This disc of chamber works by Luigi Nono is most definitely not easy listening, and will not fade quietly into the background. It is, however, a fascinating collection of works which owe at least some debt to Anton Webern in the composition of their sound worlds. The titles evoke the most basic elements of Western music: polyphony, monody, rhythm, songs. Yet none of these appears in its traditional sense in the music--Nono is more interested here in suspended or fractured songs, rather than a style of sustained lyricism. 'Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica' begins with echoes of unheard pitches which coalesce into undulating almost-harmonies before breaking into a halting movement forward.
Peter Hirsch and his Ensemble United Berlin have mastered this music and found Nono's broken and echoed melodies along with his polyphony, monody, and the rest. Whether a group of seven or of thirteen or of only two, they play with excellent ensemble. Soprano Angelika Luz gives the haunting, stratospheric 'Canciones a Guiomar' appropriate voice, giving beauty and life to "un-pretty" vocal writing.

Morton Subotnick is a living legend. A leading innovator of electronic music, he has used many important technological breakthroughs in his work as a composer. This release, originally recorded and released in the 80s on LP by Nonesuch Records, has been specially remastered for this reissue. It features The Wild Beasts, a work inspired by an exhibition of Les Fauves paintings, and After the Butterfly, a concerto-like work for trumpet, instrumental ensemble and electronics.

“I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” What the American painter Franz Kline said about his paintings, can be applied equally to Morton Feldman’s compositions. For Morton Feldman, composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the "black" of the notes as with the "white" silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman’s music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early – non-figurative – paintings of his friend Philip Guston: “the complete absence of gravity” of a painting that is “not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves,” as Feldman once wrote. Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts.

When considering the reception and public perception of the music of Mikis Theodorakis, a strange contrast becomes evident: Those interested in music know many of the Greek composer’s songs, sometimes without even knowing that a certain melody was written by him, since a considerable number of his songs have been disseminated in many different variations and arrangements. Singers from many countries have often made Theodorakis’s songs their own using new texts, some of which bear no relationship to the content of the original but contributed to their fame nonetheless. The situation looks quite different, however, with Theodorakis’s symphonic works. Even those who are active in the world of music often do not know a single symphonic work by Theodorakis; some are not even aware that he has produced a considerable symphonic oeuvre. The two rhapsodies on the present CD are easy to understand, making them good examples of the musical facture that derives from Theodorakis’s basic aesthetic stance. The rhapsodies have many things in common, including that they emerged from earlier works with the same melodic material. This procedure is characteristic of Theodorakis as well as the continuation of a procedure that can be found throughout the history of music. Recall the common multiple uses of their own musical material in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach or Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, which the composer himself reworked into an alternative or second version for piano and orchestra as Op. 61a. The Rhapsody for Violoncello and Orchestra AST was written during the last six weeks of 1996 and was premiered in Munich in October 1998. The melodies are already found in the song cycle Ta lirikotera of 1994/95, which was released as a CD in 1996 under the title Poetica, and Ta prosopa tu iliu (The faces of the sun) of 1986. The nine movements bear the names of the nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, whom Hesiod called the tutelary goddesses of the arts and assigned them to particular spheres of the arts. Their more widely known Latin names and attributes are, in the order of the movements of the rhapsody: 1 Clio (history) 2 Erato (love poetry) 3 Thalia (comedy) 4 Calliope (epic poetry, philosophy and science) 5 Euterpe (flute playing and singing) 6 Urania (astronomy and didactic writing) 7 Terpsichore (dance and light entertainment) 8 Melpomene (tragedy and elegy) 9 Polyhymnia (sacred poetry, pantomime, and serious song) The Rhapsody for Guitar and Orchestra AST also has a precursor. In Athens in March 1967 Theodorakis wrote seven songs on texts from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romencero gitano, published in 1928. These eighteen gypsy romances helped Garcia Lorca achieve his fame in Spain. His decidedly anti-Franco, leftist stance, in which Theodorakis no doubt saw parallels to his own positions, and his homosexuality caused him to be so hated by the reactionary forces that he was shot by the Falangists on August 18 or 19, 1938, just a few days before the civil war began. Theodorakis’s seven songs after Lorca were premiered in Rome in 1970 by Maria Farantouri under the direction of the composer. A version for alto and guitar was recorded by Maria Farantouri and John Williams in 1971 and only recently by the baritone Peter Goedhart and the guitarist Wim Spruijt with Garcia Lorca’s original Spanish text. Theodorakis’s second version with six songs is entitled Concert for Guitar (Lorcaand was commissioned by the Komische Oper of East Berlin. The premiere, with Maria Farantouri (alto), Kostas Kotsiolis (guitar), and members of the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Orchester der Komischen Oper under Rolf Reuter was in September 1983. Finally, the composer arranged the work for guitar and symphony orchestra in the mid-1990s and premiered this version in Munich in October 1998. Theodorakis wanted to offer the guitarist an instrumental work well suited to the instrument and with the guitar dominating from start to finish. The melodic material is primarily assigned to the orchestra.

