Miranda Cuckson & Christopher Burns Luigi Nono La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura

This disc is a reissue in DG's 20/201 Echo series, with recordings of Nono's last two finished works from December of 1990, first released in 1992. Nono died in May 1990, and "La lontananza" had been written for and with Gidon Kremer in 1988 and 1989. Nono taped Kremer playing a variety of pre-arranged sounds on violin, and then electronically altered them – the final piece results from Kremer playing solo, responding to taped sequences.

Composer Anthony Cheung releases All Roads, a follow up to FCR215 Cycles and Arrows. Featuring performances by the Escher Quartet, violinist Miranda Cuckson, soprano Paulina Swierczek, and pianists Jacob Greenberg, Gilles Vonsattel, and Cheung himself, All Roads encapsulates Cheung's penchant for drawing on broad sources of inspiration and filtering them through an incisive and discriminating compositional process to produce substantial, structurally airtight works.

This disc combines Hartmann's Symphony No. 1 (1937/1948), a requiem for the victims of the Nazis and the dead of World War II, using Walt Whitman's verses from "Leaves of Grass" written for the dead of the Civil War and a soprano singer, with anti-war pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, Bouslav Martinu, and Luigi Nono.

In this latest installment of recordings focusing on the choral traditions of different countrys choral music traditions launched last year by the Vokalensemble Stuttgart des SWR, we now arrive in sunny Italy, a country said to have no native choral tradition. Giuseppe Verdi of course used choirs in his operas, but apart from that there are only a few choral works that have sustained any place in the repertoire, some of the finest of which are presented here. With the beginning of the 20th century, however, one encounters composers that are less well known, but whom have certainly composed some very exciting music for choir, including Pizzetti, Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono and Goffredo Petrassi.

Luigi Nono (1924-90) was one of the foremost composers in the 20th century who experimented in the field of electronic music. The musical score, written and adhered to by the performers, could be changed and altered by a process of electronic manipulation during the performance.

The latest album from Christina Pluhar and her instrumental ensemble L’Arpeggiata sheds new light on the chamber cantatas of 17th century Italian composer, Luigi Rossi. He wrote more than 300 of these works and Christina Pluhar’s new double album includes an impressive number of 21 world premiere recordings, which are the fruit of Christina Pluhar’s research among music manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Vatican Library.

Music, song, and poetry have long enjoyed a stimulating relationship; coming together for expressive ends and sometimes colliding in dramatic showdowns. None more so than in these vocal works by two composers who often explore extremes, Milton Babbitt and Michael Hersch. Babbitt’s ‘Philomel’ (1964) was an audacious stab at recasting conventions of song (such as voice with accompaniment) by redistributing the text between live voice, recorded voice, and analog synthesizer. The fragmentary words and syllables by poet John Hollander retell Ovid’s story of the rape and subsequent transformation of Philomel into a nightingale; aptly paralleled by the metamorphosis of the human and artificial sonorities.