Born in Estonia in 1919, Udo Kasemets has long been resident in Canada. His music—to judge by the three recent works offered on this CD—cannot be accused of having lapsed into comfortable 'mainstream' conventions. The spirit of 'back to basics' is pervasive in Kasemets's experiments with various types of relation between music and mathematics (helpfully explained in the booklet) but the compositions themselves have the air of frameworks from which more richly worked and imaginative sound-structures could one day emerge.
In Requiem Renga—''Renga'' referring to a principle of formal multiplication used in Japanese poetry—the atmosphere of a solemn ritual is efficiently established. Yet the structure plays itself out by way of schematic alternations between strings and percussion (the latter required to improvise) which do little to intensify or refine the basic idea. A quotation of the Dies irae at midpoint may be intended as a flash of illumination but in this context it seems more naive than profound.
Palestrina on Devil's Staircase alludes to the complex structure of a fractal. The oppositions here string glissandos, vocal counterpoint—are more striking than the formulas on offer in Requiem. Even so, the work seems overlong when so little happens to enrich one's response to the initial effect, or even to sustain one's interest. Similarly, in The Eight Houses of the I Ching Kasemets's single-minded exploration of inflected consonance has a certain fascination, but the music tends to pall well before its 22 minutes are up.
It could be that Kasemets's structures are not single-minded enough, his formal frameworks too episodic compared to, for example, Stockhausen's in Stimmung, which projects its elemental source—the harmonic series with mystical intensity. This disc is technically excellent, but it is hard to recommend it, save to listeners likely to share the composer's particular philosophical and scientific preoccupations.'