Anu Komsi / Avanti! / Hannu Lintu KAIJA SAARIAHO From the Grammar of Dreams

Grammaire des Rêves (Grammar of Dreams, 1988-89) was born from my curiosity about the relationship between human voice and instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece indicates, another source of interest was the structural life of dreams.

Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form.
Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as imaginary matrices, through which the instrumental parts are ‘filtered’.

The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard. Some longer fragments have been used from his poem ‘Premierèment’ (‘L’Amour la Poésie’).

Grammaire des Rêves is dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Barrière; the first performance was in Paris on the 23rd March 1989 by Ensemble l’Itineraire with Esa-Pekka Salonen. (Kaija Saariaho)

Wu Man / Yuri Bashmet / Moscow Soloists TAN DUN Pipa Concerto - HAYASHI Viola Concerto - TAKEMITSU Nostalghia

Tan Dun's Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa (1999) is a reworking of one of his most popular works, Ghost Opera, written for and recorded by the Kronos Quartet. In this version, the composer's characteristic polystylism -- which here includes Chinese folk song, Copland-esque Big Sky music, quotations from Bach, and vocalizations by the orchestra -- comes across as a jumble, without much of a strong vision holding the disparate elements together. Pipa virtuoso Wu Man, who appeared on the Kronos recording, plays the concerto with energy and delicacy. She's ably accompanied by the Moscow Soloists, led by Yuri Bashmet. The concerto is followed by Takemitsu's Nostalghia (1987) for violin and string orchestra. Its compositional assurance, clarity, subtly nuanced orchestration, and emotional directness make it all the more striking in contrast to the Tan Dun. Here Bashmet is the impassioned soloist, with Roman Balashov conducting with great sensitivity. The three brief excerpts from Takemitsu's film scores are a pleasant stylistic diversion -- light, strongly differentiated character pieces. Hikaru Hayashi's Concert-elegia for viola and strings is a substantial contribution to the small repertoire of successful viola concertos. As its title suggests, its tone is essentially one of gentle melancholy, but it's also characterized by an optimistic serenity. It's elegantly and beautifully conceived and constructed, with a transparent emotional appeal. The versatile Bashmet plays with warmth and deep feeling. Onyx's sound is clean, clear, and warmly atmospheric. (Stephen Eddins)

Angèle Dubeau et La Pietà JEAN FRANÇAIX Gargantua et autres plaisirs

Jean Françaix (1912-1997) was something of a chronological anomaly. He came of age in the era when neo-Classicism was in vogue and the influence of Les Six was ascendant, and those trends came to inform the musical style that he continued to practice with little fluctuation throughout his long life. His Gargantua, for speaker and string orchestra, dates from 1971, the same year Elliott Carter wrote his Third String Quartet, but it could easily have been written in the 1930s, as could the other works recorded here, L'heure du Berger (1972) and Sérénade B E A (1955). The friendly harmonic language, melodic invention, formal clarity, and pervading tone of whimsicality set them far apart from just about any aspect of the prevailing modernism. The 40-minute Gargantua uses as its basis an absurd fable by Rabelais, and the music offers a pleasant, unobtrusive background to the narration. The text is in French, and no translation is provided so, it's likely to have limited impact on non-French speakers. The two purely instrumental works have a higher musical profile and are more immediately appealing. Without the constraint of keeping from covering the text, Françaix is less inhibited in his invention, and many of the movements are unabashedly dancelike, with a playful wit. Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau and her string ensemble La Pietà play with an appropriate elegance and delicacy. The sound is crisp and present. The album should appeal to fans of light, well-crafted music, particularly of the Gallic variety. (Stephen Eddins)

Tõnu Kaljuste / Tallinn Chamber ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR Crystallisatio

"Erkki-Sven Tüür's music," writes Wolfgang Sander, "sounds as if it had strolled through the history of music assimilating theoretical inspiration and practical experience along the way. Then it seems to have wrapped itself up in a cocoon, immune to the outside world, there to develop its own contours, as indicated by the abrupt contrasts. Tüür's music is realistic; it has confidence in its historical references, but it is removed." One could add that Tüür's "removal" from the international new music community was hardly his own choice: his compositional approach was established in an enforced political and geographical isolation. The same, of course, can be said for many of the composers from the former Soviet Union who, between them, have created music of enormous diversity. Tüür is impatient with the Western journalistic habit of bracketing together all post-Soviet composers as if they represented a recognizable "genre", while, at the same time, he acknowledges that every artist, whether he wishes it to be the case or not, is inevitably a product of his environment. Is his work, then, intrinsically "Estonian?" "Maybe there is something, related to the general 'Nordic' way of seeing the world, influenced by the specific geographical area, by how dark and short the days are in winter, and how light and short the nights are in summer." Tüür's New Series debut opens with Archtectonics VI, written in 1992, a characteristically "rhetorical" work that pits quasi-minimal writing for strings against serial parts for flute, clarinet and vibraphone; serialism ultimately gains the upper hand in this particular debate. Passion (1993) for strings, which follows, builds from the slow filling of space with double bass and cellos in the lowest register to sound-clusters for violins in the high register. Illusion, a partner-piece for Passion and composed the same year, deconstructs a baroque motif. Wolfgang Sander describes it as a "disrupted litany... one hundred and eleven measures composed as if in rapture." Crystallisatio (1995) for three flutes, campanelli, strings and live electronics, is particularly mysterious and beguiling. The sound potential of the flutes is subtly expanded by electronic processing and digital delay. Requiem (1994) was written in tribute to Peeter Lilje, chief conductor of the Estonian State Orchestra, a close friend of the composer who died in 1993 at the age of 43. Tüür sets the text of the Catholic mass for the dead.

