The double bass is the focus of this collection of music by Sofia Gubaidulina presented here in powerful interpretations by Daniele Roccato. Written over a span of over forty years, these compositions have become staples of the double bass literature. In Pantomime, one immediately senses a certain theatricality, which is evoked by melodic contours, dramatic pauses and dynamic progressions. Originally written for cello, the Preludes were later arranged for double bass. For in Croce, Gubaidulina pairs the bass with a bayan, (a Russian accordion). The work was inspired by the composer's experiments in improvisation using either ancient or folk instruments. Roccato is accompanied by pianist Fabrizio Ottaviucci and bayan player Massimiliano Pitocco.

On the occasion of Sofia Gubaidulina's 75th birthday on 24 October 2006, WERGO publishes a CD with chamber music where - besides Julius Berger and Stefan Hussong, two well-known interpreters of new music - Sofia Gubaidulina and her colleague, Viktor Suslin, join the artists. In "Am Rande des Abgrunds", the two composers play waterphones, instruments, which resemble water-filled censers with strange decorations. Their sound is rich in overtones and quite unusual, and contrasts sharply with the shimmering sound of the strings. Waterphones, employed rather rarely in new music - are an expression of the composer's eagerness to experiment, actively and consciously grappling with the sound worlds of the cultures of Africa or East Asia.

In 'Und so weiter pour piano électrique et bande magnétique', the piano and tape sounds become interwoven in a complex dialogue. 'Music Promenade. Mixage originale" - created in two periods: the period of recording from 1964 to 67 and the period of mixing and editing from 1966 to 68 - describes a magnetophonic memory trip through several years in which Ferrari recorded everything that attracted his attention.

Classical Music

Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series will be released on WERGO CDs. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original eighteen LPs have been highly sought after in the secondary market since 1978 when they were discontinued. These rare and historically important recordings of international avant-garde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The series presents the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that flourished in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s. The third CD set within this series contains works by Luciano Berio, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Iannis Xenakis, Roger Reynolds, Yuji Takahashi and Earle Brown, performed by the great singer Cathy Berberian, accompanied by Francis Pierre, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Boris de Vinogradov and Luciano Berio; furthermore the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Chorus together with Tokyo Choraliers and the Nippon University Chorus under the direction of Wilhelm Schüchter and the pianist Yuji Takahashi. Each set contains three CDs in jewel boxes including the original liner notes and cover. In addition there is small catalogue/booklet with an essay 'Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series' in English, German and French, as well as an information about the complete Contemporary Sound Series to be released.*

Quarterly German Record Critics' Award for second CD set of Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series, published on WERGO! Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series will be released on WERGO CDs. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original eighteen LPs have been highly sought after in the secondary market since 1978 when they were discontinued. These rare and historically important recordings of international avant-garde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The series - re-released on WERGO since 2009 - presents the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that flourished in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s. The second CD set within this series contains works by Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, David Bedford, Richard Orton, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, performed by The English Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Bruno Maderna; Jacques Castagner, Walter Lewis, Francis Pierre, Walter Trampler and Seymour Barab directed by Luciano Berio; The Pierrot Players under the direction of Peter Maxwell Davies; Mary Thomas, Jane Manning, John Tilbury, Moray Welsh and Richard Orton; Don Hammond, Don Butterfield, David Tudor, Matthew Raimondi and David Soyer.

The 18 LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, now re-released by WERGO on CD (six 3-CD sets), have become a rarity in great demand. 'Earle Brown - A Life in Music - Vol. 4' is the most recent CD set in this unique series presented by WERGO. CD 1 contains three stylistically quite different string quartets by Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi and Earle Brown himself, performed by the ensembles Quatuor Parrenin, Hamann Quartet, Quartetto di Nuova Musica, and the New York String Quartet. CD 2 focuses on works for chamber orchestra by Iannis Xenakis, Aldo Clementi, Bo Nilsson, Wlodzimierz Kotonski, and Yuji Takahashi; apart from them, the first recording of Arnold Schoenberg's 'Drei Stücke' ('Three Pieces') is outstanding as well. The works were performed by the International Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble under the direction of Bruno Maderna, the Hamburger Kammersolisten under the direction of Francis Travis, as well as the exceptional violinist Paul Zukofsky. CD 3 presents four works premiered by the Hamburger Kammersolisten: 'Études contrapuntiques' by Milko Kelemen, 'Tropi' by Niccolò Castiglioni, 'Serenata' by Vittorio Fellegara, and 'Musik für sieben Instrumente' ('Music for Seven Instruments' by Isang Yun.

