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Search Result for Genre CLASSICAL
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HVALUR 042CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/1/2022
Manchester Collective announce the release of their second full-length album, Shades. Following their debut The Centre Is Everywhere in 2021 (HVALUR 038LP), Shades is available on CD. Featuring Edmund Finnis's first and second string quartets -- the latter commissioned and premiered by Manchester Collective -- Shades marks the next chapter of the Collective's ongoing collaboration with the British composer. Composer Edmund Finnis: "'String Quartet No. 2' (2021) begins and ends with musical ideas that were in the back of my mind in some form or other since my teens. In the process of moving house during 2020, I rediscovered some old minidiscs containing rough demo recordings I'd made nearly two decades before. At that point I didn't yet know how to realize these ideas, but listening back much later I found the seeds of what has now developed into the two outer movements of the piece. Between them come the flowing interwoven patterns of the second movement and the slow third movement, which is a lament. The piece is dedicated to my friends Rakhi Singh and Adam Szabo from Manchester Collective. It has been a joy and an inspiration for me to be able to build such a close and fruitful musical relationship with the musicians of Manchester Collective over the last few years. Something of their spirit fed into the writing of this piece. I wrote the penultimate movement of 'String Quartet No. 1' (2018) first. It is a reflection on William Byrd's setting of the fifth century hymn 'Christe, qui lux es et dies'. That ancient melody is a prayer for Light within the darkness of night. The falling and rising contours within it became integral to my work on the remaining four movements of the quartet, as did the mental image of the setting and rising of the sun. I think of these two quartets as some of the most personal and intimate pieces I have written. They are outcomes of my enduring need to communicate something that I'm incapable of fully expressing with words. I would if I could. I know that it has something to do with love." Manchester Collective's relationship with Edmund Finnis has been developing over a number of years -- Finnis's piece The Centre Is Everywhere was at the heart of the Collective's debut album and their first appearance at the BBC Proms. The musical partnership continues later in 2022 in This Savage Parade (June 16-24) featuring the world premiere of a new song cycle by Finnis set to the words of British poet Alice Oswald.
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2LP
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SLT 007LP
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$35.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/1/2022
Saltern's latest offering marks the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a close associate of Young, Terry Riley, and Dennis Johnson, and an early adopter of minimalist tendencies, creating slow, sustained music, influenced by jazz, modalism, and late romantic classical music. Jennings died tragically in his early forties, most of his work lost to a chaotic life; however, his forward-looking music quietly exerted a lasting influence on composers including Young and Harold Budd. Composed over sixty years ago, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, foreshadows a number of movements in postwar avant-garde music. Despite the title, there is no saxophone on this album. At over eighty minutes, La Monte Young's justly tuned realization of Piece for Cello and Saxophone for cello alone unifies and extrapolates Terry Jennings' dense harmonies, creating an extended field of complex sonorities in motion, all brought to life by the immaculate playing of Charles Curtis. The recording captures Curtis in a performance from 2016 reflecting more than twenty-five years of dedication to the piece. Piece for Cello and Saxophone is released physically on double-LP. Mixed by Anthony Burr, mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and cut to vinyl via direct metal mastering by Hans Jörg Maucksch at Pauler Acoustics. Pressed at RTI and printed at Stoughton. Includes a four-page insert with liner notes by Young, Curtis, Burr, and Tashi Wada, and a download of the full recording.
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KAI 15066CD
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"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds -- either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively demonstrated in his series of works entitled Three Watercolors and Psychograms."
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KAI 15091CD
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"I first met Stefano Scodanibbio in 1986. What first impressed me about him and his music was that he seemed a determined young man, equally proficient on the double bass or as composer, a rare breed in the world of music of those days. His style was a very individual one, not following traditional avant-garde trends but exploring his own very special world of string harmonics. As a composer, Stefano was an individual voice in our new music world. He was a friend and fellow musician, who is sorely missed by us and all that knew him." --Irvine Arditti
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NW 80836CD
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"Though richly varied, Michael Pisaro-Liu's (b. 1961) works are linked through their philosophical and ethical concern for the interaction between music and its sounding environment, their openness to the creative contributions of performers, and their capacity for making felt our belonging to and participation in a world of continuous and often surprising variation. Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world in variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms 'transcriptions' of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel's drawings. Radiolarians comprises fourteen compact pieces, each derived from a specific species of radiolaria and ranging in duration from one to nine minutes. Each piece features a mixture of harmonic, melodic, and noise elements corresponding roughly to the structures of each radiolaria, where pitched elements serve as tonal spines unfolding in time as well as spatially within the ensemble, and noise elements capture the twitches and undulations of the protozoic bodies contained therein. Pisaro-Liu's inventive transcriptions are brought to life in this sensitively performed and masterfully recorded actualization by the Muzzix ensemble, whose balance of technological and acoustic elements reincarnate the fragile balance of the crystalline and amoebic in audible form. Across a spacious fifty-three minute performance, the radiolarians appear more or less serially as in Haeckel's illustrations, providing the listener opportunity to experience in musical time the heterochronic reverberations and anticipations of recurring organizing forces, such as the stringing together of notes in languid melodies or the surge and retreat of waves. The ensemble's heterogeneity and seamless blending of technological and traditional elements recapitulate anew the sense of enmeshed temporalities and a cross-cutting of the natural, cultural, and mechanical in Haeckel's monographs."
