Colori Ensemble Spectrum

Violinist Irvine Arditti, pianist Claude Helffer, and the Spectrum ensemble conducted by Guy Protheroe produce consummate performances of the Greek avant-gardist's unwieldy chamber music. If you're familiar with Xenakis's career you'll know he was trained in mathematics and enjoyed a successful career as an architect. Such background might prepare you for the music's preoccupation with line, volume, and form in an unusually abstract way, but it won't prepare you for its visceral, almost primitive power. On Akanthos, the singer Penelope Walmsley-Clark must cope with what is surely one of the most ridiculous soprano parts ever written.

In 1781, the Zong – a British slave ship – left Ghana with twice the number it was designed to carry, bound for Jamaica. The ship’s owners claimed that drinking water was running low, and ordered the crew to throw more than 130 living enslaved people overboard.

The last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st centuries have produced an array of astonishingly gifted countertenors who continue to set new standards of excellence and reveal possibilities for male singers performing in the traditional range of women who haven't been heard since the days of the castrati. Iestyn Davies doesn't have the spectacular instrument of some of the most dazzling countertenors of his generation but in his more modest way, he is no less impressive. His voice is pure, without a trace of the hollow hootiness that was once characteristic so many countertenors, and is absolutely secure and full from the bottom to the top of his range.

The unifying idea of the concerto provides a way to get a handle on György Ligeti's experimental spirit, for a concerto here represents several fundamentally different things. The Cello Concerto of 1966, right at the height of Ligeti's exuberantly fearless adventures in 1960s Germany, might almost be called an anti-concerto, with the cello doing its best to hang on the edge of silence. Sample the very first movement, both for the precision of cellist Christian Poltéra's work at the low end of the dynamic spectrum and for the ideally clean engineering work by the BIS label, operating in a variety of Norwegian venues and mastering them, well, masterfully. The Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments and the Melodien are essentially concertos for orchestra, with distinctive roles for each of the instruments, while the five-movement Piano Concerto, completed in 1988, is a fine and technically demanding example of Ligeti's later pulse-based, polyrhythmic style.

Conductor Shea Lolin and composer/producer Christopher Hussey have returned to Prague to record with the Czech Philharmonic Wind Ensemble, carefully curating an album of premiere recordings spotlighting the woodwind orchestra, capturing its kaleidoscopic colours and symphonic potential in order to deepen and broaden appreciation of the medium’s power.