Earle Brown's involvement with the fine arts led him to reject previously fixed ideas of musical form and supposedly sacrosanct rules of composition in the early 1950s. His graphic notations, which are primarily oriented toward Jackson Pollock's painting procedures, guarantee the opening of time and space which leads to the liberation of the sound and the expansion of the meaning of form. "[...] mobility of the sound elements within the work and the graphic provocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-performance process - were for me the most fascinating new possibility for 'sound objects' as they had been for sculpture and painting." (Earle Brown) On this CD Sabine Liebner performs important works for piano by Earle Brown: "Home Burial" for piano, based on a poem by the American poet Robert Frost was written in 1949. The manuscript of the piece was only recently rediscovered. The performance here is therefore the work's first recording. Among the pieces gathered under the title "Folio", "December 1952" is surely the most famous. On a piece of paper without staves, the actions of the pianist are indicated through lines of varying length which indicate points in a sound-time-space continuum. "Twenty-Five Pages" consists of 25 single pages, each of which is an independent entity. The decision on the number of the instruments involved as well as on the order of the individual pages is left to the performers. "Four Systems" for any number of chosen instruments was written in connection with the birthday of the pianist David Tudor on 20 January 1954, who premiered the piece shortly thereafter. "Summer Suite '95", written after Brown's almost 30-year abstinence from the piano, is dedicated to the pianist David Arden. Brown sketched out his ideas about the structure of the work graphically, as had been his previous practice. However, after writing the piece down, he realized it on a keyboard and with the help of a computer.

More than 50 composers from 13 different countries contributed to this collection of music with computers. Their pieces represent major directions of how avantgarde composers utilize the potential of new technology.

In The Quiet and Zohar Iver, Chaya Czernowin reached a turning point: a new orientation which continued in works such as Esh, At the Fringe of Our Gaze, and White Wind Waiting. “As I was writing The Quiet, I was conscious that I had already been wishing for this change for ten years. In retrospect, I see all these orchestral works as a kind of corridor through which I arrived at a new path.” - Chaya Czernowin This “new path” marked Czernowin’s shift toward a musical language in which space and gesture became the focus of compositional interest, as did the discovery of processes for musical movement and an accompanying change in perspective. The Quiet, Zohar Iver, and Esh form a group of works which Chaya Czernowin calls “The Crescendo Trilogy”, because in all three pieces different kinds of crescendos play a central role: in The Quiet, an exponential increase in volume ends the piece, while in Zohar Iver, the crescendo is interrupted with the entrance of the pedal point before the end. At the Fringe of Our Gaze, for orchestra and a concertino group, was written in response to a commission from Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It is music consisting of highly differentiated layers of sound, which rise from the depths and ascend to the highest heights. As diverse as Chaya Czernowin’s individual creative phases are, there has always been in her musical language a distinctive way of working with the characteristics of individual sounds, developed with the most refined rhythmic, coloristic, and sound nuances; there is also a deliberate search for emotional extremes, which always give the pieces a physical and existential power.

Chaya Czernowin has developed a musical language in which space and gesture are the focus of her compositional interest: the discovery of musical changes in perspective that irritate and can sometimes be misleading. The listener never knows which musical gestures will come into focus and which will fade into the background. The compositional organization of space and time plays an important role in "HIDDEN", Chaya Czernowin’s quartet for strings and electronics. This is a work that deals with things unseen: things that are never revealed in their entirety, and can only be perceived (if they are perceived at all) as shadowy intimations. Czernowin says, " ‘HIDDEN’ is a slowly unfolding, 45-minute listening experience that permits our ears to turn into eyes. Our ears are given space and time to become accustomed to a totally unpredictable territory of sound. " As Chaya Czernowin has explained, she wanted to create an “Etude in Fragility” with her cycle of works for voice and breath.

