Arditti 4

As an architect and mathematician, Iannis Xenakis brings an unusual eye to bear on his compositional ear. He rejected twelve-tone composition decades ago, instead pushing the envelope further on determinate numbers and sounds and generating a broader palette of available sounds. Graphical notation has been one of Xenakis's chief means of expression, allowing him to script sharply sliding glissandi and what he calls non-octave scales. This 2-CD set collects three string quartets and the busy, aching Akea, Xenakis's quintet for piano and strings. The unsurpassed Arditti String Quartet plays the ensemble pieces, and then farms out constituent members to play the solo and duo pieces. Pianist Claude Helffer creates pointed havoc on his three solo appearances, offering spare tones and dense steam alike. When playing with the Ardittis, Helffer makes himself central to the hard punch and slightly mad—extremely unconventional drama.

—Amazon.com

Vol 1 of the György Ligeti Edition, World Premiere Recording of the Duets
Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg (1982)
Baladä si joc (1950)
Andante and Allegretto (1950)

In his 90th year, Elliott Carter is doing something few nonagenarians ever do: he's premiering a striking new string quartet, his fifth. And it's an awe-inspiring piece. The Arditti String Quartet takes up the short phrases that run with and then against one another with sureness, plucking and scraping and making their bows sing. They then delve into each of the five interludes that interrogate the quartet's six sections and play through the disparate splinters of tone and flushes of midrange color as if they were perfectly logical developments. Which they're not. Carter has again brilliantly scripted a chatter of stringed voices–à la the second quartet–that converse quickly, sometimes mournfully, but never straightforwardly. This complexity of conversation is a constant for Carter, coming sharply to light in "90+" and then in Rohan de Saram and Ursula Oppens's heaving read of the 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano, as well as in virtually all these pieces. This is a monumental recording, extending the documented work of a lamentably underappreciated American composer.