Point Blank Music School

Contact Point is the second live release by MoIT, and feels warm and earthly compared to their debut double CD set Everlasting Moment. While their earlier album explored the edges, dynamics and tension of space and atmosphere, Contact Point presents the more unified themes of cosmic, biospheric and macrocosmic interaction. Through the use of environmental field recordings, drifting melodies and soft sonic textures set against submerged drones, billowing sequencer patterns and breezy guitar and synth lead lines, Contact Point depicts the mystery and beauty of telluric ideals. While their music touches on many of the hallmarks of Berlin-School Spacemusic, MoIT brings their own influences and innovation to the process…

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Aus den Sieben Tagen (1993) {7CD Set Stockhausen-Verlag 14 rec 1969, 1972}
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© 1969, 1972, 1993 Stockhausen-Verlag | Stockhausen 14
Classical / Avant-Garde / Contemporary Classical / Intuitive Music / 20th Century

Karlheinz Stockhausen emerged early on as one of the most influential and unique voices in the post-WWII European musical avant-garde and his prominence continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty first. Combining a keen sensitivity to the acoustical realities and possibilities of sound, rigorous and sophisticated compositional methods expanded from integral serialism, innovative theatricality, and a penchant for the mystical, Stockhausen remains one of the most innovative musical personalities to span the turn of this century.

In the course of an astonishing long life, Leo Ornstein (1893 - 2002) had many shifts of fortune. Recognized as a child prodigy on the piano, Ornstein's family fled the Russian pogroms and moved to New York City in 1906. Ornstein studied piano and composition and graduated from what would become the Juilliard School of Music. From 1915 through the mid 1920's, Ornstein was famous as a concert pianist and notorious as a composer of highly dissonant, futurist works of avant-garde music. Coming from a poor Russian Jewish family, Ornstein married a wealthy heiress, Pauline Mallet-Provost. In the 1920s, Ornstein abruptly retired from the concert stage and founded a music school in Philadelphia.

It's not at all clear whether this release delivers the promised Polish harpsichord music, but the music contained herein is nonetheless interesting. Composer Józef Elsner was born in 1769, and the sonatas and dances on the program come from a pair of publications that appeared in 1803 and 1805. Harpsichordist Urszula Bartkiewicz argues in her own notes (in Polish and English) that either a harpsichord or a piano might have been used for this music, but she cites no evidence that a harpsichord would have been a common choice for ambitious works like the sonatas here at this late date.

The circle of musicians surrounding Germany's audiophile MDG label has been responsible for several important discoveries in the music of the late 18th century, and this pair of chamber works for winds and strings, unearthed by bassoonist Rainer Schottstädt of the Calamus Ensemble, must rank among the nicest. Composer Luigi Gatti crossed paths with Mozart several times; in 1783, after Mozart had left Salzburg, he become court music director to the infamous Archbishop Colloredo. The Sextet for English horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass recorded here may have been composed in 1790, and the uniquely titled Serenata a più stromenti di Concerto seems to be of roughly the same vintage.

Acte Préalable continues its exploration of little-known and, up to now, unheard Polish repertoire. Their rapidly-growing catalogue contains some of the better-known Poles - Chopin being an obvious example - as well as a smattering of releases of Bartók and Beethoven. However, with the apparent embarrassment of musical riches to be found in Poland, they have chosen to stick with a continuing string of world-premiere recordings of Polish composers both new and old. Here we have what might be the final instalment of Lessel’s chamber music. Much was considered lost, and his first string quartet only one complete movement has survived was a rather recent discovery.