EARLE BROWN —A LIFE IN MUSIC—VOL. I • Paul Price, cond; 1–3,5 John Cage, cond; 4,7 Manhattan Percussion Ens; 1–8 Christoph Caskel (perc); 9–11 Aloys Kontarsky (pn, wood blocks); 10 Bernhard Kontarsky (cel, cymbals); 10 David Tudor (pn); 11 AMM; 12 Musica Elettronica Viva 13 • WERGO 6928 (3 CDs: 116:15)


ROLDÁN Ritmicas: No. 6; 1 No. 5. 2 HARRISON Canticle No. 1. 3 RUSSELL 3 Dance Movements. 4 3 Cuban Pieces. 5 COWELL Ostinato pianissimo. 6 CAGE/HARRISON Double Music. 7 CAGE Amore s. 8 STOCKHAUSEN Zyklus. 9 Refrain. 10 KAGEL Transición II. 11 AMM AMM. 12 MEV Spacecraft 13


Though born in Massachusetts, Earle Brown was a young composer living in Denver in 1950 when Merce Cunningham and John Cage came to perform and lecture at the McLean School. His wife at that time, Carolyn Rice Brown, was a dancer who attended Cunningham’s master class. Almost immediately, the four realized they had much in common, and Cage persuaded the Browns to move to New York in 1951—Carolyn was one of the founding members of Merce Cunningham’s dance company (where she was to remain for 20 years as a featured performer) and Earle eventually collaborated with Cage at the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. This experience with electronic equipment allowed Brown to work as a recording engineer—recording and editing pop, jazz, and classical music—for Capitol Records from 1955–1960. In 1960 he began producing records for Bob Shad’s Time label, having convinced the well-established jazz and pop maven to allow him to record a series of avant-garde compositions. The first of these remarkable documents was issued on Time, but after that label folded in 1966, Brown continued to produce the series for Shad’s larger Mainstream imprint. All 18 of these recordings were reissued on LP in the 1970s, but have not appeared on CD until now.


Brown’s broad knowledge of new music, along with his professional connections, resulted in a groundbreaking collection of music that had been largely unheard—indeed, in some cases, all but unknown—at the time. Represented, of course, were Brown himself and his friends in the “New York School”—Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and their foremost interpreter, pianist David Tudor. But Brown also included what was for the most part the first American documentation of composers from Europe like Nono, Berio, Maderna, Scelsi, and Boulez; Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle from London; an album devoted to South American composers; and one featuring the next, post-Cage generation of American radicals, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier, and Behrman. Equally important, however, was Brown’s understanding that this unfamiliar, often shocking new music needed the best possible performances in order to convince listeners of its merits, as well as the best possible sound quality to capture its tonal subtleties and extravagances. By recording performers like Tudor and pianist Yuji Takahashi, flutist Severino Gazzelloni, violinist Paul Zukofsky, vocalist Cathy Berberian, and experienced ensembles often under the direction of the composers themselves, Brown helped to establish a tradition of new-music performance styles and techniques that would stand as a model for subsequent generations of interpreters.


This long-awaited release (collectors have been paying big bucks for the precious Time and Mainstream LPs) initiates Wergo’s two-year schedule of the reissue of all 18 albums, in six three-CD sets. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the total playing time listed above averages out to less than 40 minutes per CD. Wergo has decided to maintain the integrity of the original releases’ production by reproducing the cover art, reprinting the original liner notes, and yes, limiting each CD to a single LP’s worth of music. Their digitalization of the original sound quality, which was excellent to begin with, has been handled with care (although some lingering tape hiss is inevitable)—the proof is the first CD, where the percussion timbres are clean, crisp, and vivid. I did notice one new production error in this CD release—on disc 3, the two pieces have been mislabeled; AMM is the first piece on the disc, and Spacecraft the second, not the other way around, as listed on the CD cover and in the booklet.


What about the music, then? The first disc, “Concert Percussion for Orchestra,” reminds us that adventurous composers, looking for new sounds and timbres in the days before electronics, turned to percussion in order to expand the available palette of colors, and with them began to explore the rhythmic intricacies of other, non-classical, ethnic musics. Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán’s works for percussion ensemble date from 1930, William Russell’s Three Dance Movements and Three Cuban Pieces from later that same decade. Henry Cowell’s Ostinato pianissimo (1934) has become one of the repertoire’s classics. John Cage plays the prepared piano solos in his Amores (1943). Though for the most part concise exercises in unusual rhythms and timbres, many of which sound commonplace and simplified today, these pieces nevertheless were highly influential for their time, and display a charming sense of exploration, atmosphere, and, yes, even swing.


