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Search Result for Genre CLASSICAL
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PE 023LP
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$25.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 3/26/2021
On Interior, Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard excavates intricate resonances at the periphery of our attention. Across four movements, Reinhard follows a process whereby he layers and loops fragments of piano improvisations. Yet, Interior complicates its own systematicity by using samples that are not only recognizable as piano notes, but as live recordings of a piano being played. Reinhard composes from traces both analog and digital: you can hear static hiss and clicks, but also the soft trace of a finger pressing a key or the shuffle of a body shifting position. Interior asks you to think about where you are, and how close you are willing to look, feel, and listen. Over the course of the four movements sounds return, familiar but transformed. What sounds like repetition is something more like accumulation, a thickening of space. Whether regarded at intimate range or from a distance, these compositions reveal more the longer we linger in the presence of each. Artwork photography by Jeff Ross. Edition of 200.
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KAI 15086CD
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$18.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/15/2021
"Thirty years after Nono's death, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura has not lost anything of its fascination. In this new recording, violinist Marco Fusi and composer Pierluigi Billone offer a new reading of Nono's manuscript, revealing their personal view on what has become a contemporary classic in a carefully designed spatial sound concept with two rings of speakers. For buyers of the CD, a free download of the binaural version is included."
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SR 501CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/11/2020
"The end sounds like the angels opening up heaven... Should we say euphoria?" This is Julius Eastman himself, speaking about Femenine, a piece that remains as a big and slow breathing, with something informal driving the listener to a near-hypnosis state. J.E. (1940-1990): There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful. And it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy. Performed by ensemble 0: Variable geometry group created in 2004. It interprets the compositions of its members and pieces by other composers. The group works with many regular and invited collaborators, being able to change, increase or reduce its lineup at will according to each project. Ensemble 0 has now become one of the most significant ensembles of a new sound vision. For this piece, ensemble 0, including this time Melaine Dalibert (piano), Sophie Bernado (bassoon), Cyprien Busolini (viola), Jozef Dumoulin (Fender Rhodes, synthesizer), Céline Flamen (cello) Stéphane Garin (percussion, artistic co-direction), Ellen Giacone (voice), Jean-Brice Godet (bass clarinet), Amélie Grould (vibraphone), Alexandre Herer (electronics), Tomoko Katsura (violin), Julien Pontvianne (saxophones, orchestration, artistic co-direction), and Christian Pruvost (trumpet).
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NEOS 22001CD
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Hans Maier builds bridges from the 17th century to the present. He plays music by Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Jakob Froberger, and Domenico Zipoli on the accordion, a still young instrument; he uses a historical tuning system, the meantone tuning. This not only lets the music of the early Baroque shine in its own colors: the composer Nikolaus Brass was also inspired by the juxtaposition of perfectly pure and very tense harmonies. He dealt extensively with the meantone tempered accordion and has written several works for the instrument played by Hans Maier. Two of them -- "Harmonies" and "Figuren der Sehnsucht" -- are part of the program of this CD, which shows Hans Maier as a stylistically versatile and adaptable interpreter. All compositions by: Girolamo Frescobaldi, Nikolaus Brass, Johann Jakob Froberger, and Domenico Zipoli.
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NEOS 12016CD
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For this CD, now the seventh release at NEOS, René Wohlhauser has put together a fine selection of chamber works. The vocal works contained therein reveal a great deal about the personality of the Swiss composer, especially about his very own way of dealing with language: here -- as in the title composition ReBruAla -- he consistently set his own poems to music. The main work in the program is The Great Vocal Trilogy "Three Songs", a cycle of three songs with different instrumentation, which are less connected in terms of content than by a concentrated aesthetic, each playing with a creative thought. Performers: Ensemble Polysono; René Wohlhauser (bariton, clavier); Elia Seiffert (violine); art ensemble berlin; Duo Simolka-Wohlhauser.
