The clarinet works on this disc offer a welcome variety of styles. Although the Wolf and Bavicchi works are for string orchestra accompaniment, Wolf wrote his work reflecting the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic traits of Brazil within a neo-classical framework. Bavicchi, on the other hand, wrote his piece in a good "old-fashioned" dissonant style, reflecting the more expressionistic influences found in much American music of the 1950s. A little-known work by a famous 20th century composer, the Hindemith 'Clarinet Concerto' was written for Benny Goodman but avoids overt jazz connections, instead bearing a closer resemblance to his more serious pieces such as the 'Violin Concerto' and 'Symphony in E-flat.'

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Gramophone Another Vingt regards from an unexpected source, and this time no mere stopgap. Alice Ader's interpretation has clearly been prepared with devotion and insight, and the recordings (made in the studios of Radio France over nine days) reflect similar dedication on the part of the Adda team. The resulting blend of clarity and warmth, with the piano in an excellent perspective, is greatly superior to Continuum's clear but noisy recording for Malcolm Troup; and Alice Ader's playing is on an altogether higher level than Troup's. If in the final analysis this is only one of the finest Vingt regards on record, that's mainly because Alice Ader does not have quite the power and panache to make the most tumultuous climaxes `vibrate'—the great shout of joy at the height of No. 10 is a case in point. But her finesse and agility are still to be treasured; if and when more towering versions appear (or are reissued) hers should still have a place of honour.

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Amazon.com Galina Ustvolskaya, a pupil of Dmitri Shostakovitch, is one of the most remarkable of living composers. A complete recluse whose music ranks with that of Giacinto Scelsi for sheer uncompromising single-mindedness, she was little-known in the West until the last ten years. Her compositions deliberately inhabit extreme worlds; obsessive beating rhythms, pounding clusters, monotonous repetition, bizarre instrumentation and bleak monody all feature heavily in her music. Her minute output is dominated by a sequence of five increasingly bizarre symphonies and one of six piano sonatas; the piano sonatas, all of which appear on this disc, are essential listening for anyone interested in post-Shostakovitch music, and the later ones rank amongst the finest post-war works for piano.

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"A disk that includes both the brilliant, fleetingly angular visions of Elliot Carter's Night Fantasies and the slowly shifting harmonies and often hypnotic rhythms of John Adams's Phrygian Gates. The gift of Ursula Oppens in the Carter is clarity and an almost Romantic sense of inevitability and flow. To the Adams she brings variety of color and a sense for drama." —The New York Times

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The Japanese Noise scene has received much attention in the past several years, and countless bands have flooded the market with CDs filled with horrible sounds and indiscriminate noise. "Merzbow" is the one and only original Japanese noise band, begun by Masami Akita over 20 years ago and he is still the best of them all. This special release for the Tzadik label is one of his most important compositional creations—an adventurous travelogue into his world of analog and digital noises, taking unexpected twists and turns that will surprise even hardcore Merzbow fans. Merzbow is the undisputed king of the Japanese noise scene and 1930 is one of his very finest releases.

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Classical Net Peter Serkin recorded these works over the course of more than three years, between 1994 and 1997. In spite of its long gestation time, and the diversity of composers and compositional styles, this CD holds together very well. From the opening Webern Variations for Piano, a seminal piece of 12-tone writing from 1936, to the explosion of color and light in Lieberson's Piano Fantasy (1974-5), it is hard to believe that one pianist is responsible for all these sounds. Serkin's technique allows him to negotiate dense thickets of notes and impossibly tangled rhythms without audible strain. He is slightly less convincing when he moves to the other extreme and is asked to spellbind the listener with almost imperceptibly small and slow musical changes. What is most impressive about Serkin, however, is his dedication to this repertoire. There are not many pianists who would stick their necks out for music that doesn't receive the sympathy usually reserved for Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the like. Prove me wrong and hear this CD.

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Classical Net Peter Serkin recorded these works over the course of more than three years, between 1994 and 1997. In spite of its long gestation time, and the diversity of composers and compositional styles, this CD holds together very well. From the opening Webern Variations for Piano, a seminal piece of 12-tone writing from 1936, to the explosion of color and light in Lieberson's Piano Fantasy (1974-5), it is hard to believe that one pianist is responsible for all these sounds. Serkin's technique allows him to negotiate dense thickets of notes and impossibly tangled rhythms without audible strain. He is slightly less convincing when he moves to the other extreme and is asked to spellbind the listener with almost imperceptibly small and slow musical changes. What is most impressive about Serkin, however, is his dedication to this repertoire. There are not many pianists who would stick their necks out for music that doesn't receive the sympathy usually reserved for Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the like. Prove me wrong and hear this CD.

