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GYÖRGY LIGETI: Sonata for solo viola; Lux aeterna; Three Fantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin; ROBERT HEPPENER: Im Gestein – Susanne van Els, viola/Capella Amsterdam/musikFabrik/ Daniel Reuss – HM/Gold

GYÖRGY LIGETI: Sonata for solo viola; Lux aeterna; Three Fantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin; ROBERT HEPPENER: Im Gestein – Susanne van Els, viola/Capella Amsterdam/musikFabrik/ Daniel Reuss – HM/Gold

by | Oct 24, 2016 | Classical CD Reviews

A very eclectic but interesting collection of modern works. GYÖRGY LIGETI: Sonata for solo viola; Lux aeterna; Three Fantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin; ROBERT HEPPENER: Im Gestein – Susanne van Els, viola/Capella Amsterdam/musikFabrik/Daniel Reuss – Harmonia mundi Gold HMG 501985, 64:31, (8/19/16) [Distr. by PIAS] ***1/2: Hungarian “modernist” composer György Ligeti was one of the more prominent voices of the post-war avant-garde movement in eastern Europe. He was never a proponent of serialism and developed a style that was bold and unsettling, yet never very comfortably fit with any of the trends that academic Europe was so adherent to. So, he found himself needing to emigrate to Germany in 1966 and spent the rest of his life trying to forge a reputation for himself. To this day, Ligeti is known mostly for a few key and revolutionary works; such as Atmospheres, Requiem and the present Lux aeterna. (All three of which were used to great effect by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in his revolutionary 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Lux aeterna has always been one of my favorite of Ligeti’s works and, together with the Requiem, created whole new approaches to choral writing. It is simultaneously a beautiful yet very creepy work that […]

BOULEZ: Complete Music for Solo Piano – Marc Ponthus, p. – Bridge (2 discs)

BOULEZ: Complete Music for Solo Piano – Marc Ponthus, p. – Bridge (2 discs)

by | Jun 12, 2016 | Classical CD Reviews

Often neglected music by a controversial and sometimes inconsistent composer…but not here! BOULEZ: Complete Music for Solo Piano – Marc Ponthus, piano – Bridge 9456 A/B (2 CDs), TT: 80:35 ****: So let’s list them: Three Sonatas, 12 Notations, Incises, Une page d’ephemeride—that’s it. One would think that someone like Boulez would have completed many more piano works during the course of his long and semi-productive life, but his penchant for ongoing, incomplete, and constantly revised pieces would seem to work against it. Add to that the Leonard Bernstein problem—the attraction, demands, and difficulties of balancing a conducting career with the composing instinct–and I guess it’s not too hard to see why the output is somewhat limited. However, small though it is, it is also very important. Most of the music is very early, the enfant terrible at work coming to terms with the Second Viennese School, and then advancing their initial efforts into something bordering on the radical. The first effort, 12 Notations, constitute the first real encounters with Berg-Webern-Schoenberg triumph, and the results are an elegant and naïve attempt to internalize the essence of these composers. Boulez dismissed them for years, then returned later to orchestrate several of […]