Ballad
The word "ballad" implies a tale or narrative, and while there is no literal story being told there, I found myself thinking of the two performers as co-travellers in a terrain - or as dance partners - and the music as sometimes like a song they sing together, sometimes a landscape they cross, sometimes a mood, sometimes a monologue, and sometimes a fine line they trace. In the end, it is a ballad about the cello and the piano, and the way I hear them together. - Linda Catlin Smith
Der Uhu des Ihi
"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst
Improvisation
That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.
Proprio Motu
* 2021 Stock * The disc summarises a major part of Eduardo Polonio’s work over the last decade and in some way is a complement to his 1969 - 1998 anthology.
There is a deep line, indecipherable for me, that runs through the work of Eduardo Polonio. It is a spectral base that we can track to his early works. ... In his latest work, Sudoku-mix, he buries it even deeper. We should not opt for the easy programmatic interpretation of the phenomena he points to in his work. The harmonic plays and even…
Sitting Between Chairs
* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed.
Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature.
How could this w…
Thinking
* 2021 Stock * When i speak of spirit it is far beyond what most people think of.I am confident in my ways. I dont care about what people think of me because i do know that what i have been shown and told is far beyond. - Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo
For piano + violin + videoStephen Clarke - pianoMarc Sabat - violintext: Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazoLive-recording from 01/12/2001, Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto, Canada
Weiss/Weisslich
* 2021 Stock * One day I met something strange on a stroll through the fields not far from the Hungarian border. The corn stood tall and waited to be harvested. The hot summerly east wind went through the fields, and suddenly I heard the hiss. Many had explained it to me but still I cannot tell the difference between wheat and rye. But I heard the difference. I think it was the first time that I actually heard something without an aesthetic context (like in a concert). Or was it the first time I…
Unisono Diviso
* 2021 Stock * About 1960, when serialism was pushed into an abundant mathematically structured complexity by composers such as Stockhausen or Boulez, young Ernstalbrecht Stiebler choose a completely different way - a radical backlash to the successors of Webern in Darmstadt: "No ‘mediations’, no permutations of sound material, but a way towards a further reduction of the material instead. At that time I had the feeling of entering onto new ground," Stiebler recalls.
The string trio Extension I …
Baum
* 2021 Stock * As if an incantatory ritual, Drums Off Chaos and Maria De Alvear create "acoustic images". The inherent spirit of the object - the essence of the tree comes to life through the interplay of voice and drums, assuming a clear shape in the listener’s mind.
Maria De Alvear’s colourful and expressive singing and the repetitive, insistent rhythms provided by the Drums Off Chaos work towards the same musical idea: from the specific material of each, unusual, highly differentiated sounds …
Llena
* 2021 Stock * To me, Maria De Alvear composes like a natural phenomenon: guided not as much by the coming and going of ideas and emotions, nor addressing them, but like a law of nature impassively displaying a sort of automatic writing that moves the body and courses through the psyche, ultimately demanding full awareness. - Reinier van Houdt
Vagina
* 2021 Stock * Vagina is the longing for the man. This simple sentence holds enormous secrets, starting with the word longing and not least with the word man. Recognizing a man is probably very difficult from a woman's perspective: for several reasons. The most important sine qua non is the fact that a female being must be able to be a woman. In other words, an adult female being, not only in a sexual sense, but - and here is the trick - psychologically. - Maria de Alvear
Maria de Alvear - voice…
Sexo
* 2021 Stock * "Maria de Alvear writes confrontationally personal music along sexual themes ... the same kind of spiritual revolution that John Cage ... did here 30 years ago. The work Sexo for female narrator/performer and orchestra is a passionate examination of all the taboos and all the advantages and disadvantages involved with sexuality. A poetic explosion of feeling, emotions, sexual fantasies and deep mystical and metaphysical thought. Sexo is in fact an imaginary journey that the listen…
World
* 2021 Stock * A sprawling, wandering hourlong geological survey of the composer’s ambitious spiritual world. Her music does not develop; it accumulates. - Bernard Holland, New York Times
The only single, continuous orchestral movement I know of to surpass the finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in duration. - Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Hildegard Kleeb - pianoJoseph Kubera - pianoThe Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble Petr Kotik - conductor
Libertad
* 2021 Stock * "There are pieces which must be done. The work Libertad is one of them. Inspired by the lyrics of Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo, it is one of those compositions that gave me enormous pleasure while working and that accompanied me with a wave of very great power [...] Perhaps this work [...] is one of those that carry the most power. There is an enormous mysterious protective circle around it. It is one of the works that has given me the most riddles, that contains knowledge that I can on…
Albertina Quartett
** 3 lp box, housed in a sturdy cardboard, with linen and goildembossed print. comes with a lp sized big booklet** Hermann Nitsch's String Quartet No. 2 in six movements for two violins, viola, and violoncello, was performed by the Viennese Koehne Quartet. Recorded during the exhibition Nitsch. Spaces of Color at the Albertina Museum, Vienna on the May 29th, 2019.The music is played by The Koehne Quartett: Joanna Lewis - 1. Violine; Anne Harvey-Nagl - 2. Violine; Lena Fankhauser - Viola; Mara Ac…
Música Callada / See the Welter
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and…
Adagios From The Underground
In the Understage area of the Alexandra Trianti Hall, the musical saw in the hands of Nikos Giousef, and accompanied by piano, samplers and analog synthesizers, is transformed into a voice. 'An otherworldly child's voice', 'a Siren's voice' or 'a castrato voice', as it has been described, it easily climbs to tonic heights that the human voice can only reach with great effort. The pieces chosen for the program reflect this criterion, with works such as the aria 'Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott' from the …
Spielt Mozart
* 2020 Stock * Florian Fricke (1944 – 2001) was a German music pioneer who started his career in electronic music using the Moog synthesizer within the famous Krautrock group ‘Popol Vuh’. Fricke studied piano, composition and directing at the conservatories in Freiburg and Munich where he also dedicated himself to new kinds of music like ‘free jazz’. In 1967 he met German film director Werner Herzog and the two formed a life long friendship (Fricke was later responsible for the soundtracks of se…
Gioseffo Zarlino - 2015/2019
* Edition of 500 * Marc Sabat's Gioseffo Zarlino is "the third in a series of pieces inspired by ideas in the history of music theory, which I seek to experience and unfold in a sounding world" (taken from the liner notes by the composer). In the piece, unfolding cyclically over 70 minutes, voices, strings, harp, and flute, weave through each other exploring a novel tonal space developed by the Renaissance Italian Composer-Theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino in 1558 and reinterpreted in the 21st Century …
Lost and Found
Formed in 2017, J Pavone String Ensemble features Jessica Pavone and Abby Swidler on violas, and Erica Dicker and Angela Morris on violins. The group's latest release, Lost And Found, combines both traditional notation and improvisation, with a focus on sustained collaborative playing and the application of ideas exploring the healing potential of sonic vibrations. It was recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Speaking with The Wire's Philip Clark in November 2019, Pavone describes …