Mind-blowing music, by far the best recording of the Choir Concerto…
Unquestionably one of the choral masterpieces of the 20th century, Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Mixed Chorus is the summation of Schnittke's style of "new simplicity". Written in the mid 1980s, it is an extended setting of words from "The Book of Lamentations" by the Armenian monk Grigor Narekatsi (951-1003). At 40 minutes, the Concerto is a challenging work for any chorus, but what so impresses both in the music and the performance here is its deceptive, organic simplicity. There's a wonderfully controlled ebb and flow to the phrasing and dynamics that belies the work's complexities.

As the creator of musique concrète, what Pierre Schaeffer achieved in one broad artistic stroke was a multidimensional redefinition of music. The importance of musique concrète is twofold. Schaeffer developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the musical vocabulary. It was not enough to simply make the connection between music and audio for the combination to become an effective new aesthetic paradigm. The boundaries of music had to be pushed out to include not just the set of all sounds musical instruments were designed to produce―and not just all the sounds they weren't designed to produce either: his new musical universe also included the utilitarian noises of everyday life, wrested from their familiar context and transposed into novel and astonishing juxtapositions.

"Traditional music is not denied any more than the traditional theater was supplanted by the cinema. Something new has been added, a new art of sound. Am I wrong in calling it music?" ―Pierre Schaeffer

Schaeffer concocted imaginative and surreal sonic atmospheres. With his unbiased ear, he invoked the utterly free imaginal space of our collective sonic psyche. By calling this pastiche of doctored recorded sounds musique, Schaeffer connected the ideas of two formerly separate aesthetic domains: music and audio. At once he transformed the art of recording from a passive enterprise dedicated merely to fidelity and memory into an active artistic medium, capable of digesting and transforming not just all music and all poetry, but all sound into a new sonic art form. The marriage of audio recording technology and musical composition eventually became the new "King of Instruments" because of the musical breadth and power it engendered.

Awarded the "Diapason d'Or", this disc captures Arditti Quartet's cathartic interpretation of György Ligeti's String Quartet No. 1 of 1953-54 and String Quartet No. 2 of 1968 at its best.

According to some, Ligeti is about as post-modern as you can get. However, Ligeti's composition is more than just atonal, postmodern music, as demonstrated on this disc the amazingly effective use of space and time, and advanced virtuosity at the absolute service of the composer's artistic vision. In his own words: "the ironic theatricalizing of the past is quite foreign to me." Written between 1985 and 1992, the Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto together are supposed to demonstrate the full expressive range of his later works. The Piano Concerto is a whirlwind of rhythmically driven fantasies, created by precise, almost mechanical, colliding cross-rhythms, and twisted, sprightly melodies. The Violin Concerto is just as quirky and jarring, but wilder and more impassioned, less 'mechanical,' more vigorous, and ultimately the highlight of the disc.

Amazon.com
This Ligeti entry in the Deutsch Grammophon (DG) 20th Century Classics series was one of the first Ligeti CDs. It remains a fine single-disc introduction to Ligeti, one of the greatest of late 20th century composers. These works are all from Ligeti's 1960s prime when he was exploring micropolyphony. If you never heard anything else, you would have a good basic sense of what Ligeti's contribution was to the late 20th century avant-garde. Included are "Lux Aeterna," the eerie choral work from 1962, made famous for its inclusion in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and the String Quartet No. 2 from 1968, performed by the LaSalle Quartet. I think the Arditti Quartet surpassed the LaSalles with their Sony recording found in the "Ligeti Edition, Vol. 1," but this version is superb in its own right. The other three pieces are performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain, led by Pierre Boulez – "Ramifications," (1968-1969) "Chamber Concerto" (1970-1971) and the very strange vocal "Aventures" (1962-1965).

Although there are some titular confusion on this CD, namely that the cover lists only Gorecki's 1st Piano Sonata and his Four Preludes with almost an indirect reference to Arvo Pärt's For Alina and Variations for the Convalescence of Arinuschka but no mention of any kind to Galina Ustvolskaya's Twelve Preludes and Sonata No. 6, which take up almost half of the CD, the common aura of simplicity that binds the three composers speaks to us in an elegant, albeit intimate, sincerity.

