Communicating the originality, quality and, yes, enjoyment to be found in the music of the post-war avant-garde is no easy task, so credit to Col Legno, faithful documentors of the European New Music scene, for making these discs available, and at mid-price. Booklet-notes are brief but to the point; performances testify to the dedication of the mainly radio-based musicians who have made so much of this music possible.
The Ligeti disc might be thought the least essential, as all the piano works feature on Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s magisterial disc in Sony’s ongoing Ligeti Edition (1/97). Yet Erika Haase brings her own, vividly emotional response to the Etudes, witness the touching vulnerability of ‘Cordes vides’ and the surging power of ‘Automne a Varsovie’. Her wonderfully spontaneous Musica ricercata confirms that less is indeed more, each piece with an expressive force way beyond its prescribed allocation of notes. The harpsichord pieces also sound well; Hungarian Rock is a classic of technique made vital and enjoyable. Worth the attention of aficionados and newcomers alike.
Mauricio Kagel’s pioneering work in a variety of media has ensured him immense influence in Europe but little more than cult status in the UK. The present disc features orchestral works from the late 1980s, where Kagel seems intent on channelling his oblique perspective on past and present through purely musical processes. Music for Keyboard Instruments is interesting primarily for its technical challenges, but Les idees fixes takes the Mahlerian rondo format into intriguing new areas of expression, while the sheer instrumental finesse of Opus 1.991 blurs the boundary between comedy and catastrophe with a humour Kagel has made his own. Excellent performances, and a valuable introduction to just one aspect of his protean output.
Bruno Maderna presents a problem to present-day listeners. A superb, wide-ranging conductor from the outset of his career, the roles of composer and interpreter gradually coalesced to make his later works as much performance events as fully fledged compositions. The First Oboe Concerto counters rhapsodic soliloquies from the soloist with semi-improvised interjections from the ensemble to make intermittently involving listening. Both a philosophy in sound and a touching memento of time and place, Ausstrahlung combines the polemical with the nostalgic to intriguing and touching effect. Giardino religioso is one of several fully realised and scintillating orchestral works that Maderna wrote against time, at the tragically premature end of his life.
The Xenakis disc is an ideal introduction to a composer whose singular approach to sound has had many imitators, but no equals. The whole gamut is here: from 1954’s Metastaseis, precursor of the sonorism so prevalent a decade on, through to the startling synthesis of contemporary and traditional musics in N’Shima and the panoramic sound canvas of 1977’s Jonchaies, from the richest period in Xenakis’s output. Ata finds the composer deriving a more elaborated degree of discourse from his material with at times impressive results, but though the recent Ioolkos draws on his earlier cluster techniques, its crabbed expressive focus and histrionic brass writing show the idiom to have run its course. Visceral performances only enhance the desirability of this issue.
Luigi Nono is in many respects the most provocative figure of his generation, with the outward extremes of his output matched only by its degree of underlying coherence. There’s a fair representation here, with the confident premiere of Due espressioni, its lyrical intensity unique in avant-garde music in 1953, and the saturated ambience of Post-Prae-Ludium, from Nono’s last decade of astoundingly original creativity. The intricate sound world of the Carlo Scarpa tribute feels compressed in this vivid but airless recording, while the Moscow Quartet’s nervy and increasingly frenetic account of Fragmente: Stille, underplaying the silences which give this music its expressive focus, makes only minimal sense of this absorbing and equivocal work.
Overall, then, a varied assortment which is never less than fascinating and on occasion revelatory. While all five discs are worth acquiring, it is the Xenakis which is mandatory listening for anyone attracted to a spirit of vibrant creativity too rarely in evidence today. Hopefully further volumes are planned: Donatoni, Holler, Lachenmann, Scelsi and Zimmermann would make a diverse and welcome second instalment.'