Spiegel

Friedrich Cerha (b. 1926) is revealed by this great 2-disc Kairos set to be one of the great composers of the late 20th Century, who deserves to be recognized alongside Xenakis, Ligeti, Nono, Stockhausen, and Boulez. Cerha was the 2012 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the "Nobel Prize of music," and so his reputation and stature outside of Austria are belatedly coming to more closely match the esteem he enjoys in his own country. Cerha's own music has only been extensively documented recently, with a series of discs on Austrian neuemusik label Kairos, as well as recordings on the ECM, Col Legno, and Neos labels.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is almost exclusively associated with his later works. Born in 1935, his early music was very much ‘avant-garde’ in style. In the 1970s, he increasingly found his inspiration in medieval religious music, both western and eastern European. This first transpired in his Für Alina for piano. It features the telling low tempo and two layer structure which were to become trademarks of his later works.

Spiegel is a cycle of seven orchestral works "Spiegel" and is mentioned in a few surveys as a key representative of a style known as "field music". (…) Not that moods or humour are excluded: near the middle of the cycle, horns break out into punctuated calls of fifths, which gradually morph into a sort of demented "oom-pah" band. Perhaps Ligeti was recalling ……

Fabrice Fitch @ Grammophone