Things heat up when the phenomenal E-MEX Ensemble joins forces with the outstanding vocal soloists Monica Benvenuti and Renatus Meszar on their new GENUIN album to bring Sylvano Bussotti's first major work to life: his "Pieces de Chair II" from 1958. These "Flesh Pieces" are a masterpiece of immense curiosity and experimental fervor. Their provocative sounds remain thrilling and fresh even today. Under the direction of Christoph Maria Wagner, the E-MEX Ensemble creates an entire sound cosmos unlike anything previously captured on audio!

After her first b records album, the result of her residency at the Royaumont Foundation, Claudia Chan, ambassador of the contemporary pianistic repertoire, presents her new record dedicated to the Italian school. From the masters Salvatore Sciarrino and Sylvano Bussotti to the new generation led by Francesco Filidei, Simone Cardini and Giulia Lorusso, the performer reveals the richness of a national heritage marked by a free spirit and the sensuality of the sounds that resonate under her fingers, sometimes even before they activate the keys. A program with a high potential for discovery!

It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked it's entry into the 20th century was a very modern one: the Tombeau that Manuel de Falla dedicated in 1922 to Claude Debussy was pioneering at the time. The instrument had everything it needed to be 'modern': a small, but captivating chamber music sonority, a glorious past (at least in the then halfforgotten noble ancestor, the lute, whose place it took), and a technique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schonberg's use of the guitar as early as 1924 in his Serenade, mainly owing to Andres Segovia - the main architect of the instrument's renaissance in the 20th century, who long dominated the scene with his own predilections and idiosyncrasies -, the repertoire remained linguistically linked to that debut moment until the 1970s: modern, but no longer contemporary. It was then thanks to the work carried out in Darmstadt by Leo Brouwer (1939), a talented Cuban guitarist and composer, and a few other performers - among whom we should mention at least Siegfried Behrend (19331990) and Angelo Gilardino (19412022) - that the first compositions for guitar built on elements that the composers of the second half of the 20th century had already been using for decades came to the public at large: aleatorism, serialism, free atonality, and extreme timbral research. When contemporary composers finally embraced the instrument, they did so with conviction, developing it's full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languages of our time.

The 1960s were a period of revolution in classical vocal composition, a time of re-inventing and re-creating the classical voice's sound world that inspired the generation of composers featured on this album. Spear-headed by such imaginative singers as Cathy Berberian and Michiko Hirayama, and inspired by the simultaneous developments in Early Music, technology and an awareness of world music singing styles, the long-established Bel canto singing tradition was extended in new, imaginative and extraordinarily virtuosic ways. This collection is widely diverse in style from the simple (yet so complex) simple vocals by the two American composers, to a variety of extended-technique songs by the notoriously modernist Europeans, Kagel, Scelsi, Bussotti, Nono, Berio, and Castliglioni. fSara Stowe is one of Britain's most versatile and inventive performers with a repertoire ranging from medieval song to the present day. She began studying as a prize-winning harpsichordist and piano scholar at the Royal College of Music. On leaving she decided to pursue singing and studied in Italy where she sang for Luciano Berio and studied Scelsi's vocal music with Michiko Hirayama. In Britain Sara's performances include work with The Academy of Ancient Music, New London Consort, Sirinu, James Wood and the Taverner Consort.