Márta Kurtág

Collecting five CDs for about the price of three, this set of Boulez recordings is without parallel among the conductor's new-music releases. Imagine getting Boulez's celebrated single CD of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke and his equally impressive single CD of Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and Variations for Orchestra, bundled with four pivotal Elliott Carter works, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's electrifying …AGM…, Gérard Grisey's Modulations, Iannis Xenakis's Jalons, Hugues Dufourt's Antiphysis, and Brian Ferneyhough's Funerailles, and you have an idea how far this set stretches.

In the winter of 2012/13, the Haus der Kunst in Munich – one of Europe’s most important museums for contemporary art – hosted the exhibition ECM – A Cultural Archaeology. The goal of curators Okwui Enwezor and Markus Müller was to show the range of the label’s artistic endeavours in music, graphic art, and photography and its creative interchanges with film, theatre and literature. For this exhibition, Manfred Eicher and Steve Lake created this box-set accentuating directions in ECM's rich musical history. Many themes and streams are touched upon here including the range of composition in the New Series, music for and from films, imaginative historical reconstructions, trans-cultural music, ambient minimalism, and jazz and improvisation of many hues, in a collection with a playing time of more than seven hours.

"Doll's House Story" composed 1985 for the Amadinda Percussion Group. "Pebble Playing In A Pot" composed 1978. "Second Construction" composed 1940. "Piano Phase" composed 1967. Digitally recorded in1986. Performing on a wide array of percussion instruments, including Polynesian log drums, Chinese gongs, tin cans, bicycle wheels, and frying pans, the Budapest-based Amadinda Percussion Group skillfully combine the masterpieces of percussion music, the work of contemporary Hungarian composers, and new compositions by bandmembers. Taking their name from an African-style instrument that they made themselves, the group continues to celebrate the joys of polyrhythmic music.

Exploring 20th-century repertoire – both acknowledged masterpieces and new discoveries – this 14-CD anthology reflects the diverse aesthetic strands of Pierre Boulez’s programming over the course of his ground-breaking and influential career. These Erato recordings, made between 1966 and 1992, feature composers otherwise absent from Boulez’s discography – Xenakis, Donatoni, Grisey, Dufourt, Ferneyhough, Harvey and Höller – and the first CD release of the interpretation of Stravinsky’s incantatory Les Soucoupes in the version for female voices and four horns.

Cryptic Scattered Images of Time Forgotten, is a musical memorial of pianist and band leader Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer. Like Sinbad, he roams through time, browsing through the chapters of his life with the expansive calm of bygone times, from his years in Novi Sad, through he time at the Budapest free music school, to his studies in the Netherlands, and this way free and contemporary music, dance music, and the jazz idiom all find a place next to one another.