The theme of human liberty and subjection is a recurrent theme of both Dallapiccola’s life and music. Dallapiccola’s early works show him grappling with a range of disparate influences ranging from Debussy to Schoenberg. By 1934, as an appointed professor of piano at the Florence Conservatory, his compositions further developed under the influences of Busoni, Schoenberg and, especially, Berg, as Dallapiccola studied the 12-note system and began to incorporate it into his own music. Meanwhile, the growing shadow of Fascism reawakened his concern with the plight of ordinary human beings living under despotism. In 1938, Mussolini’s adoption of Hitler’s racial policies (with the consequent threat to Dallapiccola’s own wife, who was Jewish) provided the impetus for the first of his tryptych of works concerned with imprisonment and freedom, the Canti di prigionia (“Songs of Imprisonment”)―as Dallapiccola noted in his diary: “In a totalitarian regime, the individual is powerless. Only by means of music would I be able to express my anger.” For all his personal difficulties, however, the years immediately before and during World War II were musically fecund ones, as Dallapiccola established the lyrical version of 12-note music―with a distinctly Italian turn of phrase―that was to serve him for the remainder of his career, and which he first expounded in the sequence of small-scale vocal works, most notably the Liriche greche, written during the 1940s.

Write your own damn review after hearing this CD for yourself! (Peachfuzz)

Nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for "Best Opera Recording", Olivier Messiaen's St. Francis of Assisi, the grandest grand opera since Wagner's Parsifal, came into being in 1983, during the first Reagan Administration, when Men at Work topped the pop charts. Somehow, it has already acquired a historical aura, as if it were an antiquity whose head and paws are only now emerging from the sand. José van Dam, who created the demanding title role in 1983, is a powerful presence in this live recording from the 1998 Salzburg Festival, and Dawn Upshaw―the lone female soloist in this baritone-dominated work―is appropriately radiant as the Angel. Conducted by Kent Nagano, who studied the score with the composer, this can be recommended to fans of Messiaen or to anyone interested in modern opera as a truly definitive recording.

Though the great Shostakovich Piano Quintet may appear to be the main bill of fare here, the lion's share of this disc is undoubtedly of chief importance for the other featured composer. Although she is still a relatively obscure figure, more has come to light in recent years about Galina Ustvolskaya, and in particular her often volatile relationship with Shostakovich. As his student and friend, Shostakovich always acknowledged Ustvolskaya's ability and influence. Yet as important as her music was to Shostakovich, and as critical as his teaching was to her development, the pieces recorded here do not clearly or convincingly illustrate the connections between them. Indeed, Ustvolskaya's Octet is strikingly unlike Shostakovich, for the language is more stringently atonal, and the layering techniques, brutal ostinati, and disjointed rhythms are more like Stravinsky or Varèse. Composition No. 3 (Benedictus qui venit) and the Symphony No. 5, "Amen," are equally avant-garde in approach, and also show a strong preoccupation with religious matters, utterly foreign to anything in Shostakovich's secular output. So when the sweet, Classically oriented Piano Quintet follows Ustvolskaya's darkly dissonant works, one may be skeptical about the composers' relationship and the depth of their influences on each other.

Amzon.com
This Montaigne disc (a 2001 reissue of 1990 recordings) contains string quartets by three contemporary composers in the post-Webernian tradition. In the spotlight is Gyorgy Kurtag, the Hungarian composer who famously bloomed late with a relatively small body of music, who contributes three pieces. The disc is filled out with the string quartet of Witold Lutoslawski and the second quartet of Sofia Gubaidulina. Kurtag's quartets are some of the finest of the 20th century, clearly fusing Webern and Bartok. Lutoslawski's quartet is one of his more radical works, though I don't think he's at his best at his most radical while Gubaidulina's quartet may be the greatest of the three works represented here, which was premiered in 1987.

MusicWeb
John Corigliano was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in music for his Second Symphony. Ironically, Corigliano stated at one point that he would never write a symphony, but a heartfelt response to the AIDS pandemic changed all that with the First Symphony. His excuse here is that "the string symphony is another, rarer, animal". In this symphony, Corigliano effectively re-scored his Second String Quartet for string orchestra, packing a full punch that is reminiscent of the later Bartók with a distinct Pendereckian slant.

Cathy Berberian, singer and wife of Luciano Berio, was one of music's true originals. Equally adept at Monteverdi and the wildest effusions of the avant-garde, her performances brought her husband's music to new and appreciative audiences, while permitting Berio to create some of his most gripping work at the same time. Folk Songs is exactly what the title says―a collection of folk songs from around the world which gives Berberian the opportunity to demonstrate her ability to sing in different languages and styles. Recital 1 is something else again―a monologue for soprano that reveals the slow disintegration of her personality. It's a nervous breakdown in music. Berberian performs everything on this disc brilliantly.

John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1, drawing from a diversity of styles and inspirations from Berlioz, Mahler and Shostakovich to Schoenberg and John Cage, becomes a symbolic form by which ideas are "translated" into music and expressed. In this case, this symphony takes on a requiem-like nature in that it mourns the loss of dear friends to the AIDS epidemic―perhaps one of the most terrifying of 20th century phenomenon―not unlike Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Gorecki's Symphony No.3 as some of the most moving creations of our era.