Despite the complexities within the compositions, and also the rigorous demands they make on performers, the impact of Xenakis's music on the listener is always direct. The music is still alive with "the whole agony of my youth and the Resistance", but there is an increasing richness of expression, a spirit of exuberance and exhilaration, a new romanticism, what seems to be a celebration of the sheer joy of music by a composer at the height of his powers and in full command of his medium, his destiny. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award. Spectrum / Guy Protheroe: conductor / Irvine Arditti: violin / Claude Helffer: piano / Penelope Walmsley-Clark: soprano.

George Benjamin is a contemporary composer known best among small circles, but with a loyal international following. This recording contains five of his pieces, and they share a common style. Benjamin treats a composition as a landscape: a kind of blank, rolling panorama onto which he affixes musical ideas. His sound is very textured and evocative. 'Ringed by the Flat Horizon,' for example, portrays a storm that overtakes a vast open space. The music begins ominously and contains a variety of created sound effects along with rapid fire crescendos into huge orchestral crashes. 'A Mind In Winter' is contrarily a setting of "The Snowman" (a poem by Wallace Stevens), and yet is built upon the same sort of abstract picture-building and sweeping evocative gestures for the voice. Benjamin's vocabulary is developed from the modern schools of atonality, and his teacher Messiaen is a clear and strong influence on his work. For those attracted to the modern schools of classical composition, they will find a great many layers to be unveiled in this recording.