Nino Gvetadze DEBUSSY

I have been waiting for the moment to record Debussy’s music for some time. While playing his pieces I had the urge to keep playing, to keep discovering the colours, the touch, almost trying to reach for a perfection, which of course is not possible; and the further I went, the deeper I looked, I kept discovering endless possibilities for fantasy, and the images flew one after another into my head.

I did not want my next CD to be just the next CD; I wanted to do something useful and as we are often discussing the lack of classical music education among children and young people, I decided to do something about it from my side and organized workshops mostly for children, but also for adults.

I decided that the best way for me to awaken musical interest in children, to really lead them through music, was via drawings, so I asked them to close their eyes, to listen to the sound, rhythm, harmony, melody and imagine what would it look like if this piece was a drawing or a painting. Debussy’s music was perfect for this project, as he gives you endless space for imagination. The result was unexpected even for me, the enthusiasm that I saw in my young public’s eyes and the range of fantasy was truly amazing.

I worked with more than 200 children and received more than 200 beautiful drawings. I may not have changed the world, but at least I opened the doors to music to some children and I hope they will follow the route to this beautiful Muse throughout the years. (Nino Gvetadze 29.10.2013)

Matt Haimovitz / Dennis Russell Davies PHILIP GLASS Cello Concerto No. 2 "Naqoyqatsi"

As the subtitle indicates, the music in the Cello Concerto No. 2 ("Naqoyqatsi") of Philip Glass is not new but is drawn from the score to the film of that title composed by Glass in 2002. Though the term is drawn from Hopi cosmology, the film used a good deal of computer-assisted imagery to address the theme of the relationship between technology and the natural world. Glass' music, as usual, is entirely performed on conventional orchestral instruments. The original score had a prominent cello part, performed on the soundtrack recording by Yo-Yo Ma, and Glass has here boiled the original score, with perhaps a dozen cuts, down to seven movements that seem to make a vaguely linear sequence. The music is a good example of Glass' mature film scores, which may endure as his most lasting works; it combines the composer's characteristic minimal textures with more elaborate cello lines, some involving lightly extended techniques, that seem to evoke the metaphysical concept under examination ("Massman," "Intensive Time," "Point Blank," etc.). Although there's nothing new here, the version makes an attractively sized package of Glass, and listeners without access to the film may well prefer it as more coherent in this form. The realization is very strong. Cellist Matt Haimovitz, who has specialized in experimental mixtures of concert and vernacular traditions, acquits himself in such a way that no one will be thinking about Yo-Yo Ma; Glass' solo parts, although not virtuosic in a fancy way, aren't easy, for they require the composer's ensemble concepts to be sustained over long periods. Haimovitz soars. Another attraction is the superlative live recording in Cincinnati's venerable Music Hall; it would be hard to think of a venue that would be better in providing the resonant yet clean acoustic Glass' music demands. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, who has conducted a lot of Glass in his time, catches the grander moments of the score without giving them the pounding quality they take in inferior Glass performances. (James Manheim)

Nino Gvetadze MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition and 10 other piano pieces

The Georgian pianist Nino Gvetadze was born in 1981 and studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Since winning the YPF National Piano Competition in 2004, she has appeared with many leading orchestras and performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Modest Mussorgsky’s turbulent and muddled life somehow enabled him to become one of the most visionary and innovative composers in Russia in the 19th century. ‘Art is not an end in itself, but a means of conversing with one’s fellow creatures’ he wrote in his autobiography. This view may in some way explain the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in his music. He had been called a ‘barbarian’ by some of his colleagues, and even his friend and fellow member of ‘The Mighty Handful’ (the group of five leading Russian nationalist composers) Rimsky-Korsakov thought he lacked refinement.

His vivid tonal pallette was to become an important influence on composers such as Debussy and Ravel, the latter famously orchestrating Mussorgksy’s piano masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition. The original is the main work on this disc which includes all his extant works for solo piano. Much of his output for piano dates from his early years as a composer, and two piano sonatas, in E flat major and F minor, have sadly been lost.

New recording, containing pieces that are rarely recorded

One of a series of releases highlighting the winners of the principal prizes at the prestigious YPF Young Pianist Foundation’s National Piano Competition in Holland.

‘A musician to be reckoned with.’ De Telegraaf