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Satie-Cage - Cabaret - per nulla (2007)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 09 Apr 2009 05:59:29 | Comments : 5
Satie-Cage

Cabaret - per nulla - Satie-Cage (2007)
Sabina Meyer, voice, things - Marco Dalpane, piano
Avant-Garde | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 170 MB | RS.com
Label: ants | Cat. Num.: AG13 | 1 CD 53:32 | Complete Scans

“From Cage to Satie, from Satie to Cage, the musical ping-pong proposed by this CD is exciting. It was Cage that pointed to Satie as an innovative composer, who anticipated Marcel Duchamp, and in so doing indicated an ideal bond between Satie and himself. It's not rare, therefore, that concert programs or recordings unite the two, what is rare is the ease and frequency heard here, of the exchange between them. A play list of a high order, but there is more. The premise for this recording enters the heart of a conflict of ideas in Contemporary music. Cage, pro-Satie, was considered revolutionary. Pierre Boulez, who at first was in good relation with Cage, then in open conflict, considered Satie a banal neoclassicist and Cage himself, like Satie, nothing other than a dilettante, a clown that perpetually repeats himself and an eternal adolescent.
Mario Gamba from the attached booklet
”
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Posted by :: Alex | Date :: Aug 20, 2008 19:05:00 | [ 34 comments ]


Charles Ives - Sonatas for Violin and Piano (1999-2006)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 04 Apr 2009 08:39:00 | Comments : 8
Ives-Sonatas

Charles Ives - Sonatas for Violin and Piano (1999-2006)
H.Schneeberger, violin - D. Cholette, piano
Label: ECM New Series | Cat. Num.: ECM 1605 | CD 75:56
H.Hulst, violin - G. Bouwhuis, piano
Label: BVHaast | Cat. Num.: CD 13(1405 | 2 CD 57:36 + 44:45
Modern | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 3CD 303+406MB | RS.com | Booklets

“Ives tried repeatedly to find a violinist with whom he could play his sonatas, but all such attempts ended in a fiasco. Ives remarked sarcastically about a rehearsal of the Violin Sonata #1 with a German violinist: "The 'Professor' came in and, after a lot of big talk, started to play the first movement of the First Sonata. He didn't even get through the first page. He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and got mad. He said 'This cannot be played. It is awful. It is not music, it makes no sense.' He couldn't get it even after I'd played it over for him several times. I remember he came out of the little back music room with his hands over his ears, and said, 'When you get awfully indigestible food in your stomach that distresses you, you can get rid of it, but I cannot get those horrible sounds out of my ears.'"
from ECM booklet

It seems that Ives derived a lot of pleasure from composing the four violin sonatas written during his mature period of creativity. In general, he wrote most of the "prose" for the piano and most of the "poetry" for the violin. This was one way of resolving the problems that existed in the interaction between the piano and violin. He composed in a lyrical manner, making full use of the violin's natural properties. It seems he developed an entire concept for the uniting of the two instruments. All sections of all of his sonatas, except those in the third, only give tempo indication.
from BVHaast booklet
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VA - New World Jazz (1998)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 30 Mar 2009 15:47:23 | Comments : 3
NewWorldJazz

VA - New World Jazz (1998)
Michael Tilson Thomas, New World Symphony
Modern-Contemporary | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 294 MB | RS.com
Label: RCA Red Seal | Cat. Num.: 09026 68798-2 | CD 78:55 | Complete Scans

“American popular culture became an international trendsetter with the emergence of jazz at the end of World War I. Spread through the new medium of recordings, improvised jazz was America's first successful musical export and the first viable challenge to the supremacy of Europe's notation-based classical music. Its rhythmic vitality and freedom of interpretation were immediately recognizable as a contrast to traditional European music.
Many American and European classical composers have attempted to reconcile the seemingly-opposed interpretational aesthetics of jazz and the classics by incorporating jazz rhythms and timbres into their compositions. Jazz pioneers from Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus also created larger scale works with classical sensibilities. Three of the eight composers featured here were Europeans, but all three eventually emigrated to America.
Frank J. Oteri (from the attached booklet)
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Charles Ives - The Unknown Ives - 2 cd (1999-2004) reload

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 23 Mar 2009 14:29:43 | Comments : 22
Unknown Ives

Charles Ives - The Unknown Ives - 2 cd (1999-2004)
Donald Berman, piano
Avant-Garde | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 220 + 265 MB | RS.com
Label: New World Records | Cat. Num.: NWCR 811 - 80618 | 2 CD 65:31 + 73:33 | Complete Scans

“Donald Berman is a superlative pianist, but as any number of attempts by excellent players have shown, it takes more than technique to bring Ives alive. To my ears Berman's Ives most resembles the playing of Ives himself, as we hear it in the composer's private recordings. With Berman there is the same subtlety of voicing you hear in Ives's playing, the same power combined with delicacy—a surprising thing to say about Ives, but that's how he often played his own music. Berman studied with John Kirkpatrick, the composer's first great interpreter, and kept growing from those studies. Ives was a prophetic genius whose consciousness, and piano writing, stayed rooted in Romanticism. For a pianist that's a very difficult balancing act, but Berman handles it beautifully. A new generation of performers are reaching a mature and seasoned approach to Ives, and Donald Berman is a vital part of that achievement.
Jan Swafford, author of "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" (1996, W.W. Norton)
”
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Iannis Xenakis - Music for Keyboard instruments (2008) UPDATED