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GLR 006LP
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The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin's Westend on February 2, 2019. Live im Haus des Rundfunks documents the first half of this evening, in which the individual composer-pianists introduced themselves to the audience in solos, duos and trios. This carefully choreographed set served as an electrifying prelude to the grand finale, the 20-minute collective mantra of Steve Reich's 1973 composition Six Pianos, a studio recording of which has already been released on the 2016 record Steve Reich and Terry Riley's Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1 (FILM 002CD/LP).
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IF 1061CD
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A cosmic journey into the beating heart of the orchestra: the string quartet. The innovative composer Labelle covers themes such as language, culture, and heritage on his new record, Eclat. Sparked by a moment of revelation during the rehearsal of his previous album, the critically acclaimed Orchestre Univers (2019), Eclat is a record about the unspoken, almost telepathic language between musicians playing together onstage, a metaphysical element of sound that can elevate music into the spiritual. Even the electronic parts on the record were recorded live with the string quartet, and acted as a means of conduction on stage, thus making Labelle a part of the musical conversation. The result is a transcendental record that eschews traditional rules of composition and recording, and pushes the boundaries of what classical music can be. With strong influences of his home -- La Reunion -- and its musical culture of Maloya, Eclat is a unique and beautiful journey into unknown territory.
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IF 1070CD
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French pianist Vanessa Wagner continues her exploration of the minimalist repertoire by introducing her audience to pieces, many rare or unpublished, by acclaimed composers, young pianists, and genre-bending personalities from the ambient and electronic scenes. In France or even Europe, Vanessa Wagner is practically the only "classical" pianist to tackle this contemporary and timeless repertoire. Study of The Invisible features interpretations of pieces by a spectrum of composers that includes Suzanne Ciani, Harold Budd, David Lang, Bryce Dessner, and Phillip Glass. Described by Le Monde as "the most delightfully singular pianist of her generation," and by Libération as "one of the most curious and captivating pianists on the French scene," Vanessa Wagner is able to balance parallel careers. As well as performing a classic solo, chamber and concert repertoire on stages all over the world, through her output on InFiné she is continuously exploring paths that are equally personal, but perhaps more intimate. Study of the Invisible sees her breaking new ground in a musical tradition, in a way that no other "classical" pianist in France and Europe currently does. Often described as "minimalist", it's a musical tradition that covers a multitude of singular styles and musical personalities and that spans generations. Study of the Invisible seeks out the mysterious world that lives behind the score, the imperceptible links that unite these silences and harmonies, but also the inner resources that this music can bring to light. With this record and this journey, whose apparent melancholy ultimately proves to be powerfully comforting, Vanessa Wagner continues to give a new scale to a music which proves to be above all radiant and luminous. Also features compositions by Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Moondog, Timo Andres, Peter Garland, Nico Muhly, Ezio Bosso, and Melaine Dalibert.