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SONOR was established in 1975 as a forum for the presentation of new music by the faculty of the University of California, San Diego. Resident composers with the ensemble have included Erickson, Ferneyhough, François, Ogdon, Rands, Reynolds, Steiger and Yuasa, most of whom have written new works for the ensemble.

The work of James Tenney as a composer, theorist, performer, and teacher, is of singular importance in American music of the past four decades. He is by nature a quiet, almost publicity-shy musician, but his musical and theoretical works are steadily becoming widely known, despite the fact that few have been published and only a relatively small number, to this date, are readily available on recordings. Meta + Hodos once had the widest “underground” readership of any treatise of its kind until it became more readily available through Frog Peak in the late 1980s. The drum quartets, For Ann (rising), and a few other works are also familiar, in a wide variety of contexts, to contemporary musicians. He is also known for his groundbreaking work in the development of compositional algorithms. This is the period in his work that is documented on this recording.

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Blog Critics For those of you expecting to hear something along the lines of the delicate sounds of raindrops plopping on leaves, you'll be sorely disappointed. In her first full length CD from Touch Music, Heated, a performance she gave in October 2008 in Tokyo, Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen creates soundscapes from recordings that she has made with specially designed microphones of rivers in China, far beneath the surface of the North Sea, and crevices that run into the hearts of icebergs. According to the credits on the disc the source material used for this show was gathered with various types of hydrophones and microphones in Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. This is a world of mysterious groans, squeaks, and loud unearthly growls, as Winderen's microphones pull sounds from depths beneath the ice pack in the frozen north. For twenty-six plus minutes she plays back sounds that are so alien to our ears that they could be from another planet. Believe me when I tell you, listening to this disc is unlike anything you're likely to have experienced ever before.

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Brown belonged to a group of composers that today is referred to as the "The New York School" (the group active in New York in the 1950s that included Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.) The works recorded on this disc represent several of Brown's compositional styles. At least one piece was selected from every decade of his career, from the 1950s to the 1990s. The ensemble size varies from one player to fourteen. Performers include Christian Wolff and vocalist Joan La Barbara, both of whom knew and worked with Brown for many years.

Focusing on the religious aspect in Vasks' music, this disc contains three sacred works for choir and orchestra, featuring the outstanding Latvian Radio Choir and its conductor Sigvards Klava, as well as the Sinfonietta Riga. Based on Latin texts from the traditional Christian liturgy, these works include the two contemplative motets Pater noster (The Lord's Prayer) and Dona nobis pacem (Grant us peace), as well as the ordinary of the Mass. Vasks' style of choral writing links him to the composers who have come to be described as 'holy minimalists,' a group that includes Arvo Pärt, Henryk Góreck, Giya Kancheli, and John Tavener, whose music, while stylistically diverse, tends to rely on tonal and modal harmonies, is frequently harmonically static or slow-moving and is often linked to plainchant and ancient liturgical traditions. Vasks' choral music is firmly rooted in Western polyphony and is for the most part traditional-sounding; there is little in it apart from certain unconventional harmonic progressions that would make it immediately identifiable as a product of the late twentieth century. Among the other holy minimalists, the sound of his music is most closely related to that of Górecki in its harmonic textures and the somber earnestness of its moods. The three works recorded here are polyphonically and harmonically sensual, in spite of their serious tone. An exception to the sober tone is the Mass' Sanctus, which, while not exactly lighthearted, is lively; the composer imagines it 'sung by happy, little angels.' The Latvian Radio Choir sings with warmth and passion and with excellent control in the composer's extended, sustained vocal lines. Sigvards Klava, conducting Sinfonietta Riga, leads them in deeply felt performances. The CD should be of interest both to fans of choral music and of new trends in minimalism tinged with Romanticism.

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Sequenza21 In 1970 or thereabouts, Cage wrote his Song Books, a collection of 90 vocal/theater pieces. Solo for Voice 58, from the Song Books, amounts to a collection of pitches upon which the vocalist can improvise, and include microtones. From this raw material are derived the "18 Microtonal Ragas", and this is a fascinating and often beautiful album. The vocalist, Amelia Cuni, is nothing short of amazing as she puts forth a virtuosic performance in conjunction with three other musicians on electronics/drones and percussion. While this could have amounted to mere chinoiserie, the musical instincts of Cuni and her colleagues, along with the freedom afforded by Cage himself, make this a very individual and wonderful composition, one which acknowledges the influence of Eastern musics without imitating them for the sake of cheap imitation.

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