“Distance de fée” created in 1951, one of the best pieces of Takemitsu’s early period. The spirit of Debussy and Messiaen are fully felt in this work of approximately 7 and 1/2 minutes duration. Messiaen’s octatonic scale is used in the tonal language. The opening lyrical theme is repeated several times, and finds a new pathway upon each return – this is a version of variation as well as rondo form, two of Takemitsu’s favorite compositional procedures. This piece, like many others by Takemitsu, was inspired by poetry, in this case, a poem of the same title by Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1979). This work describes, with lightly mythological imagery, an elusive, transparent creature living in “air’s labyrinth … it lives in the spring breeze That barely resembled the balance of a small bird” source
Arisa Fujita – Violin / Megumi Fujita – Piano
From the album Between Tides and Other Chamber Music with compositions by Toru Takemitsu, with Fujita Piano Trio, released in 2001.
Another excellent recording with unknown performers:
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963). Hindemith is among the most significant German composers of his time. His early works are in a late romantic idiom, and he later produced expressionist works, rather in the style of early Arnold Schoenberg, before developing a leaner, contrapuntally complex style in the 1920s. This style has been described as neoclassical, but is very different from the works by Igor Stavinsky labeled with that term, owing more to the contrapuntal language of Johann Sebastian Bach and Max Reger than the Classical clarity of Mozart. [source]
1. Phantasie (3:06)
2. Thema mit Variationen (4:01)
3. Finale mit Variationen (10:09)
Kim Kaskashian – Viola
Robert Levin – Piano
From: Paul Hindemith – Kim Kashkashian – Robert Levin - Sonatas For Viola And Piano And Viola Alone, released in 1988.
Jesús Rueda Azcuaga (born in Madrid, 30 May 1961) is a Spanish composer. He won the 2004 National Prize for the global quality of his music, with special recognition to his recently premiered symphonic and chamber compositions, such as his Symphony No. 2 and his String Quartet No. 3. His Symphony No. 3, Viaje imaginario (dedicated to his teacher Francisco Guerrero following his untimely death) and a selection of his piano music, including his two sonatas, were subsequently published by Naxos Records.Through his career he has evolved from experimental music to a more mainstream style.He is the resident composer of the Cadaqués Orchestra, and a regular juror of the Queen Sofía Prize. [source]
Ananda Sukarlan – Piano / Proyecto Gerhard Ensemble / José de Eusebio – Direction
Toshio Hosokawa (細川 俊夫 Hosokawa Toshio, born 23 October 1955 in Hiroshima, Japan) is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music Hosokawa studied with Yun Isang at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 1998, Hosokawa has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. In 2004, Hosokawa became a guest professor at Tokyo College of Music. In 2001, Hosokawa became a member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin. [source]
Julio Estrada Velasco (born 10 April 1943) is a composer, theoretician, historian, pedagogue, and interpreter.
Estrada was born in Mexico City, where his family had been exiled from Spain since 1941. He began his musical studies in Mexico from 1953–65, where he studied composition with Julián Orbón. In Paris from 1965-69 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and attended courses and lectures of Iannis Xenakis. In Germany he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1968 and with György Ligeti in 1972. He completed a Ph.D in Musicology at Strasbourg University from 1990-1994. [source]
Lylia Vásquez, – Piano /Álvaro Bitrán – Violoncello.
Grabada en la UAM-Iztapalapa, México, 1982.
From the album by the Croatian composer Dubravko Detoni: Jugoslav AvanGarde Music: Graphies I.II.III / Phonomorphia 1.2.3., written between 1967 – 1970 and released in 1970.
Dubravko Detoni (born 1937 in Križevci, Croatia) is a composer, pianist and writer. Although active since the early 1970s he is almost unknown internationally.
He was educated in Zagreb, Sienna, Warsaw and Darmstadt, and studied with John Cage in Paris. He has written more than a hundred musical pieces, theatrical spectacles, multimedia and performance pieces, books of poetry, essays, commentaries, and radio and TV programs.
As the founder and leader of the ensemble, ACEZANTEZ, he has performed around Europe, Asia and America. [source]
Galina Ivanovna USTVOLSKAYA (1919 — 2006) was a Russian composer of classical music. Ustvolskaya developed her own very particular style, of which she said, “There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.” Among its characteristics are: the use of repeated, homophonic blocks of sound, which prompted the Dutch critic Elmer Schönberger to call her “the lady with the hammer”… [source]
Trio – for violin, clarinet and piano (1949) (16:48)
Sonata No. 5 – in ten movements, for piano (1986) (17:39)
Duet – for violin and piano (1964) (23:47)
Total time: 58:37.
Harmen de Boer – Clarinet (track 1) / Reinbert de Leeuw – Piano / Vera Beths – Violin (track 1,3)
Digital recording: October 5 & 6 1991, De Vereeniging, Nijmegen. The Trio is in three movements, marked espressivo (8:30), dolce (3:33) and energico (4:45), but is indexed as a single track. The CD was released in 1992 on hat ART records. Copyright (c) Hat Hut Records Ltd.
Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky ( 9 March/21 March (OS) 1888, – 25 September/6 October (OS) 1914, ), was a Russian composer. He was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Nikolai Zhilyayev and Serdei Taneyev. He was recognized as an outstanding talent but suffered from mental problems and was several times confined in a psychiatric clinic. He drowned under mysterious circumstances, perhaps suicide, on 25 September/6 October (OS) 1914.He tore up much of his work in fits of hallucination and rage. Thankfully, however, friends and colleagues managed to reconstruct many of his pieces. Almost all Stanchinsky’s surviving works are for piano; they include three sonats, Sketches, and several preludes. He attempted to combine modality, complex polyphony, and post-Romantic chromatic harmony in the manner of Scribin. Despite his short life he made a considerable impression on his contemporaries, and though for a long time almost none of his music was published, his pieces circulated in manuscript. Among significant Russian piano composers Prokofiev (who wrote an article about Stanchinsky in 1913), Arthur Lourié, Anatoni Alexandrow, and Samuil Feinberg all acknowledged his influence. [source]
Pianist: Robert Henry.
From “Twelve Nocturnes and a Waltz” with Robert Henry.
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist. Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is especially known for his development of drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and “minimal” compositions question the nature and definition of music and often stress elements of performance art. [source]
John Cale about “X for Henry Flynt” by La Monte Young: “In 1962, I was at Goldsmiths [College]. I was really wrapped up in writing pieces that were instructions. That’s when I found La Monte Young, and Cage, and “4’33″”, which threw another spanner in the works, because it was really about how environment impacts performance. This is a peculiar American thing that was very fractured, because in Europe, the concert was sacrosanct: silence, and you listen. But you don’t listen to Cage as much as you read him. If you read him in Silence, or A Year From Monday, you get a world outlook that’s very interesting. The walls of the concert hall were not the only thing that he was breaking down.
We learned about discipline and working every day from La Monte, about not particularly forcing anything to happen, but allowing things to happen. I think Cage liked how La Monte was writing instructions for performers. That’s the original performance art. And those instructions didn’t just deal with performance or music. “X for Henry Flynt” was a piece where you pick an event and then you repeat it X number of times with the same gap in time between it. “Draw a straight line and follow it,” which was really about Einstein and space. If you draw a straight line and you come back to where you started, then space is finite. So you really didn’t know what’s performance and what’s not.
Later, when La Monte and I were working together down here on Church Street, holding the drum for an hour and a half every day for a year and a half, it’s like, “What is a performance? Where does it start and where does it end?” And his idea was that it didn’t. He said it was a very Chinese idea at the time. Everybody else in Europe think about centuries. But China thinks in terms of eons.”