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2LP
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IF 1070LP
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Double LP version. Includes three bonus tracks. French pianist Vanessa Wagner continues her exploration of the minimalist repertoire by introducing her audience to pieces, many rare or unpublished, by acclaimed composers, young pianists, and genre-bending personalities from the ambient and electronic scenes. In France or even Europe, Vanessa Wagner is practically the only "classical" pianist to tackle this contemporary and timeless repertoire. Study of The Invisible features interpretations of pieces by a spectrum of composers that includes Suzanne Ciani, Harold Budd, David Lang, Bryce Dessner, and Phillip Glass. Described by Le Monde as "the most delightfully singular pianist of her generation," and by Libération as "one of the most curious and captivating pianists on the French scene," Vanessa Wagner is able to balance parallel careers. As well as performing a classic solo, chamber and concert repertoire on stages all over the world, through her output on InFiné she is continuously exploring paths that are equally personal, but perhaps more intimate. Study of the Invisible sees her breaking new ground in a musical tradition, in a way that no other "classical" pianist in France and Europe currently does. Often described as "minimalist", it's a musical tradition that covers a multitude of singular styles and musical personalities and that spans generations. Study of the Invisible seeks out the mysterious world that lives behind the score, the imperceptible links that unite these silences and harmonies, but also the inner resources that this music can bring to light. With this record and this journey, whose apparent melancholy ultimately proves to be powerfully comforting, Vanessa Wagner continues to give a new scale to a music which proves to be above all radiant and luminous. Also features compositions by Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Moondog, Timo Andres, Peter Garland, Nico Muhly, Ezio Bosso, and Melaine Dalibert. Double-LP version includes three bonus tracks featuring compositions by Melaine Dalibert, Sylvain Chauveau, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
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NW 80826CD
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"Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultra-modernism, but her activities as a composer and pianist in 1930s New York City placed her within the orbits of many important artists. Her mentors, friends, and collaborators included Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Otto and Ethel Luening, Marion Bauer, Dane Rudhyar, Percy Grainger, and choreographer Doris Humphrey. At last, in the 21st century, Beyer's name is now invoked alongside these others, as the significance of her music is becoming more widely recognized. Although her works for percussion ensemble, piano, and strings have garnered the most attention, Beyer composed a substantial amount of music for woodwinds. Thirteen solo and chamber works, all written between 1932 and 1943, represent an exceptional contribution to the wind repertoire. Only five pieces involving clarinet and flute have previously been recorded. This album brings to light the rest of Beyer's known chamber music for winds, allowing for a more complete assessment of her achievements. Beyer wrote to Cowell in 1940, 'I am not a set piece of so many molecules. I am an ever changing something.' Nothing truer could be said of Beyer's woodwind music, which reveals a composer in constant search of new approaches and instrumental colors. In little more than a decade of intense creativity, she produced inventive pieces in an ever-unfolding ultra-modernist style. These works, now accessible for performance and study, confirm Johanna Beyer's importance in the canon of 20th-century wind chamber music."
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LP
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ND 011LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/15/2022
"The stakes are high; if I mess up the last bar, the whole recording is ruined." As Dutch pianist Nicolas van Poucke acknowledges, there is an electricity in the room whenever the lathe is on. Direct-to-disc recording generates tension and release unlike other methods, not least in the final moments of a 20-minute solo piano recital. Described as "the young freethinker" of his generation, van Poucke relished the challenge. Having spent day one setting up to record works by Frédéric Chopin, van Poucke changed tack on day two to perform two Beethoven piano sonatas -- "Sonata No. 12 Opus 26 in A flat major", and "Sonata No. 23 Opus 57 in F minor", also known as the "Appassionata". For many the latter is one of Beethoven's most important and challenging works. Recorded in a single continuous take, van Poucke's recital bristles with energy, control and improvisatory flair. The nature of the recording also sets it apart. Classical pianists have long negotiated the line between technical precision and emotional intent. Outside the rigors of the concert hall, live recordings of classical works are a rarity, and contemporary studio recordings tend towards the meticulously edited. The detail afforded by hi-fi digital clarity is often preferred to the warmth and feel of an analog process. This was not always the case. Drawing on his love for the playing of Cortot, Horowitz, and Fischer during the so-called "golden age" of pianists in the early-mid 20th century who would have likely recorded direct-to-disc before the advent of tape, van Poucke was inspired to follow in their footsteps. "When playing music, one goes from one place to another," he describes. "In a performance, everything that happens in the moment affects what will happen in the next bar or chord. A different nuance, shading, sound quality, inflection might put something that happened in a different light." The immediacy of the recording is striking, the resonant quality of the open Steinway grand delivering a sound as close to live as possible. Nicolas agrees: "In the end, it was a super intense, risky, highly-strung, but a beautiful and joyful experience." For fans of great jazz soloists like Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans as much as for classical aficionados, van Poucke's recordings make the best of the process in capturing a sense of timelessness in the music. Tip-on sleeve; 180 gram vinyl.
