★Kairos
Les Espaces Acoustiques
Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is a groundbreaking work which defies assumptions about what music “ought” to be. Not for nothing did the composer describe it as “a great laboratory”, exploring the way we listen.The “Acoustic Spaces” cycle, begun in 1974 and completed in 1985, consists of six instrumental works that may be played consecutively, since each acoustic space extends the previous one. The unity of the whole is based on the formal similarity of the pieces and on the two acousti…
Sui poemi concentrici
Deluxe triple cd boxet "to write music for Dante’s entire Commedia... It was not without trepidation that I accepted the proposal for a television production. Especially to accompany a reading of the text, meaning to follow it step by step, but also to support it with solid architecture. It is the opposite of a background created fragmentarily with the situations to which it relates. [Rather] a complete structure that expresses itself within the poem, a unified plan. I thought of a single arch o…
Ghosts
This is the extraordinary sequence of composers selected by Marino Formenti for his solo piano cycle Kurtág’s Ghosts, which examines how major composers from the fourteenth to the twentieth century have influenced the Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Formenti has performed the seamless cycle of seventy compositions live to considerable acclaim, and it is now available as a 2 CD set from the Vienna-based label Kairos.A typical Kurtág’s Ghosts sequence is 46 seconds of Kurtág's Hommage à Stockhau…
Through the looking-glass
Fantastic box with 5 cds "Imagine the sonic center of a maelstrom and you'll have some idea of the relentless swirling mass of thrum López generates a masterful exercise in controlled sound manipulation [www.textura.org] Perfectly formed sonic power, done in a rampaging style, combining ear-splitting volume with almost seismic catharsis [Giag, Latvia] Powerful and ominous. Could be anything from tectonic movements to amplified bloodflow [www.chaindlk.com]The most intense and elementary ambient …
Action Music
Giacinto Scelsi’s relationship with the piano is interesting and contradictory. For no other instrument has the Italian composer and poet composed so many pieces; to no other instrument does he seem so closely attached, both personally and biographically; and no other instrument disappeared so abruptly and finally from his scores as the piano, the European showcase instrument. With the piano, we can follow the break lines and develop-ments in the musical thinking and works of Giacinto Scelsi, wh…
Natura renovatur
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) has featured prominently in my music writing life for a decade and a half, ever since I wrote Discovering Scelsi on my first computer for Piano Journal (Oct. 1986), one of the first UK articles about this fascinating and elusive composer.There are particular reasons why the Scelsi CD in the latest, indispensable batch from Kairos prompted a trawl of my files. Scelsi applauded my analysis of his piano music and we had a cordial correspondence, after which I met him tw…