Spiegel Best

With "Nemesis - The Best Of & Reworked", Blutengel are not only releasing their first official Greatest-Hits-Album, but also a rather special kind of history lesson, presenting classic songs, hits and favorites from the past in the sound of today…

For newcomers to the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, this generous two-disc collection of performances from EMI's archive would be a good place to start exploring. The authoritative Pärt performances would probably be the premiere releases on ECM, produced by Manfred Eicher, but these performances are all of a very high quality and there is a handful of works that ECM has never recorded. Pärt's most famous works are here; there are three versions each of the ever-popular Fratres (for violin and piano, string orchestra and harp, and string quartet) and Summa (for mixed voices, string orchestra, and string quartet), as well as the version of Spiegel in Spiegel for violin and piano, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell, and the concerto for two violins and prepared piano, Tabula rasa.

From the fiery boogie opener ‘Any Second Now’, through to the dark acoustic closing of ‘Old Wounds’, Cut and Run takes the listener on a trip from honest acoustic ballads to searing Blues Rock and captures Lloyd Spiegel at his best as a vocalist and guitarist while providing some of his best lyrical work to date. This album, along with This Time Tomorrow (2017) and last year’s Backroads concludes a trilogy of albums and represents the fruits of an intensely creative time for the Melbourne-based bluesman. Says Spiegel, “the last three years I’ve written one album while touring the previous so it’s a natural progression that each group of songs is a response to the last. Cut and Run has a positivity and clarity in it that for me, resolves a great deal of the questions I asked myself on the last two albums. It’s definitely the end of a chapter for me both musically and personally.”

Friedrich Cerha (b. 1926) is revealed by this great 2-disc Kairos set to be one of the great composers of the late 20th Century, who deserves to be recognized alongside Xenakis, Ligeti, Nono, Stockhausen, and Boulez. Cerha was the 2012 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the "Nobel Prize of music," and so his reputation and stature outside of Austria are belatedly coming to more closely match the esteem he enjoys in his own country. Cerha's own music has only been extensively documented recently, with a series of discs on Austrian neuemusik label Kairos, as well as recordings on the ECM, Col Legno, and Neos labels.