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CD
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NMN 019CD
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$19.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/1/2022
2022 repress. On tape from the Judson days. Remember? When you made these things at home, on the best equipment you or your other poor friends could find? Electronic music from the 1960s. And you had that Japanese tape recorder with built-in mike; indeed, that was the only piece of furniture on your tatami floor on the Lower East Side that summer of 1961. This compact disc presents tape music recorded between 1962 and 1963 for the friends meeting once a week in a loft in NYC. The first track, "Lucinda Pastime", was the soundtrack for a dance piece by Lucinda Childs: "the tape was made in the kitchen sink, with primitive equipment and all the different kinds of plates and bowls in the house. The enjoyment of listening to this musique liquid at night, in bed, and always finding it too short." "Memories: Performances": "Ah yes... yes! The principle of this tape is the recombining of recorded performances from the past, my past, this time. Because the idea, and practice, of collage was really around in that time." "From Thais", was made on request of Yvorine Rainer, "collaging mostly extracts from Massenet opera, mix after mix to get thrown around fragments of the opening until the thin, otherworldly quality of the ending." "Oracle, a Canata on Images of War", was commissioned by the Living Theatre: "All sounds in violent counterpoint, made by me at home... playing with real noises, with a deliberately pulverized reality made of over-recorded close-miked crashes which even blew the machine's circuitry. Mixed into the 'Darkest White Noise' ever made." "Flares" used dancers and musicians and slides and lights in a total-space multimedia; this is the only piece on this compact disc which uses purely generated tape sounds. "Circus Tape" was for "a whole evening of inspired crazy-fun, from burlesque to creaking doors." All previously unreleased works presented in a digipack CD with 16-page booklet.
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MOVCL 065COL-LP
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"Isao Tomita, also known as Tomita, was a Japanese composer, regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music and space music, and as one of the most famous producers of analog synthesizer arrangements. Many of his albums are electronic versions and adaptations of famous classical music pieces. In 1974 Tomita released his second studio album, Snowflakes Are Dancing. The album consisted entirely of Tomita's arrangements of Claude Debussy's 'tone paintings', performed on a Moog synthesizer and a Mellotron. The track 'Clair De Lune' was used at the 2020 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in Tokyo. The album became a worldwide success and was responsible for popularizing several aspects of synthesizer programming. In addition, it entered the US Top 50 charts, became NARM's best-selling classical album of 1975 and was nominated for four Grammy Awards, including Best Classical Album. Snowflakes Are Dancing is available as a limited edition of 1500 individually numbered copies on crystal clear & white marbled vinyl."
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MOVCL 064LP
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"Cantique features the music of iconic Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. In celebration of Pärt's 75th birthday, Estonian-born and American-raised conductor Kristian Järvi leads the Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin and the RIAS Kammerchor in the performance of Cantique. The album includes Pärt's 'Symphony No. 3' and the world premiere recordings of the orchestral and choral version of his 'Stabat mater' (1985/2008) and 'Cantique des degrès' (1999/2002) for choir and orchestra. Cantique represents the culmination of a lifelong friendship between Järvi and Pärt. The album was produced by Florian Schmidt and recorded at Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin in February 2010. The orchestra -- Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin -- is one with which Kristjan Järvi has collaborated for more than a decade, and hails from Berlin, Pärt's home for many years outside of Estonia. Cantique is available on vinyl for the first time and contains an insert."
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2CD
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NW 80835CD
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"music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein's experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók's 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók's series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such sequence. The compositions do not build toward a particular way of playing or specific kind of technical virtuosity. Even so, Goldstein envisions these pieces to be used as both teaching material for improvisation as well as concert pieces. Each of the eleven pieces defines a narrow set of parameters -- musical, physical, conceptual, etc. -- to explore the sounding possibilities of stringed instruments. Goldstein uses the term structured improvisation composition to describe this kind of piece. He explains that concept as 'improvisation as a process of discovery enacted within the structures of the particular performance activities specified for each piece.' In other words, the musicians are not free to play anything at all, but they are free to explore everything within the constraints laid out in the score. Goldstein's aim is not for the musicians to produce the same music each time, nor to try and play a piece the way he would do it. Rather the philosophy is centered on the process of 'each individual unfolding, the breath expanding in gestures of becoming sound.' Goldstein relishes the possibilities inherent to improvisation: 'Anything can happen starting from nothing ? so that music is a process of discovery filled with surprises.' All of the musicians on this recording are part of the Montréal improvisation scene and there is a deep mutual trust between composer and performers developed over many years. A keen ear will recognize both the unique constraints of each piece's structure and the subtle, individualized ways the different musicians improvise the material."
