Classical Records of the Year – The Sunday Times, 17 December 1989
A stringent and sustained electro-acoustical experience is to be had from Iannis Xenakis’s magnum opos Kraanerg (70 mins long) as recorded on Etcetera by the Alpha Centauri Ensemble and Roger Woodward…..
The Times, Saturday November 1, 1989
…The music has ‘active energy in abundance. … The performance is dazzling, and I come firmly into the ‘bowled over’ rather than ‘baffled’ category… A.W…..
Diapason-Harmonie, Decembre 1989, Les Nouvelles
Rating 8 TTTT
Une très belle interprétation, vigoureuse et sanguine, résultant de vingt-trois exécutions de la version ballet par la Sydney Dance Company et l’Alpha Centauri Ensemble sous la direction inspirée de Roger Woodward…… read more
Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 1990, Roger Covell: Caution : 70 minutes of untamed music…

An invigorating journey over the landscape of modern music, Swiss clarinettist Eduard Brunner's solo recital is a tour-de-force of extended technique and high musicality applied to intensely-demanding composition. Brunner's album is titled after Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (out of nothing) whose sounds bleed into and out of the resonant silence of the church of St. Gerold. Where Lachenmann's concluding piece calls for nothing less than a new way of hearing, the Isang Yun composition that opens the programme is a deeply moving assertion of the inviolability of the human spirit which has its genesis in the two years that Yun spent in a South Korean prison under sentence of death. The recital also includes a hitherto unpublished Stravinsky miniature alongside the well-known Three Pieces for clarinet, Boulez's daunting Domaines, some brightly optimistic Stockhausen, and Scelsi's shadowy Preghiera per un'ombra. BBC Music Magazine: "Although a disc comprising 70 minutes of 20th century music for clarinet might be thought to appeal to enthusiasts only, there is such an enormous range of sounds contained within these pieces that one's attention is held throughout.

An astonishingly intense and courageous program, brilliantly performed.

Attracted by the borderline experiences and solitary forms of a gradually darkening Renaissance, these compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino revolve around three figures from the 16th century, all of whom lost control in the field of tension between feverish living and spiritual demise, between brightness and damnation, inspired, driven and obsessed. The famous poet Torquato Tasso describes in three authentic letters (Lettere poetici) his tormenting visions of goblins and phantoms. This is all reflected in Sciarrino's intense, whispering, whirring music, in which silence is as significant as the birth of sound, "Almost naked, sober," remarks the composer, "and that is an important element when one is listening to music. Only in this way can it bore its way into the flesh." (Carlo Sini)

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati was born on 27 February 1919 in Krakow where he studied musicology and philosophy as well as composition with Artur Malawski and took private lessons with Jósef Koffler in Lemberg.
1947– 1950 head of the music department of the Krakow Radio
1950 – 1956 director of the State Music Library of Tel Aviv and professor at the Music Academy
1957 return to Europe, worked at the Studio de Musique Concrète in Paris where he drew inspiration from Olivier Messiaen. Then worked as editor and music consultant of Universal Edition Vienna; permanent residence in Vienna. Visiting professor in Buenos Aires, Stockholm and at the Yale University.
1973 to 1989 he accepted an appointment to the Wiener Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst as professor of composition. In addition to composition Haubenstock-Ramati focused on the development of new forms of notation and musical graphic.
In 1959 he organised the first exhibition of ‘Musical Graphic’ in Donaueschingen.
In 1981 he was awarded the ‘Grand Austrian State Prize’.
He died on 3 March 1994 in Vienna, a week after the gala concert in honour of his 75th birthday at the Wiener Konzerthaus.

Sock Monkey, the follow up to 2004's Catfish (Tzadik), and the latest of a whole string of albums on Innova, starts off with a fine example of Applebaum's exuberant postmodernism, in the form of Magnetic North (2006), a 14-minute adventure scored for brass quintet and percussion with occasional interpolated cadenzas from an additional soloist, in this case Applebaum himself on his self-designed mouseketier (an electroacoustic sound sculpture incorporating amplified bits of junk and toys, whose already strange sounds are further transformed electronically).

Much of Kagel's music has an element of the intelectual strip-show, which ultimately turns out to be more like a Vesalian anatomy lesson: if the reductio is not necessarily ad absurdum, it is nonetheless drastic, and seems to invite discussion. But this is precisely what is forbidden by the ritual of the concert performance, whose rules are: first presentation, then immediately judgement (applause, or some less favourable alternative).