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NEOS 12008CD
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Tobias Eduard Schick is a young musician with an enormous aesthetic spectrum. This can be seen in his biography: studying composition with such diverse personalities as Mark Andre, Ernst Helmuth Flammer, and Manos Tsangaris was followed by training in electronic music. This portrait CD deals with his chamber music oeuvre from duo to ensemble -- and a solo work, "Klangzeichnung" for double bass, in which the composer himself appears as an interpreter. Performers: Tobias Eduard Schick (double bass), Diego Ramos (violin), Olivia Steimel (accordion), Michiko Saiki (piano), trio sostenuto, Duo Steimel-Mücksch, El Perro Andaluz with Lennart Dohms (conductor).
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NEOS 12011CD
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The flute has a special place in Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf's oeuvre. What attracts him is its particular virtuosity, agility and ease in crossing large sonic spaces. He was still a student when he composed the alto flute solo "coincidentia oppositorum" (1986) and the flute solo "succolarity" (1989). From the "Angelus Novus" cycle, "La terreur d'ange nouveau" (1997-99) turned out to be a significant, substantial flute work. Then Shanna Pranaitis began performing Mahnkopf's flute music. This led to a cooperation that spawned the three most recent pieces: the solo for piccolo "Kurtág-Cantus II" (2013), the duo "Finite Jest" (2014) with the soprano Frauke Aulbert, and the solo for bass flute "atsiminimas" (2016). Together, these six pieces cover the entire flute family.
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NEOS 12012CD
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The electro-acoustic works by Erhard Grosskopf offer a grand insight into the pioneering days of the large electronics studios. Grosskopf was able to experiment with state-of-the-art analog technology at the Instituut voor Sonologie at the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht; this is how "Dialectics" was created amongst others for the EXPO'70 in Osaka. In addition to the purely electronic version as it was heard in the German pavilion at the time, a performance with three live instrumentalists and tape is documented here: Eberhard Blum (flute); Hans Deinzer (clarinet); Vinko Globokar (trombone); Erhard Grosskopf (sound control). "Prozess der Veränderung" (Process of Change) and "Night Tracks" also originated in Utrecht in the early 1970s, where Grosskopf was a research assistant for a few months in order to be able to realize the compositions. The analog tapes were digitized for this publication by the Institute of Sonology, which is now based in The Hague. Performers: Eberhard Blum (flute); Hans Deinzer (clarinet); Vinko Globokar (trombone); Claude Lelong (viola); Erhard Grosskopf (sound control).
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NEOS 11823CD
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Nicolaus A. Huber speaks of a "luxurious world of percussion", given the variety of instruments and their technical capabilities. Instead of drawing on these resources lavishly, he makes a sparing selection for each piece, which in turn has important consequences for the work's sound, character, morphology, and form. With a reduced instrumentation, Huber aims for maximum differentiation of sounds, rhythms, and performance techniques. This CD contains world premiere recordings of his younger percussion works, written between 2007 and 2012. Johannes Fischer is celebrated as a "magician among percussionists" by the press and touches the audience with his effortless, sensitive and energetic music making. In addition to a solo performance career, Fischer is an active composer, improviser, teacher and conductor. In 2009 he was appointed Professor at the Lübeck University of Music. Performers: Domenico Melchiorre (percussion), Johannes Fischer (percussion), Dirk Rothbrust (percussion), eardrum percussion duo (Johannes Fischer and Domenico Melchiorre), Andreas Mildner (harp).
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NEOS 12021CD
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In a powerful surge in creativity, Paul Hindemith wrote three piano sonatas in succession in 1936 -- the year that was to end with a complete ban on performance by the Nazi regime. The premieres of the sonatas were canceled, but Hindemith nevertheless wrote music history with them. The sonatas differ as far as possible in terms of complexity and technical challenges, so the extremely demanding first is followed by a short, light-footed second one. Overall, they paint a differentiated picture of the composer, which Andreas Skouras ingeniously completes by starting with the "Suite for Piano from 1922". The Greek-German pianist and harpsichordist Andreas Skouras, born in 1972 in Thessaloniki (Greece), studied piano with Prof. Franz Massinger and harpsichord with Prof. Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Prof. Ketil Haugsand at the University of Music and Theater in Munich. He was u. a. awarded the City of Munich Music Scholarship and the Bavarian Art Award.
