Music Eighties

Na jarenlang research komen Universal Music en BR Music met de Testament van de Eighties uit de langverwachte opvolger van de succesvolle Sixties en Seventies boxen. Het Testament van de Eighties is wederom een fraai vormgegeven box met 10 cd's, 5 dvd's en een boek.

Mea is the title of the piece opening the CD with Krzysztof Olczak's compositions presented here, a Gdansk composer and accordionist, a long-time lecturer at the Stanislaw Moniuszko Academy of Music in both these fields, a member of the Polish Composers' Union and the Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music.

This third instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two works of astonishing vitality for a composer in his eighties. Both of them have social undercurrents: Symphony No. 22 is driven by ecological concerns about the pollution of the world’s oceans, and No. 23 takes its material from folk-melodies of the Ingrians, a vanishing ethnic group on the Finnish-Russian border. The orchestral writing in both pieces is passionate and wildly inventive, a kaleidoscope of color and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance.

This second volume of Carl Vine’s chamber music concentrates on a period of five years between 1992 and 1997. Although time has moved on from the music featured in volume one, which dealt with works from the mid to late eighties, the Vine hallmarks outlined in my review of the first volume are still evident here, principally a fascination with rhythm and rhythmic structures that manifests itself in all of the pieces featured in some shape or form.

Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat's collection of Arvo Pärt's piano music spans nearly 50 years of his career, from student pieces written in 1958 to a work from 2006. This would not be the right album for listeners looking primarily for Pärt's legendary austere simplicity, but it would be ideal for anyone already familiar with the composer looking for exposure to the broad stylistic and expressive range of which he is capable.

"Let The Music Play" is the authorized story of The Doobie Brothers from their beginnings as a biker band in California in 1970, through their breakthrough with "Listen To The Music" in 1972, sustained success and line-up changes in the mid-seventies and their change of musical direction and further success following the arrival of Michael McDonald in 1976…