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NW 80834CD
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"Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke's music does not use just intonation, it projects that 'corporeal' quality that this predecessor valued as essential. The pieces on this disc make for intersecting pairings. There are two works for a pianist who vocalizes and produces sound beyond the keyboard (Bringing Roses With Her Words [2009] and There Is a Field [2008]). There are two works that are portraits of individuals. There are two ensemble pieces that are idiosyncratically theatrical (For Pte Tokahewin Ska [2015] and The Redness of Blood [1994?95]). Listening to them in sequence, they begin to feel like a multi-movement work about life that culminates in The Redness of Blood, the longest and most substantial piece of the program. On a first hearing, for some more accustomed to the complexities of modernist practice, Kitzke's music may sound somewhat simple. Conversely, those more used to the open spaces of minimalism, or the grand gestures of neoromanticism, may find the music too mutable as it morphs, quicksilver-like, through an invigorating stream of consciousness. The fact that this music does not fall easily into any '-ism' is a tribute to its individuality, and its strength. Ultimately, the music has the quality of a crazy kaleidoscope, tumbling from one moment to another, the sonic palette constantly refreshed."
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SR 525CD
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Sarah Defrise dedicates her first new music album to the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. The disc features exclusively a capella pieces which were written for Cathy by some of the most prominent composers of her time. Berio's Sequenza III, Cage's Aria and Cathy's own Stripsody have become new music "hits", but For Cathy also presents lesser-known repertoire such as Henri Pousseur's Phonème pour Cathy, Bussoti's fragment from Passion selon Sade and Entretien, a piece for electronic tape composed by Sarah Defrise as a tribute to Berberian. Sarah took an active part in the editing process of the disk in order to create a coherent sound object, displaying the endless possibilities of the human voice. Includes 24-page booklet.
Cathy Berberian (July 4, 1925 - March 6, 1983): American mezzo-soprano and composer based in Italy. She worked closely with many contemporary avant-garde music composers, including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Sylvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and Igor Stravinsky. As a recital curator, she presented several vocal genres in a classical context, including arrangements of songs by The Beatles as well as folk songs from several countries and cultures. As a composer, she wrote Stripsody (1966), in which she exploits her vocal technique using comic book sounds (onomatopoeia), and Morsicat(h)y (1969), a composition for the keyboard (with the right hand only) based on Morse Code.
Sarah Defrise: Belgian soprano Sarah Defrise has quickly established herself as one of the most fascinating young vocal artists enjoying close working relationships with a wide range of contemporary composers. A polymorphic artist, she is at ease in Lied, opera as well as contemporary performances including solo stand-up shows. She featured as a soloist on stages such as the Berlin Staatsoper, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, MÜPA in Budapest, NOF in Fribourg, the Opéra royal de Wallonie in Liège and la Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels. Composers Peter Eötvös and Jean-Luc Fafchamps have conceived roles specifically for her.
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4CD BOX
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TUM 1004CD
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"The Chicago Symphonies is a magnificent four-CD boxed set by Wadada Leo Smith's Great Lakes Quartet. Each disc includes one of the four symphonies composed by Wadada Leo Smith for this quartet. The first three symphonies, 'Gold Symphony,' 'Diamond Symphony' and 'Pearl Symphony,' are performed by Wadada Leo Smith with saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadill, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Jack DeJohnette whereas the fourth, 'Sapphire Symphony - The Presidents and Their Visions of America,' features Smith with saxophonist Jonathon Haffner, Lindberg and DeJohnette. The idea of a symphony composed for a quartet was first presented by Don Cherry on his classic recording Symphony For Improvisers in 1966 but Wadada Leo Smith has brought this idea to the present day and broadened it to include social and political into the creative space. The Chicago Symphonies celebrate the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the historical development of creative music in Chicago starting with Louis Armstrong and through Sun Ra onto the AACM as well as, in the case of 'Sapphire Symphony,' Abraham Lincoln and Baraka Hussein Obama."