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2CD
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NEOS 12018-19CD
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Christian Ofenbauer's composition Zerstörung des Zimmers/der Zeit (Destruction of the Room/of Time) was created in 1999 as a sound installation for the Schauspielhaus Graz (6 scores: string quartet, zither, contra guitar, 2 violins, piano and amplifier system). The string quartet and especially the piano part have found their way into the concert hall. Taking up essential elements of his own compositions and placing them in a new context is one of the peculiarities of the Austrian composer. This is how the concert version for string quartet and piano was finally created in 2000, in which the original idea of the sound installation was taken up in a completely new way: the string quartet and piano form two temporal levels, metrically independent of each other, but together they are set to a duration of exactly 48 minutes. Both versions of composition Zerstörung des Zimmers/der Zeit, the piano quintet and the piano version from the installation, now appear in direct juxtaposition on this double-CD, recorded ingeniously by Quatuor Diotima and Johannes Marian.
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NW 80824CD
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"In modern experimental music, and especially among a number of musician-composers emerging in America during the Sixties, a fixation on process and awareness became a structural hallmark, exploring the gradual change of sonic materials, built environments, and the human body. Though much maligned as a term by its practitioners, figures like Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley were among these 'minimal' composers; askew of them were electroacoustic explorers like Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. In recent years, composer Sarah Hennies (b. 1979) is forging new paths of reduction and expansion. Spectral Malsconcities (2018) consists of six linked and varied sections; it is constructed in a way that ensures the musicians are never completely in sync, and in fact they generate sounds that continually destabilize the standard ensemble goal of togetherness. As Hennies put it recently, 'this piece is an example of performers elevating something beyond what I thought it could be. I wrote a piece that I thought would intentionally create mistakes. You ask somebody to repeat a very different polyrhythmic contrapuntal page of music 25 times, and it is going to fall apart at some point and then come back together. However, the musicians are so good that they played it exactly as it was written, which is better than what I thought it would have been if they were messing up...' Taking its cue from a two or three player-one vibraphone piece called Settle, which was composed by Hennies in 2012, Unsettle (2017) is a spare and summarily weighty composition that finds space monolithic and driving. The score is economic, taking all of two pages to spin out 33 minutes of music. It begins with una corda fluttering, the passing of time held in single E notes bent at the edges and limned by vibraphone haze, gradually augmented by rumbling clusters and brassy, clanging bells. The inflection and increase in density among otherwise apposite events create an extremely intense landscape of tension without release, though powerful as well -- the closing minutes of pedal movement, muted piano strings, and bell clatter (à la Iannis Xenakis' Bohor I) lead into prepared twang and supple metallic accents. Ditto the shock of vibraphone and muted clamor at minute twenty, carrying enough distorted overtones to defuse one's skull. Sublime and utterly physical, explosive and statuesque, Spectral Malsconcities and Unsettle are complementary works that display another rich stage of Sarah Hennies' practice. Her world of creativity is welcoming, but like all art of significance, you have to do the work in order to share in the experience. At the end, and wherever that end is, the rewards will be great."
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LCD 5003CD
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This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences is one of the opera tetralogy that Ashley wrote in the early 1990s, following Perfect Lives (LCD 4917CD/LDVD 4917DVD) and Atalanta (Act of God) (LCD 3301CD, LCD 3303CD). He would give it the overall title (also the name of one of the component operas) Now Eleanor's Idea. These four operas would follow the stories of some of the characters who populated Perfect Lives a decade earlier. We met Don last year when Lovely Music released a CD of a new Ashley "band" performing Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (LCD 5002CD) at the Kitchen, New York. In Foreign Experiences "Don gets a job at a small college in the southwest. Once there, against all expectations, everything goes wrong. He loses his family and friends, he loses his car, he fears that he will lose his mind." He comes to believe that he has been given a mission, to learn about premonitions and he embarks on a journey to find the wise man who will give him priceless information. Linda thinks he plan is foolish; Don thinks he has no choice. But is the opera really "about" Don and Linda? "Opera likes to simplify and enlarge its characters to make them fit grand themes. Mr. Ashley goes in the opposite direction and arrives at the cosmos just as easily. Mundane chitchat about good eating habits or car repair turns to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, not to mention psychiatry, before we know it." -- Bernard Holland, The New York Times (November 21, 1994) The live recording was made by Tom Hamilton and Cas Boumans, and this release has been edited mixed by Tom Hamilton. A slipcase includes a jewel case with a four-page folder, and a 96-page booklet of the full libretto.