The Stockhausen and Kagel works on the second disc were hot off the press in 1960, and they receive gripping readings. The solo percussion score Zyklus , once so jolting, now has an almost meditative feel to it, and this version of Refrain emphasizes its delicacy and spontaneity, offering a constellation of Webernesque detail. Mauricio Kagel’s Transición II surveys a wider range of attacks and rhythms, with previously recorded and live taped components increasing the complexity of tonal relationships. Tudor and percussionist Caskel (who works directly inside the piano) pay sharp attention to the task at hand, briskly aligning the aleatoric elements of the score. (Alternate versions may be heard from the ensemble L’Art pour L’Art on the cpo label and Aldo Orvieto, Dmitri Fiorin, and Alvise Vidolin on Mode.)


Finally, we have what is probably the most unusual album released in the series, recordings of group improvisations by the British band AMM (which at this time included composer Cornelius Cardew) and the Rome-based group of American expatriates including Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum (and one Hungarian, Ivan Vandor), Musica Elettronica Viva. Both ensembles featured live electronics as a major part of their instrumental arsenal, and both gleefully embraced noise as a confrontational device and a link to the ritualistic musical activities that, without benefit of a predetermined compositional design, produced their truly spontaneous structures. Drones—frictional, layered, and ambient—are the source for much of their aural environment, and acoustic instruments—pianos, saxophones, even cello—are played with pseudo-electronic timbres or mixed into the fray so as to be all but unrecognizable.


AMM’s contribution is an edited excerpt from a longer, live performance (which may be heard in its entirety on “The Crypt—12 June 1968: The Complete Session” on the Matchless label). In addition, silences of various lengths were edited into the performance after the fact, interrupting the music according to some unexplained, Cagean provocation. Interestingly, these silences still contain several small tics and pops, suggesting that rather than edit in fresh, totally silent digital silence, Wergo decided to use the analog silence taken from an LP (the master tapes may have been unavailable), thus once again maintaining the integrity (albeit flawed) of the original release. MEV’s live activity, Spacecraft , was an open improvisation that they performed a number of times in their early years—other versions may be found on the Alga Marghen label, and in the valuable four-CD set “MEV 40” on New World. The AMM and MEV improvisations have less-than-optimal sound, and are difficult to listen to without flinching, but as examples of controlled chaos they project a raw, immediate catharsis unmatched by any other music of their time. Earle Brown’s decision to include them as representation of the cutting-edge of new music’s new repertoire, giving improvisation a platform equal with composition, was gutsy and prophetic. The remaining releases in this most welcome series will afford further examples of the breadth of Brown’s vision.


FANFARE: Art Lange

This new CD 'Late and Unknown' features numerous first recordings on Nancarrow's player pianos of pieces either associated with his late output or previously unknown. The program documents Nancarrow's practice of turning old rolls into new works ('For Ligeti', 'Study No. 18' second version, 'unnumbered canon 3:4:5:6') and his usage of the player piano as a tool for testing practically everything he wrote ('Three Canons for Ursula'). Included is also the unfamiliar 'Study No. 45d' surrounded by its companions 'No. 46' and 'No. 47', all former members of the most extensive work that Nancarrow ever conceived, the so-called 'Betty Freeman Suite'. Finally, current technology has made possible a properly coordinated version of the ambitious 'Study No. 48c', for two superimposed rolls, heard here for the first time - in fulfillment of a long-lasting wish from the composer - on one of his own instruments.

Classical Music

WERGO presents first recordings of chamber music works by the Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin. The eponymous series of works, 'Shifting Gravity', from 2008 connects the string quartets 'Anea Christal' with the compositions 'Sheva' and 'Sahaf'. The second part of the CD consists of the 'Winter Songs III' (2003). This WERGO production shows a different side of the artist who was born in Haifa in 1957 and who, up to now, has been appreciated mainly for her stage works, in particular for the much noticed music theatre play 'Pnima ... Ins Innere' or her adaptation of Mozart's 'Zaïde / Adama'. The instrumental works were all created after the music-theatre plays, associating notions like paralysis, adherence, proliferation. The field of tension resulting therefrom corresponds with Czernowin's own descriptions: 'Anea is the imaginary name of a 'music crystal' created from a latticework of corresponding musical gestures according to the model of an ionic crystal'. 'Winter Songs' are described by her as follows: 'The whole cycle reflects the aspect of winter which is about being pulled into the inner cave... At the same time, underneath, in the ground, the roots of life slowly grow stiff and blindly start to search for a path between the stones'.