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LCD 5004CD
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Robert Ashley's eL/Aficionado is a group of scenes from the life of an "agent". The scenes are a kind of "debriefing" to a jury of Interrogators, in which the Interrogators (chorus) challenge the Agent (soloist) in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to our fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. The opera was performed many times between 1987 and 1993, and Lovely Music released a recording of the opera in 1994 (LCD 1004CD). This new studio recording features the cast of the 2021 production (October 21-23 at Roulette, Brooklyn), with mezzo soprano, Kayleigh Butcher, taking over the role formerly inhabited by baritone Thomas Buckner. Recorded at Robert Ashley's studio in July 2021. Orchestration by Robert Ashley and Tom Hamilton. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Produced by Tom Hamilton and Mimi Johnson. Personnel/Credits: Music and Libretto by Robert Ashley; Kayleigh Butcher - The Agent; Brian McCorkle - Interrogator No. 1; Bonnie Lander - Interrogator No. 2; Paul Pinto - Interrogator No. 3.
"As labyrinthine as a Robbe-Grillet novel, as pithy as a Pinter play, eL/Aficionado comprises a series of debriefing sessions between a secret agent and his three interrogators. For 70 minutes the work sustains an atmosphere of uneasy calm brilliantly: misty, microtonal electronics provide a sometimes barely audible backdrop to the vocal parts. But don't confuse this with ambient; Ashley's music requires your full attention to appreciate the subtle timbres of his unique sound world... This is another riveting work by one of the world's leading composers of experimental opera." --Chris Blackford, The Wire (1995)
"Enigmatic, cryptic, wonderfully mysterious, eL/ Aficionado has a story line and narrative structure, as do Ashley's previous operas. Though the characters hail from a parallel universe, familiar and alien. The music is austere, simple, even minimalistic, yet utterly compelling. The New York Times was dead-on in proclaiming Ashley 'opera's James Joyce.'" --Dean Suzuki, Wired, 1995
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NW 80830CD
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"Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968-71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers -- timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials -- were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musicians themselves. Charles Ives began to develop a different conception with (among other works) his String Quartet No. 2 (1913). It portrays four individuals who come together to have a discussion that turns into an argument (presumably over politics) and then its transcendental resolution in the mountains. With Ives and then others from the American Experimental Tradition (including John Cage), chamber music starts to become a place where differences are unleashed. Given his exploration of the ontology of people making music together, the string quartet, laden as it is with the tradition of unity, might not at first seem to be an obvious fit to Wolff's sensibilities. But his quartet music stems as much from Ives and Cage as from the European art music tradition. The four characters of Ives become four people playing music. In one piece he simply calls them '2 violinists, violist and cellist.' Sometimes they are asked to coordinate like a traditional quartet. But at other times (often in the same piece), they are pushed to the point of dissolution. Here we find a music that allows for the spontaneous expression of four musicians who are bound together by something more than the rule of the bar line. These are all world-premiere recordings."
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R 089CD
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Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades. CD version includes eight-page insert; edition of 250.
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R 089LP
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LP version. Includes double-sided insert; edition of 500. Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades.
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KAI 18004CD
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"Born in Rome in 1983, Clara Iannotta is particularly interested in music as an existential, physical experience - music should be seen as well as heard. This is one of the reasons why she sometimes prefers to talk about the choreography of the sound rather than about orchestration. Clara Iannotta's compositions do not tell a story, but rather develop a physiognomy. They nurture sensory spaces in which the ear, figuratively speaking, can wander and contemplate. Spaces that open up beneath a surface like the deep sea beneath the surface of the ocean. Spaces that contain something hidden that indirectly, as a reflex, reaches to the outside world."
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DTRA 037LP
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Dirter launch a new subsidiary imprint, dedicated to releasing historical musical documents, DTR Archive Recordings. The first release is Igor Stravinsky conducting his masterpiece The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps). Yes, it can be done -- wiping off the dust and polishing the sound for a new shine, whilst maintaining the integrity of the original recording. Painstaking steps were made to track the best possible audio down and get as close to the original as possible. Forget the dreadful, over-compressed CDs that we are all used to. Close your eyes and listen to this and you could be back, almost 100 years ago...
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3LP BOX
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MOVCL 056LP
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"Akhnaten is the third in the composer Philip Glass' trilogy of operas about men who changed the world in which they lived through the power of their ideas. Akhnaten's subject is religion. Its title was derived from the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten, who was the first monotheist in recorded story. His substitution of a one-god religion for the multi-god worship when he came to power ultimately resulted in his exclusion from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs, and his legacy became all but lost to history until the late 19th century. The opera describes the rise, reign, and fall of Akhnaten in a series of tableaus. 180 gram vinyl. Deluxe lift-off box set. Includes 16-page libretto booklet. The third in Glass' thematically related Portrait trilogy, along with Einstein On The Beach and Satyagraha."
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