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NW 80823CD
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"We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into the interstices of what does not sound by means of what does sound. We will use harmony to probe one world, and when that world is known, move from it to another and another beyond that. It is with this state of mind that I listen to the music by Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985). It reawakens in me a primal fascination with the simultaneity of sound. Because of the inventiveness of its compositional strategies, the music inspires a sense of open possibility, of something yet to come, of something yet not quite with us. Dykstra has a creative impulse, shared with many experimental composers, of not wanting to repeat in one piece what he has done in another. Each work seems to begin with a moment in an empty space. When I listen carefully before each piece on this disc starts, I have a keen sense of that space. It must contain an echo of the moment just before Dykstra started writing the piece: that moment when anything can happen." --Michael Pisaro (from liner notes)
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2CD
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KAI 15030CD
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"In the project Scelsi Revisited Scelsi's legendary tape material is for the first time reflected in the medium of art: seven composers (Ragnhild Berståd, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail, Michael Pelzel, Michel Roth, Nicola Sani) were commissioned by Klangforum Wien to create new works from Scelsi's tape music. The results on this album are quite heterogeneous: they range from the meticulous analysis of the source material and its transfer into the emerging composition to free artistic commentaries. Scelsi Revisited is a conceptual extension of the historical collective working method, thereby accentuating the plural: Scelsi, c'est nous!"
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NW 80821CD
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"Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b. 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. Seven Deserts (2019), rather than operating from a fixed narrative structure with predetermined events, lays out the ground rules for a manifestation that is absolutely identical in every performance in its operations and sonic vocabulary, but with each realization completely unique in internal detail and musical interaction. Improvisation fleshes out the structure yet also embeds itself in the musical foundation to help determine the overall shape. The conductor is improvising to the same extent that the individual players are and may set forces in motion, allow them to work, and then, based on the results, initiate the next iteration. In Seven Deserts, Fields has created a work that has a sense of loss and unnamable dread coexisting with an objectivist appreciation of aesthetic beauty and balance. He shifts the focus between foreground and background, hyperactivity versus the static, saturated sound and quietude. By recording Seven Deserts in the performance hall in Cologne, both with and without an audience, Fields was able to have the best of both worlds. Listening through the set, one hears deserts in full bloom: vivacious, juicy, and ripe with the players' interactions, virtuosic solo outings, and varied sonic environments. There are elegiac clouds that suddenly are scattered with Euro-jazz disruptions. Baroque-sounding flute harmonies splinter into jazzy riffs that never settle into unisons but spiral outward. A tense groove reminiscent of Miles Davis's On the Corner period shatters into shards of noise and floating tones. We hear roiling saxophones and vibraphone kicked over the edge by electric guitar punctuations and roaring tenor sax expletives. The final movement reveals an impression of Debussy as orchestrated by Webern, which opens into fractured solo guitar vs the ensemble and then resolving into strange attractors -- pools of repeated activities without repetition and a sudden end. Fields has chosen his players wisely, an orchestra of virtuosic soloists, including members of Ensemble Musikfabrik and other new music groups from Cologne, as well as freelancers drawn both from the region and other corners of the world."
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NW 80819CD
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"The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b. 1954). These are the generations... is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol'd'ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth verse of the first book (B'rey'sheet) of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky's Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels. The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky's musical output: Some were composed in the 1980s while he was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California (Eleh Tol'd'ot, Sacco, Vanzetti); some while living in New Hampshire when he was a Professor of Music at Dartmouth College (Glockentood II, 22 Sounds-); and others are recent compositions completed in Santa Cruz, California, around the time of Polansky's retirement from the University of California, Santa Cruz (five songs for kate and vanessa, kaddish (ladder) canon). The performers on the recording are similarly of different generations. Some have known and worked with Polansky since the 1980s or earlier; others are much younger and began working with him as graduate students within the last few years. Moreover, some of these works use some form of algorithmic composition while others use more conventional approaches to composing music. In some pieces, the musicians themselves must enact some kind of procedure to generate the sounds or structures they are to play. Finally, the works presented here demonstrate Polansky's deep understanding of the history and techniques of experimental music in the United States. Within these compositions one can find compositional approaches that span styles from the ultramodernists in the early twentieth century to advanced computational algorithms not yet possible in that era. Through these works Polansky somehow manages to integrate older and newer styles of experimental composition into a cohesive voice that despite, or perhaps because of, its eclecticism and diversity is unmistakably the music of Larry Polansky."