"Exercise 15" was made out of and invites transformations or transcriptions. It's for piano or ad hoc instrumental arrangement. Its material is from a 1920s song "Union Maid" (as I found it in Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer's collection "Songs of Work and Protest") by Woodie Guthrie using an earlier popular song tune. The tempo of the music is not specified. Sometimes it's played rather fast, as the original tune probably was, sometimes at a deliberate, 'prosaic' tempo. Here it's in a slow motion as though under a temporal microscope, which to my ears makes it somehow new (extensive change of quantity about a change quality). _ Christian Wolff

Dutilleux is an outsider by instinct and his independence from prevailing 'schools' of French composition would explain why his music is not as widely appreciated as its abundant qualities suggest it should be. And it's coals to Newcastle indeed that it was a British orchestra -the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - who first brought Dutilleux's music to Paris's most chic music venue, the Cité de la Musique, in 1999.

“The basic idea of Variété” writes Kagel “was to compose a concert/show combining a number of musical idioms associated with the traditional vaudeville style. From the composer’s view-point, the term théâtre trouvé might be useful to describe this liaison: new pieces of music, not bound to any particular visual content, are confronted by other presentation. The result is ‘music’ – ‘theater’.”

The core group consisted of Franco Evangelisti, Ennio Morricone (yes, that Morricone), Roland Kayn, Mario Bertoncini, Ivan Vandor, and John Heineman. Usually mentioned in the same breath as another great electro-acoustic improvising ensemble, AMM, who were navigating similar terrain to that of the GINC, each member brought their own composing and improvising sensibility to bear on a collective effort that is never less than totally engaging. They performed a totally unique melange of free improvisation, with white noise, analog electronics, extended technique, and a knowledge of composition that encompassed centuries worth of developments, from the Renaissance on up to the latest innovations of Stockhausen, Cage, or Xenakis. This DVD features a 45-minute-long black and white film of a performance given by the group at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1967. [MK] (Reissued 2006)

Kagel's conundrum is this: Saint Bach is either a unique musical phenomenon, perhaps the only instance of such divinely made (not just inspired) music, thus rendering him incomparable and even incommensurable to all other composers, or Bach's saintliness is a possibility that any composer might attain and thus "Saint Bach" is a representation of "the composer" him/herself in his/her fullest attainment. If this is the case, what other composers might Kagel also be a saint? Himself? As I said, Kagel confronts us with the most challenging epistemological conundrum any recent composer to my knowledge has laid down. And I suspect attentive listeners will be wrestling with his conundrum for generations to come, either infuriated by its seeming audacity, or humbled by its remarkable devotion. In any case, some of those infuriated and humbled listeners will return to Kagel's music with a culminating sense of marvel at its emotion and elegant design that will seem at times to be Bach's music itself wearing an astonishingly contemporary garb.
Anne Sofie Von Otter, Hans-Peter Blochwitz, Roland Hermann, Peter Oggisch, Gerd Zacher, Stuttgart Sudfunkchor, Limburger Cathedral Boys Choir, Hamburg Radio Chorus, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Mauricio Kage / Conductor

Just in from the always beautifully presented Die Schachtel label, a two-CD and DVD package housed in a linen slipcase devoted to unheard recordings by the legendary Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, a group whom it's always been frustratingly hard to pin down on disc or LP despite their powerhouse line-up. The GINC was a performer/composer ensemble with revolving members active from the mid-'60s to the mid-'80s; the recordings and film collected here are from what is arguably their greatest and most innovative era which spanned the years 1967-1969, when the core group consisted of Franco Evangelisti, Ennio Morricone (yes, that Morricone), Roland Kayn, Mario Bertoncini, Ivan Vandor, and John Heineman. Usually mentioned in the same breath as another great electro-acoustic improvising ensemble, AMM, who were navigating similar terrain to that of the GINC, each member brought their own composing and improvising sensibility to bear on a collective effort that is never less than totally engaging. They performed a totally unique melange of free improvisation, with white noise, analog electronics, extended technique, and a knowledge of composition that encompassed centuries worth of developments, from the Renaissance on up to the latest innovations of Stockhausen, Cage, or Xenakis. The DVD features a 45-minute-long black and white film of a performance given by the group at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1967. [MK] (Reissued 2006)