Mikis Theodorakis is a composer whose life and work are more closely connected with the vicissitudes of twentieth-century European political history than any other musician alive today. In calling his new album East Of The Aegean, Theodorakis harks back to his own origins – he was born on the island of Chios in the eastern Aegean Sea. In Jens Naumilkat and Henning Schmiedt, Theodorakis has found two musicians who are ideally suited for a sensitive interpretation of this work.

WER 6038; WERGO - Germany; Contemporary classical Cameristica. Composed in 1964, this recording for female voice and tape is presented by Luigi Nono. An adaptation of Giuliano Scabia and Cesare Pavese (from "Two poems in T" for the final) created for Soprano on a Four-track magnetic tape. Luigi dedicated it "for the workers of the Italsider of Genoa" released as a Ricordi score 131242 (1967) on tape #131321. The original firs took place as a world premiere in Venice, Teatro La Fenice, Italy on15 September 1964. The Venice Biennale, XXVII International Festival of Contemporary Music recorded by Carla Henius, mezzo - on Magnetic tape made at the studio of phonology of the Italian Radiotelevisione of Milan with the participation of the Choir of the RAI in Milan directed by Giulio Bertola. - Luigi Nono, sound direction. Artist: Carla Henius: soprano / Choir of RAI Milano / Guilio Bertola: conductor / Marino Zuccheri: engineering / Barbara Miller: soprano / Sopranchor der Schola Cantorum Stuttgart / Clytus Gottwald: conductor / Stefania Woytowitz: soprano / Children's Choir of Piccolo Teatro, Milano.

'Anecdotic' is the term Luc Ferrari used to describe his music, portraying incidents, experiences and atmospheres in this music: 'It's all about trying to express the passing ideas, feelings and intuitions by different means, to observe everyday life in all its realities, whether they are social, psychological or sentimental.' It is exactly this endeavour that characterizes the works released on this CD. They were performed by the pianist Elmar Schrammel who 'brilliantly captured the polyglot aesthetics and left an impressive mark.' (Frankfurter Rundschau) Thus, the 'Suite hétéroclite' becomes a sounding souvenir of his transatlantic cruise to Edgard Varèse. 'Antisonate' - this title clearly states the will not to establish the classical form. It is especially the musical substance that has to be seen as an expression of savagery and non-conformity. The composition 'Sonatine Elyb' was written in the early 1950s. In keeping with the spirit of that decade, it follows the principle of serial technique. 'Visage I' juxtaposes two different compositional methods, contrasting serial and repetitive techniques. The 'Collection de petites pièces ou 36 enfilades pour piano et magnétophone', a collection of very short pieces, was originally conceived as a sort of musical theatre. Even 'Fragments d'un journal intime' goes back to a music-theatre play by Ferrari entitled 'Journal intime' which was premiered in Paris in 1983.

Ligeti's two-act opera in four scenes, Le grand macabre, is an entertaining, taut example of musical theater residing somewhere between parody and ominous seriousness, between clowning and wisdom. The opera's hero, Nekrotzar (Dracula), alias Le grand macabre, has not only ambitions to suck blood but also apocalyptic visions: he wants to bring about the end of the world personally (but fails to do so). This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award. Opera in four acts (four scenes).

This Ligeti CD contains several of his best-known and most characteristic pieces (several of which were used in the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey), and the ensemble's highly artistic interpretation leaves nothing to be desired. Ensemble "die reihe", Wien / Friedrich Cerha: conductor / Sinfonie-Orchester des S�dwestfunks, Baden-Baden / Ernest Bour: conductor / Kammerorchester des Saarl�ndischen Rundfunks, Saarbr�cken / Antonio Janigro: conductor / Schola Cantorum Stuttgart / Clytus Gottwald: conductor.