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2CD
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D 20023CD
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It is 2020 and the world celebrates Ludwig Van Beethoven's 250th birthday the complete year over. Two CDs with Beethoven's masterworks! Ludwig van Beethoven, born in 1770 and baptized 17th December the same year in Bonn, Germany -- died 26 March 1827 in Vienna, Austria, was composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the classical and romantic eras in classical music, he remains one of the most recognized and influential musicians of this period, and is considered to be one of the greatest composers of all time.
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NEOS 11909CD
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This CD with orchestral works by Ernst Helmuth Flammer is the fifth edition with works by the composer at NEOS. The compositions presented here date from 1983-1999. They all deal with the phenomenon of time in different ways; whereby Flammer is concerned with the architectural/energetic organization of time within a composition, as well as the musical-historical point in time of their creation and thus a temporal classification in an aesthetic sense -- namely an "aesthetically rigorous approach" (Flammer). The piano concerto "Zeitzeichen - Zeitmaße" was recorded with Ortwin Stürmer and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Lothar Zagrosek. Also features: Radio-Sinfonieorchester Basel - Ulrich Backofen, conductor; Philharmonisches Orchester Freiburg - Hannu Koivula, conductor - Ortwin Stürmer, piano; BBC Symphony Orchestra - Lothar Zagrosek, conductor.
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NEOS 12001CD
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Victor Ibarra's music, by producing cuts, cracks, outbreaks, and eruptions, erodes the conditions of common listening. It is characterized by sudden changes and contrasts, but is held together by a strong energy. Víctor Ibarra is professor of composition at the University of Guanajuato in his native country Mexico. His career has taken him to numerous European centers for New Music, where he has received several awards. With this recording of the Ensemble Vertixe Sonora under Nacho de Paz there is now a monographic CD of the remarkable Mexican composer.
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NEOS 12002CD
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Cello and percussion -- "my favorite instruments!" -- is how almost all composers respond, when UmeDuo from Sweden asks them to write for them. Since the duo has been founded in 2008, numerous compositions where created for the two sisters. Seven of them found their way on this CD. Seven personalities -- seven musical languages, from spiritual meditations to icy harmonies, from rough scrapes to delicate soundscapes. A view on UmeDuo's journey so far: musically, geographically, and aesthetically. UmeDuo is Karolina Öhman (cello) and Erika Öhman (percussion). Compositions by: André Chini, Jenny Hettne, Ricardo Eizirik, Esaias Järnegard, Leilei Tian, Ivo Nilsson, and Farangis Nurulla-Khoja.
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NEOS 12005CD
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Werner Heider has left his mark on cultural life in Franconia for decades: as a composer, pianist, conductor and long-time director of the ars nova ensemble nürnberg. In January 2020, he celebrated his 90th birthday. Reason enough for a portrait of a special kind: In constant crescendo, this CD ranges from solo piano (Heider himself as the interpreter of his music) to chamber works and his large orchestral work Architektur, played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Eötvös.