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 14 Mar 2009 21:44:15 | Comments : 10

Iannis Xenakis - Music for Keyboard instruments (2008)
Daniel Grossmann, MIDI programming
Avant-Garde | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 270 MB | RS.com
Label: NEOS | Cat. Num.: 10707 | CD 55:30 | Complete Scans

“This is the first recording of Xenakis' music for keyboard instruments realised by computer - unplayable by human hands!
(from the attached booklet)
”
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Iannis Xenakis - Music for Strings (mode 152 - 2005)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 10 Mar 2009 13:48:22 | Comments : 10
Xenakis-MusicString

Iannis Xenakis - Music for Strings (2005)
Ensemble Resonanz - Johannes Kalitzke, conductor
Avant-Garde | EAC Rip (ape, cue, log) | 7-zip | 250 MB | RS.com
Mode Records - mode 152 | CD 57:28 | Complete Scans

“"I like the organ — but I have a particular flair for string instruments." Anyone who has a slight acquaintance with Iannis Xenakis's music will suspect that his liking for string instruments does not derive from early childhood memories or some other sentimental origin. The technical characteristics and sonorities of string instruments are so much part of his soundworld that we may well wonder if it did not actually develop out of string sound in the first place.
- Michael Struck-Schloen (from the attached booklet)
”
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Pauline Oliveros: Deep Listening (1989)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 05 Mar 2009 09:55:15 | Comments : 4
Oliveros_Deep

Pauline Oliveros: Deep Listening (1989)
Recorded in the bottom of a cistern that once held two million gallons of water
Avant-Garde | EAC (ape + cue) | CD 63:18 | Covers & booklet txt format | 180MB | RS

“As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of release and change. In my performances throughout the world I try to transmit to the audience the way I am experiencing sound as I hear it and play it in a style that I will call deep listening. Deep listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep listening is my life practice.
---Pauline Oliveros
”
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Xenakis: Ensemble Music (mode 53-56 - 1996)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 26 Feb 2009 09:25:18 | Comments : 10
Xenakis Ensemble

Xenakis: Ensemble Music (mode 53-56 - 1996)
Live performances, with the participation of the composer
ST-x Ensemble directed by Charles Zachary Bornstein
Avant-Garde | EAC (ape + cue) | 2 CD 66:55 55:14 | booklet | 240+230 MB | RS

“Mr. Xenakis, for to achieve complete victory in his "struggle for existence", would have to create something so different that to anybody else it would be totally meaningless.
Even he has not gone that far, though he has regularly traveled a long way into the desert of incoherence, often by calculating his music so as to maximize disorder. This is the main thrust of his mathematical techniques: his spinning numbers, like John Cage's coin tossings, insure that notes are chosen and ordered by blind chance, or according to processes of change that have little to do with conventional musical perception.
.....
Mr. Xenakis so often equates beauty with savagery: in his fascination with weapons and armor, for instance, with the sea or with the bulls of the Camargue. In his music virtually the whole elaborate machinery of Western composition is set aside, and we are left with a brute vocabulary of other modernists - Stravinsky, Varèse, Harrison Birtwistle - avoidance of the immediate past leads to imagined contact with the archaic.
Paul Griffiths, The New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 1997
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VA - Bartók, Eötvös, Kurtág (2000)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 18 Feb 2009 09:35:04 | Comments : 6
ECM1711

VA - Bartók, Eötvös, Kurtág (2000)
Kim Kashkashian, viola
Avant-Garde | EAC (ape + cue) | CD 50:04 | booklet | 210MB | RS

“"The violin", Edgard Varèse declared half a century ago, "does not express our epoch." But whatever the truth of that remark, then or now, its sister (or brother?) the viola has certainly been finding the occasion in the last several decades to express - if not the epoch - itself.
......
The condition of Bartók's Viola Concerto - partial, imminent, not yet arrived - might have encouraged later Hungarian composers to feel that here was a genre in which something was waiting to be said. György Kurtág chose this as the form in which to present his graduation exercise at the end of his studies at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, a decade after Bartók's death. (Maybe not in this youthful work, but certainly in his later output, Bartók's absence is a prime motif and anxiety.) More than forty years later yet, Peter Eötvös returned to the image of the viola concerto - and perhaps the missing viola concerto - in his Replica.
Paul Griffiths - from the attached booklet
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VA - Bartók, Ligeti, Kurtág (2002)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 15 Feb 2009 16:11:07 | Comments : 9
ECM_1729


VA - Bartók, Ligeti, Kurtág (2002)
András Keller, János Pilz, violins
Contemporary | EAC (ape + cue) | CD 58:01 | booklet | 234MB | RS

