more centuries to inspire Katharina Rosenberger.

Rosenberger's tempi agitati embeds Petrarch’s texts (especially fragments from his “Ascent of Mount Ventoso”) and settings of sonnets by Willaert and Rore within her own responses to those materials. In live performance, Rosenberger works together with stage-director Ludger Engels to distribute members of the ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten, around the sound space; they dart around throughout the site, thereby embodying Petrarch’s “vive faville.” While a sound recording lacks the visual dimension crucial to Rosenberger’s concept, it allows the listener to attend much more closely to her rich tapestry of sonorities as she puts Petrarch’s 14th-century poetry and 16th-century madrigals into dialogue with her extended vocal techniques. Sometimes the singers coalesce into whole polyphonic samples before returning to the extended vocal techniques from which they had emerged. Sometimes, finally, the madrigal itself appears, now intact. Rosenberger thereby simulates Petrarch’s struggle to put into coherent form his reactions to Laura’s glance. Those living sparks have indeed inflamed thousands: Laura’s glance goaded Petrarch to the heights of formal perfection in his sonnets, and it led the madrigalists to imagine tonal worlds far beyond the stylistic precepts they had inherited.

This release documents Roger Reynolds’ most recent string quartets in composer supervised first recordings by the acclaimed JACK Quartet. “FLiGHT”, commissioned by JACK Quartet, arose from a collaborative process lasting almost five years. Its four movements reflect upon the stages of humanity’s aspirations for flight: IMAGINING, PREPARING, EXPERIENCING, and PERSPECTIVE. Of “not forgotten” Reynolds writes: “As the years pass, one notices that certain elements in one’s days have unusual persistence in the mind. Such elements may involve individuals encountered, sometimes places experienced, or momentary intersections that are unexpectedly luminous. The point is that they not only don’t go away, they play roles as one’s own life evolves. … Three composers with whom I had extensive and formative interactions were Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu and Iannis Xenakis. Geographic parallels include Ryoanji in Kyoto, Monet’s sumptuous Giverny gardens, and the glitteringly patterned surface of the Aegean.” These experiences form the movements to “not forgotten.” The outer movements, “Giverny” and “Now,” are fixed, while the inner movements may be played in whatever order the quartet chooses. Each movement begins with a solo by one of the quartet’s members. The unique liner notes take the form of a communication between the composer and members of the JACK Quartet. This is the first of a projected two volume set celebrating Reynolds’ 85th birthday and his recent music, to be released on Mode.

This is the second of two volumes celebrating “Roger Reynolds at 85,”and marks the first recording of his Piano Etudes, in two Books. Book I was written between 2010 and 2011, Book II in 2016–2017. Reynolds’ Etudes allows the performer to not only choose the number of Etudes to be presented (even repeating them, if desired) as well as their order. In this way, the performer becomes a co-creator with the composer. All 12 Etudes are presented in this recording by Eric Huebner. Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second six constitute a difference in kind rather than an extension. Their complexity is intensified, their investigations more extreme, even though they make comparable technical demands. The Etudes carry subtle quotations from Reynolds’ own, earlier piano works as well as the traditional literature of piano etudes. The lineup Reynolds has chosen includes Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti. Yet these allusions are not mere homages, and these quotations range from fleeting to obsessive. Reynolds collaborated with Huebner on the 2009 Mode release, Epigram and Evolution (mode 212/13), an anthology of Reynolds’ piano works to that date. This led the composer to value Huebner’s extraordinary capacity to combine virtuoso technique with Zen-like concentration. Their artistic bond inspired Reynolds to contemplate writing his own brand of etudes.

REVIEW:

This is the second of two volumes celebrating “Roger Reynolds at 85” (see 11W050 for the first), and marks the first recording of his Piano Etudes, in two Books. Book I was written between 2010 and 2011, Book II in 2016–2017. Reynolds’ Etudes allows the performer to not only choose the number of Etudes to be presented (even repeating them, if desired) as well as their order. In this way, the performer becomes a co-creator with the composer. Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second six constitute a difference in kind rather than an extension. Their complexity is intensified, their investigations more extreme, even though they make comparable technical demands. The Etudes carry subtle quotations from Reynolds’ own, earlier piano works as well as the traditional literature of piano etudes. The lineup Reynolds has chosen includes Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti. Yet these allusions are not mere homages, and these quotations range from fleeting to obsessive.

-- Records International

The JACK Quartet follow up their acclaimed, best selling release of Iannis Xenakis’ complete string quartets (mode 209) with a disc devoted to another iconoclastic European composer, Helmut Lachenmann. Lachenmann has created a unique sound world which he refers to as “instrumental musique concrete.” It is a world where the musical atom is not the note but the sound, which may be drawn from the instrument in all kinds of unusual ways. Strange as the soundscape may be, Lachenmann believes that the fundamental principles of music is about finding shape and continuity, about revealing the unexpected and touching the familiar, and that the string quartet, in particular, is about conversation. Even through all the use of extended techniques, this is still a music of gestures, phrases, even melodies. The JACK Quartet, specialists in new music, are the perfect performers for such repertoire. This recording is endorsed by the composer. Liner notes by Paul Griffiths.