Polyphony

György Ligeti - Double Concerto, San Francisco Polyphony, etc. (1987) {BIS-CD-53}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 373 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 175 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 25 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1974-87, 1987 Grammofon AB BIS | BIS-CD-53
Classical / Chamber Music / Concerto / Modern Classical / Modern Composition

In 1961, the young Hungarian composer György Ligeti did a pretty amazing thing: he wrote a piece called Atmospheres, in which almost nothing happens, extremely slowly. The European avant-garde was still obsessed with quantifying musical parameters, with crystallizing pitch, duration, timbre, and register into rigid regions, radiating with speed and hardness – and then Ligeti cast out this massive orchestral goo, the enemy of all geometries, devoid of contours and as slow and gaseous as a trip through Saturn. A paean to all mysterious and intangible, Atmospheres initialized both a brilliant swerve from the music of its time, and a kind of life-journey for Ligeti's own incipient voice: a musical vision on the verge of disintegration, inventively trying to put itself back together, to re-integrate.

The bizarre presentation of this disc by the Portuguese recorder ensemble A Imagem da Melancolia may be enough to put listeners off of the whole thing, but they'll be missing out on some attractive recorder arrangements of organ music if they let it happen. The bad news begins with the "Bad Tempered Consort" title, which is apparently supposed to be humorous; it doesn't seem to refer in any way to tuning, but it's hard to say exactly what it is supposed to mean. In search of an explanation, the buyer may step inside to the booklet essay, a self-indulgent and muddled exposition of the idea that musicians should be able to do pretty much whatever they want to with a score.

Missa Charles Darwin is a multi-movement composition scored for unaccompanied male vocal quartet written by Gregory W. Brown using texts from Darwin compiled and edited by New York Polyphony bass Craig Phillips.

Described by the French Radio as "One of the most gifted pianists of the young generation " and as "a young artist with a distinctive voice", Franco-Belgian Antoine Préat is establishing a solid concert career.