Xenakis Ensemble

Mr. Xenakis, for to achieve complete victory in his "struggle for existence", would have to create something so different that to anybody else it would be totally meaningless.
Even he has not gone that far, though he has regularly traveled a long way into the desert of incoherence, often by calculating his music so as to maximize disorder. This is the main thrust of his mathematical techniques: his spinning numbers, like John Cage's coin tossings, insure that notes are chosen and ordered by blind chance, or according to processes of change that have little to do with conventional musical perception.
…..
Mr. Xenakis so often equates beauty with savagery: in his fascination with weapons and armor, for instance, with the sea or with the bulls of the Camargue. In his music virtually the whole elaborate machinery of Western composition is set aside, and we are left with a brute vocabulary of other modernists - Stravinsky, Varèse, Harrison Birtwistle - avoidance of the immediate past leads to imagined contact with the archaic.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 1997

It's true that Xenakis' music has a completely unique, totally new expressiveness. It is essentially music that no longer concentrates so heavily on the individual aspect of the masses - in other words, it is truly 20th-century music. In contrast to many of his avant-garde colleagues who, according to Xenakis are still living in the 19th century, Xenakis is an authentic contemporary figure.

from the CD booklet

Violinist Irvine Arditti, pianist Claude Helffer, and the Spectrum ensemble conducted by Guy Protheroe produce consummate performances of the Greek avant-gardist's unwieldy chamber music. If you're familiar with Xenakis's career you'll know he was trained in mathematics and enjoyed a successful career as an architect. Such background might prepare you for the music's preoccupation with line, volume, and form in an unusually abstract way, but it won't prepare you for its visceral, almost primitive power. On Akanthos, the singer Penelope Walmsley-Clark must cope with what is surely one of the most ridiculous soprano parts ever written.

In 1968 the choreographer George Balanchine made a ballet from two works by Xenakis Metastaseis and Pithoprakta and the following year he commissioned Xenakis to compose an original score for New York City Ballet. Antikhthon turned out to be one of the great might-have-been collaborations: Xenakis completed the score in 1971, but the work was never staged. The concept of Antikhthon Anti-Earth or Counter-Earth was first proposed by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton around 400 BC. He speculated that there was a Counter-Earth a hypothetical heavenly body that revolved with the earth around a Central Fire. This led to Philolaus being credited as one of the first to propose that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, but that it was in an orbit around the Sun (Central Fire), with the other planets.

Collecting five CDs for about the price of three, this set of Boulez recordings is without parallel among the conductor's new-music releases. Imagine getting Boulez's celebrated single CD of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke and his equally impressive single CD of Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and Variations for Orchestra, bundled with four pivotal Elliott Carter works, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's electrifying …AGM…, Gérard Grisey's Modulations, Iannis Xenakis's Jalons, Hugues Dufourt's Antiphysis, and Brian Ferneyhough's Funerailles, and you have an idea how far this set stretches.