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NW 80816CD
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"John J. Becker (1886-1961) is the least known of a group of composers who, by reputation, became known as 'the American Five,' analogous to the better-known 'Russian Five' or 'French Six.' Becker's cohorts consisted of Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, and Charles Ives. Ives, born 1874, was the oldest of the group and Cowell, born 1897, was the youngest, and in the 1920s and '30s they were known as the most radical and dissonant of American composers. Becker could be briefly summarized as a confluence of dissonance and Catholicism. He became known as one of the leading proponents of a style invented by musicologist/composer Charles Seeger (1886-1979), who had been one of Cowell's mentors, known as dissonant counterpoint, an idiom in which the traditional rules of counterpoint were reversed to produce maximum dissonance rather than consonance. In his own writings about Becker, Cowell emphasized his ties to Renaissance church polyphony, calling him 'a Sixteenth-Century modern.' For a promotional pamphlet Becker produced, Cowell wrote that Becker 'bases his style on the art of the great vocal polyphonists, de Lassus, Palestrina, Victoria, etc. Using their breadth and religious feeling, he has poured his own modern materials into the old polyphonic forms.' Elsewhere Becker can fall into a kind of modernist simulacrum of Classical-era style, in conventional four-part textures differentiated by the harshness of dissonant intervals between moving lines. He picked up Cowell's passion for tone clusters, often pitting black keys on the piano against white (in common with some other early moderns like Stravinsky and Ornstein), and he made a notational fetish of large sharps and flats that were intended to apply to an entire chord. In his music, he said, there was no dissonance, because 'dissonance replaced consonance as the norm.' Along with the Symphonia Brevis, the Concerto Arabesque, and a motoric percussion ensemble piece called The Abongo (which the percussion-loving Cage expressed admiration for), Becker's seven chamber works abstractly called Soundpieces have proved the most public part of his output. This is the first recording to bring them all together, and indeed the first commercial recording of several of them. That John Becker will remain the least-celebrated member of the American Five is probably inevitable. But at his best he achieves considerable eloquence in the then-new idiom of dissonant counterpoint, and a textural momentum and energy that seem all his own."
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5CD
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D 50021CD
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Five-CD set presenting 100 masterworks composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by various orchestras, choirs, and soloists from Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria -- with all the details and credits noted in the enclosed six-page leporello booklet. Johann Sebastian Bach (born March 31st (or) 21st March 1685 -- died 28th July 1750) was the German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Western art musical canon.
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NW 80807CD
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"Intercultural composition is no longer a novelty. It has become a familiar, even commonplace, phenomenon. With this recording, Shih-Hui Chen (b. 1962) breathes fresh air into this important genre. In more ways than one, her transcultural work has blurred the lines between individual cultures and represents our rich musical horizon today. Her earlier work is characterized by intense modernist sonorities, polyphonic layers, yearning angular melodies, and firm control of orchestral timbre and structure. It is the profound balance between her earlier modernist sensibility, with its rigorous control of polyphonic layers and structural design on the one hand, and her search for the inner self with materials distinctly different from Western tradition, that marks her accomplishment as a 21st-century composer. In the five works collected here, Chen broadens her reach into several branches of vernacular music -- Nanguan music and Taiwanese opera -- and the Chinese zither of traditional literati. Two use traditional Chinese instruments as soloists with a Western orchestra, one is written for both solo Chinese instrument and Chinese orchestra, and the two remaining works are scored for Western orchestra. Yet it is the source of inspiration that really sets them apart. The earliest work, Concerto for Pipa and Chamber Orchestra (2002), is abstract in conception, with prominent pipa gestures that infuse the composition with distinctive sonorities and melodic tropes. This is followed by three works, each of which uses a melodic source from traditional Chinese genres. Fantasia on the Theme of Guanglingsan for Zheng and Chinese Orchestra (2014) is based on a well-known masterwork, which is full of drama and contrast. It shares certain sonic similarities with the pipa concerto. As a pair they differ significantly from the two following works, centered around Taiwanese Nanguan music. Fantasia on the Theme of Plum Blossoms for String Orchestra (2012) uses as its basis a famous tune from the Nanguan repertoire, while A Plea to Lady Chang'e for Nanguan Pipa and Chamber Orchestra (2013) is essentially a setting of a traditional Nanguan song in the modernist sonic fabric. Finally, Silvergrass, for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (2016) represents a step further in that direction, not only tracing the sonic aspect of another indigenous music genre -- Taiwanese opera -- but also delving deeply into the words, sensibility, and poetic expression of one of the island's literary legends, author Huang Chunming, who is known for his plain, richly colloquial voice."
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