Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Kagel, born in Buenos Aires on 24 December 1931, is a very distinctive composers of contemporary music. From the very beginning his name has been associated above all with music theatre, the genre in which he has perhaps exerted the greatest impact. Besides his radical innovations in this area, however, he has also developed a highly personal aesthetic in his absolute music. Kagel's creative output is remarkable: it encompasses not only stage, orchestral and chamber music in an extremely wide range of instrumental settings, but also film scores, radio plays and essays.
Mauricio Kagel, born in Buenos Aires on 24 December 1931, is a very distinctive composers of contemporary music. From the very beginning his name has been associated above all with music theatre, the genre in which he has perhaps exerted the greatest impact. Besides his radical innovations in this area, however, he has also developed a highly personal aesthetic in his absolute music. Kagel's creative output is remarkable: it encompasses not only stage, orchestral and chamber music in an extremely wide range of instrumental settings, but also film scores, radio plays and essays.
The Rest Is Silence – Music Of Our Time
*2025 stock* "Stefan Winter, head of the Winter & Winter boutique label, has a different attitude to popularising classical music. Rather than relying on the familiarity of old favourites, he believes that contemporary classical music is more accessible than its ascetic, atonal reputation suggests, and can find an audience outside its assumed intellectual elite. Hence this compilation of excerpts from the label's catalogue…" - The Independent"Winter & Winter is something of a special case when i…
Chorbuch, Les Inventions d'Adolphe Sax
*2025 stock* This Winter & Winter cd of 'Chorbuch' and 'Les Inventions d' Adolphe Sax', recorded in December 2007, was Mauricio Kagel’s last recording, delayed due to unexpected death in the year 2008. The centrepiece of the album, 'Les Inventions d' Adolphe Sax' was commissioned by the Nederlands Kamerkoor, who invited the acclaimed Raschèr Quartet to participate. As a premiere recording and with Kagel’s artistic participation a masterpiece was created. The Nederlands Kamerkoor and Mauricio Kag…
Kantrimiusik
*2025 stock* “There is freshness, there is (self) irony, there is a desire - and for once let's say it without shame - to have fun with music. [...] Nature triumphs in all its aspects: noises and sounds of birds, pouring rain, thunder, animal cries, alternating on the lines of a fiddle violin.” - Corriere di Bologna
The Mauricio Kagel Edition
"It's fascinating, and a wonderful reminder of how fresh and unique Kagel's place in the history of music in the last half-century is." - The Guardian
Die Stücke der Windrose
2025 stock "Kagel's witty intelligence objectifies the ordinary to create important art." - The Wire
Schwarzes Madrigal
*2025 stock* "In composing a piano trio, I fulfilled a long-fostered desire. This is a genre which, like the string quartet tradition, can slightly intimidate any composer. I too waited patiently but anxiously to make my own contribution. The pre-history of the piece is closely tied to my Music Epic about the devil, La Trahison orale (Oral Betrayal), which I wrote in 1981-83. When conceiving this work, I had already decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a particular …
Playback Play
*2025 stock* Famous for his examination of unusual and exotic instrumental sounds, here Mauricio Kagel focuses on the most mundane of sound materials. While attending a music trade show, Kagel was taken by the many levels and orbits of sound activity emanating from the various booths and stages. In 'Playback Play' (subtitled 'News from the Music Fair, A Radio Piece') he has arranged a spatially sensitive tableau of crowd noises, sales pitches and fragments of the sort one hears in music store sh…
Radio Cologne Sound Das Studio für Elektronische Musik des WDR
Small repress available! Biggest Tip possible! ** English/German edition. 288 pp + 5CD plenty of incredible music, most of which have never been heard before ** From the Wolke Verlag imprint, who've already brought us incredible books like Karl Berger's "The Music Mind Experience", "FMP Free Music Production - The Living Music", Peter Brötzmann's Along the Way, and George Lewis' "Composing While Black. Afrodiasporic New Music Today", to name only a few and a great many more - comes one of the m…
The Avantgarde Series
The legendary DG Avantgarde vinyl series (1968-1971) is turning 55! In order to celebrate this occasion, the series is now released on 21 CDs for the first time. The Avantgarde series serves as a historical document for a time of radical change in musical thinking and the breaking of artistic boundaries. The question "What is music?" confronted many of the composers and musicians involved in the series, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was a palpable influence. Deutsche G…
Save Percussion Theatre
Aiyun Huang’s unique recital, “Save Percussion Theater,” is a video-recording of theater music for percussion dedicated to the pioneering work of the Parisian group “Trio Le Cercle,” for whom many of these works written and by whom they have been championed. This recording, in essence a document of the complete percussion works from the French school of theater music, is an ambitious undertaking. Here the camera replaces the eye of an audience member, and the microphone his or her ear, yet wit…
Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975
** 2021 Stock. In process of stocking** Hard-cover. Cloth boards issued without dust jacket offset-printed sewn bound. Critical anthology of the art journal Interfunktionen, an art journal which published 12 issues between 1968 and 1975 in Cologne, was founded in 1968 as a form of protest by artists who had no affinity with the critical lines that were redrawn at Documenta that year. The review was of considerable importance as a vehicle for propagating pro-European ideas and as a union between …
Süden: Gastón Solnicki on Mauricio Kagel
111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …
Sankt-Bach-Passion
Mauricio Kagel (December 24, 1931 – September 18, 2008) was a German-Argentine composer who was notable for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance. Many of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, to physically interact with other performers and so on. His work comparable to the Theatre of the Absurd.
Orchestral Works
Mauricio Kagel by himself: the composer, theater maker, filmmaker, virtuoso, writer of radio plays and, on the whole, all-round talent conducts his own works.
Szenario - Duodramen - Liturgien
Mauricio Kagel is a conductor, writer, teacher and self-taught composer, initially influenced by avant-garde figures such as Boulez and Stockhausen. 'Szenario,' scored for string orchestra and tape, was conceived as an independent work, but quickly found a new role as musical backing to the Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali silent classic 'Le chien andalou'. Duodramen can be heard either as an orchestral song-cycle in the tradition of Mahler or as an operatic 'final scene' in the tradition of Wagner or …
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970, Acustica, for experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers, is one of Mauricio Kagel's radical and extraordinary works, in which his constant search for ways of escaping from the restraints and conventions of traditional musical performance took him into a world of exotic instruments and almost surreal invention. The instrumentation for Acustica is a huge array of sound sources: there are folk instruments collected from around the world and from different periods…
Transición II. Phonophonie
This disc collects two early, forward looking works by Argentine born Mauricio Kagel, now living in Germany. Both works are constructed in such a way so that no two performances can ever be alike. Transición II was an early exploration of what "live electronics" are now being used to achieve. The score is in individual pages which can be placed in any order by the performers. It works on three levels. LIVE: The pianist performs on the keyboard while a percussionist performs inside the pian…