Customer Reviews

Orchestral Works 3

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This is the third installment of "works for orchestra" on the Timpani label. Arturo Tamayo seems to have made it his personal goal to document many previously unrecorded works by Xenakis. There are four works on this disc, each one a marvelous addition to the body of Xenakis recordings. All of the composer's characteristic gestures are here: mass glissandi, violent rhythms, microtonal clusters. A very fine recording of excellent compositions by a 20th Century master. Worth many listens!

This Timpani disc is the third in the label's project to record all of Iannis Xenakis's orchestral works. (A box set of all five discs has recently appeared.) As always, Arturo Tamayo leads the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. Now, I am a bit concerned about the reliability of these performances, as many Xenakis scores cannot be fully realized by even the greatest virtuosos, and these Luxembourg players and their conductor aren't exactly big names. (Hiroaki Ooï is a rather more renown figure.) Still, if you are exploring the wild output of one of the 20th century's most original composers, this series makes it easy.

The big attraction of Disc 3 is "Synaphai" for piano and 86 musicians (1969), a very unusual sort of concerto. The soloist keeps up a constant stream of pointilistic sonorities -- he's only silent for a couple of bars over the entire 16 minutes -- and the virtuosity of the part is impressive. The orchestra's music is cloud-like, furious tufts of sound that converge over the piano for a time and then disperse. The piece draws to a close with a powerful battery of percussion. This is savage music, but while it is full of dissonance, this is not a result of sticking to a system like serialism, but rather exploiting sonorities for effect. One might compare "Synaphai" to the music of Varese, but with greater complexity, and this is precisely the kind of Xenakis writing that ought to be heard more by fans of IDM and rock music, for they will find much to love here.

"Eridanos" for 68 musicians (1972) is a constantly shifting work where all the possibilities of strings are presented, from exhuberant tremolos to fluttery pizzicato passages. The string passages are interrupted at several points by brass calls, and in the end both strings and brass all join together into a massive ending. There's not much to say about "Eridanos" other than that it is strong Xenakis, the sort of primal but avant-garde style that is unrivalled.

From the early 1980s, Xenakis' works seemed to be all cut from the same roll of cloth, with big, blocky chords moving in slow, foursquare rhythms. "Horos" for 89 musicians (1986) is an example of this late style, though it rises above much else from this period as it contains much variety. There is a remarkable section of eerie, squirming textures and the woodwinds at one point unexpected play a funereal plaint. Though Xenakis was no longer overtly basing his music on mathematics as when he made his name 30 years before, here he applied the principle of cellular automata.

Now, "Horos" isn't all that great of a piece, but I'd much rather listen to it than "Kyania" for 90 musicians (1990), which is 20 minutes of bog-standard late Xenakis. Unbearable.

If you are a fan of Xenakis', then Timpani's project is worth seeking out, and this disc will prove especially entertaining for "Synaphai", "Eridanos" and parts of "Horos". Pity about "Kyania", though.