This is an excellent introduction to the piano music of two of the 20th century's greatest composers. Gyorgy Ligeti's stock has only risen since his death, and much of his repulation rests on his formidable ETUDES, one of the few recently composed piano works to enter the active repertory of contemporary players. Ligeti doesn't have a method and belongs to no particular movement or school; he creatively exploited the vocabulary of postwar classical music to hone a very particular voice of his own--expressive, humorous, vivid, grotesque, sometimes macabre.
Like Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen was liberated by the harmonic freedom of modern music to forge a highly personal, even eccentric path--in his case to express and celebrate the awesome presence of God in nature. (He is perhaps the most traditionally Roman Catholic of any major composer, although that is just about the only conservative thing about him.) Far from serene, his music bursts with color and dissonance, and can be violent and terrifying in nature. The piano cycle VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT-JESUS is quintessential Messaien, and the pianist Volker Banfield gives these excerpts a fluent reading with plenty of splash.

Classical Music

Helmut Lachenmann is often associated with the musique concrète instrumentale that he developed during the middle years of his career. The pieces on this recording, however, were written both before and after this particular aesthetic phase. The point of departure for these ideas (as Lachenmann put it in 1970) is sound itself “as the characteristic result and signal of its mechanical origin and the more or less economical use of the energy required to produce it.” Noise-like instrumental sounds are examined for similarities and contrasts. They are also cataloged: categories and families are created as the foundation of a kind of motivic development using noises and sounds. In “Got Lost” Lachenmann used four lines from Nietzsche, the poem “All Love Letters Are Ridiculous” by Fernando Pessoa and a short note in English lamenting the loss of a laundry basket which gave this work its name. Lachenmann wrote: “Three only seemingly unrelated texts, stripped of their lofty, poetic, or mundane diction, are all presented by the same sound source – a soprano voice singing ‘any old way’ – and sent into a constantly changing intervallic field of sound, resonance, and movement."

On this CD, "Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger" ["Cycle for One Percussionist"] can be heard in two different versions performed by two different performers, Max Neuhaus and Christoph Caskel. Stockhausen originally wrote it as a required piece for the Kranichstein Percussion Competition in 1959. He deliberately did not determine the length of the piece's performance, so as not to be overly specific concerning the work's multiplicity of meanings, the different characters of various performances, or the technical abilities of the players. Max Neuhaus, for example, tried to find the best possible positions or arrangement of the individual instruments relative to each other to form them into one "instrument". In addition, he developed his own playing techniques specially adapted to the piece and instrument. For "Klavierstück X", Stockhausen combined two extremes: The work is based on the attempt to mediate between relative disorder and order, chaos and balance. The interpretation on this CD was performed by the legendary pianist Frederic Rzewski.

Our focus with the CD 'Coronation' is not on blue blood or kingly power. In processes that are positively vegetal, the music on this CD sends up its shoots and produces blossoms like crowns. '(co)ro(na)', by Vykintas Baltakas, springs from a cascade of motivic branchings, its roots in a cycle of works named after the alchemical Ouroboros, a snake that swallows its own tail. Its 'dragon's blood', so the legends say, is cinnabar red - like the hue that shines in 'cinnabar' by Rebecca Saunders. Magnus Lindberg's 'Joy' expresses itself through its profligacy with spectral harmonies and the resonant snapping of the strings of a demolished piano. Iannis Xenakis creates sieves that proliferate until they transform into archaic dances, refulgent with the brass tones characteristic of so many musical moments: This is the sound that crowns the affair.

This portrait CD provides insight into the sensitive and exciting sound aesthetics of the composer Malika Kishino. Nature and beauty constitute the main points of reference of her oeuvre. Japanese culture and it's aesthetics leave a mark on Kishino's music, yet it is futile to look for anything reminiscent of the traditional music of her home country. Nature, especially optical and visual phenomena or physical states, are an inspiration for the structure and character of her works which she herself describes as "sound organisms". "Rayons Cr�pusculaires", for example, refers to a radial light phenomenon that shows particularly in the spatial arrangement of this composition. Three groups of musicians stand facing loudspeakers which reverberate the sounds modified by live electronics back into the room. The work which was recorded specifically for this CD is a "complex acoustic event which not only sets the space in motion but also sharpens one's hearing with regard to special tonal qualities" (Michael Struck-Schloen). Meanwhile the currents of the water and it's changing states of matter are the starting points for "Sensitive Chaos". This examination becomes more or less audible in the form of dripping sounds which later turn into more flowing structures. Another topic is the menace to nature: Kishino dedicated the choral piece "Prayer / Inori" to the memory of the catastrophe of Fukushima.