“Musical interpretation changes overtime, as does the response it elicits. Undoubt edly the 44 Duos for Two Violins have gained in standing - have perhaps even been ennobled - since great violinists have been programming them in concert. But a further reason these little pieces are listened to differently today - as artworks sui generis - is that many of these miniatures provide such blissful relief from the countless garrulous works of our time. And in their overwhelming lucidity, they also consign both hypertrophic musical actionism and the so-called "new simplicity" to the place they deserve: namely, to the order of fashionable musical trends.
from the attached booklet
”
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VA - New Piano Works From Europe and The Americas (1993)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 03 Feb 2009 23:40:00 | Comments : 9
Haydée Schvartz, piano


VA - New Piano Works From Europe and The Americas (1993)
Haydée Schvartz, piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (ape + cue) | CD 71:08 | booklet | 234MB | RS

“A debut recital of incredibly varied and fascinating music from Argentinean pianist Haydée Schvartz. Her teachers include Roberto Brando, Dora Castro and Nikita Magaloff. Ms. Schvartz continued her studies in London with Maria Curcio and subsequently received a a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Buffalo, New York with Yvar Mikhashoff, where she won the Cameron Baird Competition in 1990.

"Schvartz's disc is no less interesting, including several realizations of the Perpetual Tango Cage wrote for Yvar Mikhashoff's Tango Project, recent miniatures by Berio and Pärt, and a Schumann-inspired set of nocturnes by Gerardo Gandini (Shvartz includes the relevant Schumann work for good measure). More substantial are the Quattro Illustrazioni of Scelsi, Kagel's impressive An Tasten and a strong work by the Argentinean Gabriel Valverde called Ek-Statsis which lives up to its name."
---Bradley Lonard, ABC Radio (Australia)
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Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Concertos (2005)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 24 Jan 2009 10:05:00 | Comments : 5
Carter-Concertos

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Concertos (2005)
BBC Symphony Orch. directed bt Oliver Knussen
Contemporary | EAC (ape + cue) | 1CD 61:09 | booklet | 242MB | RS

“Elliott Carter was something of a 'late starter' as a composer, but he has made up for that with an almost unprecedented fecundity of creative activ ity and accomplishment in advanced old age. The programme on this disc contrasts a comparatively 'early' orchestral work, from his mid-thirties, with the highly mature Violin Concerto written in his eighty-second year and a solo violin cycle most of which was composed in his nineties. At the time of writing this note (July 2005) Carter is not far short of his own centenary, and continuing to produce highly complex, sophisticated scores with an energy that would hardly be conceivable even in a much younger man.
from the attached booklet
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Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Violin Concerto et al. (2005)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 21 Jan 2009 19:47:00 | Comments : 5
Carter_Violin Concerto

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Violin Concerto et al. (2005)
Rolf Schulte, violin
Contemporary | EAC (ape + cue) | 1CD 57:32 | booklet | 287MB | RS

“Elliott Carter was something of a 'late starter' as a composer, but he has made up for that with an almost unprecedented fecundity of creative activ ity and accomplishment in advanced old age. The programme on this disc contrasts a comparatively 'early' orchestral work, from his mid-thirties, with the highly mature Violin Concerto written in his eighty-second year and a solo violin cycle most of which was composed in his nineties. At the time of writing this note (July 2005) Carter is not far short of his own centenary, and continuing to produce highly complex, sophisticated scores with an energy that would hardly be conceivable even in a much younger man.
from the attached booklet
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Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Nine Compositions - 1994-2002 (2003)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 19 Jan 2009 15:35:00 | Comments : 9
Carter5

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - Nine Compositions - 1994-2002
Contemporary | EAC (ape + cue) | 1CD 64:22 | booklet | 250MB | RS

“The various pieces on this disc vividly illustrate the sheer fecundity, the undimmed imagination and constant creative impulse of veteran composer Elliott Carter. True, most of the works here are comparative miniatures. Carter has elevated the short instrumental tribute piece, for an unaccompanied solo instrument or a select few, to a new and significant branch of his art, creating a virtual production-line of dialogues or soliloquies of considerable expressive force which further explore or amplify the issues marked out by his larger works. But those larger works continue to emerge as well, and here the "Oboe Quartet" and the slightly earlier song-cycle "Of Challenge and of Love" typify his perennial gifts for sustained argument and expression on an ample scale.
from the attached booklet
”
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Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - The Music of E.C. Volume Four (2001)

Posted By : ooliver | Date : 17 Jan 2009 08:49:00 | Comments : 2
Carte44

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) - The Music of E.C. Volume Four (2001)
Speculum Musicae
Contemporary | EAC (ape + cue) | 1CD 56:55 | booklet | 189MB | RS

“Critics often write as if technique and expression - or indeed form and content - are entirely separate. As if the manipulations of tone and rhythm, line and harmony, which the composer must perform in order to create his music are somehow divorced from, if not actually inimical to, the music's emotional life. Yet in the greatest composers there is of course no such opposition: technique exists to project and embody the poetry, the imaginative fire, that audiences respond to whether or not they know or care about the music's inner workings. Technique is expression.
Thus it is with Elliott Carter.
from the attached booklet
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