Contemporary Music Score

This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.

Here’s a strange and interesting CD if I’ve ever heard one. It begins with Peter Eötvös’s contemporary piece Levitation, written for two clarinets, accordion, and strings. But don’t break out your polka records for a comparison; this music is more of the style normally described as “contemporary ambient,” with brief shards of musical motifs drifting, interacting, and creating a mood rather than a work with a form that one can grasp. Ironically, I find it much more palatable than some of the contemporary music I’ve reviewed recently, such as Maxwell Davies’s Symphony No. 1 or the piano music of Judith Lang Zaimont. The first section depicts a hurricane scene in which phone boxes and traffic signs float on the violent winds, yet the music is not as violent as the description suggests. Its fragmentary nature, and reliance on a small group of instruments, results in an atonal yet somehow fascinating musical environment.

Peter Sculthorpe was the most internationally prominent Australian composer to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. This Australian composer produced earthy, gripping soundscapes with original timbres that incorporate elements of Australian, Japanese, and Southeast Asian musics and express poetic imagery from primal nature and profound human interaction.
Peter Sculthorpe, educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Melbourne. His early works (most now withdrawn) were influenced by …..

Peter Sculthorpe was the most internationally prominent Australian composer to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. This Australian composer produced earthy, gripping soundscapes with original timbres that incorporate elements of Australian, Japanese, and Southeast Asian musics and express poetic imagery from primal nature and profound human interaction.
Peter Sculthorpe, educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Melbourne. His early works (most now withdrawn) were influenced by …..

'Written on Skin' is the second collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. Their previous one-act opera 'Into The Little Hill' has been received with universal acclaim. Written on skin was jointly commissioned by The Festival d Aix-en-Provence and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and this recording was largely produced from a broadcast recording by Radio France in July 2012 at Aix. George Benjamin’s status as one of the UK’s leading composers has created unprecedented demand for the new opera.

It is a meaningful sign of the times that Astor Piazzolla is arguably one of the most frequently performed composers on the contemporary musical stage, even though he probably never aimed at writing “classical” music. True, one of the fundamental encounters of his life was with composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, who mentored many of the most important avant-garde musicians of the second half of the twentieth century. And, under her guidance, Piazzolla did attempt to express his personality through the language of Western contemporary music. The results, of course, were very good, since nobody could question Piazzolla’s talent. Yet, when Piazzolla performed one of the tangos he had already written to his professor, she exclaimed: “Astor, all your classical pieces are well written, but the true Piazzolla sound is here, never leave it behind!”. And if the language of Piazzolla’s music does not correspond to that of the coeval European avantgardes, neither does it conform to the standards of the Argentinian tango tradition. It is precisely for his utter originality that Astor Piazzolla rightfully claimed and obtained a place in the pantheon of twentieth-century classical music. But it is also this originality that may puzzle those attempting to classify him within one of the established musical categories.

Celebrating his 80th birthday in 2012, Per Nørgård is undoubtedly one of the most important Danish composers since Nielsen. This disc brings together his two violin concertos as well as the orchestral work Spaces of Time. The music of Helle Nacht (‘bright night’) has several transparent layers, and at each hearing the listener will be able to experience the work differently. The transparency of the music is even more pronounced in the version for chamber orchestra, created especially for Peter Herresthal.