Michael Zev Gordon Saraste

Call it postminimalist, totalist, or maximalist, the orchestral music of Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon is big, loud, frenzied, and assertive, jam-packed with stylistic references, dense with inventive orchestration, and overflowing with virtuoso activity. Dystopia, performed by David Robertson and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the city of Los Angeles, created in collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison. This live recording of the work's premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, January 12, 2008, captures the energy and spontaneity of the music, which at times is quite reminiscent of the hubbub of the Shrovetide Fair in Stravinsky's Petrushka, though one must imagine that the listening experience with the film was overwhelming. In contrast, Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not so much a wall of sound as a multi-layered gloss on its original material, an echo of Beethoven's music warped and reshaped through glissandi, microtones, clusters, montage, and other modern techniques.

"Eight cellos in a circle. The audience can sit around the octet, or even inside the circle. The cellists start to play, and the resulting music spirals around like a moving object. 8 is part of a series of works that started with Timber for six percussionists playing amplified simantras, and includes Rushes for seven bassoonists and Amplified for four electric guitarists. Each of these works is meant to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state, in the listener as well as the performer."

Concluding their series of the orchestral music of Johannes Brahms on Profil, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln present the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Tragic Overture on this third volume, thus rounding out a standard set of the seven works that are usually packaged together.

Alban Gerhardt writes admiringly of Rostropovich and the legacy of marvellous works he inspired, but on the evidence of these extraordinary accounts of two of them, he need fear no comparisons with his great Russian forebear.