The 2nd installment in John Eliot Gardiner's exciting new Brahms series. Brahms' most popular symphony coupled with the richly beautiful Alto Rhapsody (well-known in earlier performances by Janet Baker). Lavishly packaged hard-bound edition will appeal to Gardiner's immense loyal following.

“Music is calligraphy using sounds painted on the canvas of silence.” Toshio Hosokawa’s idea demonstrates his engagement with Far Eastern calligraphy as the most prominent connection between his compositional esthetic and traditional Japanese arts as well as the principles of Asian philosophy. There is not a single note in the music of this Japanese composer that is not continuously modified like a brushstroke – every sound seems to be the result of inexorable change embedded in cyclic processes of birth and decay.
Whereas constant oscillation is typical of “Landscape II”, “Landscape V” is one of Hosokawa’s most peaceful and static pieces. It was influenced by Mark Rothko’s monochromatic color field paintings, where a relationship is created between two nearly identical colors. Here the string quartet and the Japanese mouth organ sho seem to merge to become an oscillating instrument.
Hosokawa composed “Elegy” as a memorial to Miyako Umehara, the wife of his friend, the philosopher Takeshi Umehara. The piece was first performed at the funeral ceremony by Himari Umehara, the daughter of the deceased.
With its mixture of horizontally flowing microtonal motion and strikingly consonant vertical constructions (almost traditionally European), “Small Chant” appears like a synthesis of European and Asian conceptions of sound.
Hosokawa has in his music repeatedly made reference to specific historical events and their existential repercussions. “Threnody” is dedicated to the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing devastating tsunami on 11 March 2011, which claimed more than 20,000 lives.
co-production with Sudwestrundfunk

1 Mémoire / Erosion (1976), Pour Cor Et Ensemble Instrumental 17:39
Conductor - Charles Bruck
Ensemble - Ensemble L'Itinéraire
Horn - Alain Noël
Recorded By - Jean-Pierre Pelissier
2 Ethers (1978), Pour Flûte Et Cinq Instruments 20:38
Cello - David Simpson
Conductor - Jacques Mercier
Contrabass - Joëlle Léandre
Flute - Pierre-Yves Artaud
Recorded By - Claude Pavy
Trombone - Christian Marchand
Viola - Geneviève Renon
Violin - Ami Flamer
3 C'est Un Jardin Secret, Ma Soeur, Ma Fiancée, Une Fontaine Close, Une Source Scellée (1976), Pour Alto Seul 5:00
Recorded By - Alain Brasseur
Viola - Sylvie Altenburger
4 Les Courants De L'espace (1979), Pour Ondes Martenot Et Orchestre 19:21
Conductor - Yves Prin
Ondes Martenot - Jeanne Loriod
Orchestra - Orchestre National De France

Eonta, for 2 trumpets, 3 trombones & piano
Composed by Iannis Xenakis
with M. Chapellier, Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine de Paris, Yuji Takahashi, Pierre Thibaud, J. Toulon, G. Moisan, L. Longo
Metastasis, for 60 musicians (Anastenaria, Part 3)
Composed by Iannis Xenakis
Performed by Orchestre National de l' O.R.T.F.
Conducted by Maurice Le Roux
Pithoprakta, for 49 musicians
Composed by Iannis Xenakis
Performed by Orchestre National de l' O.R.T.F.
Conducted by Maurice Le Roux

This album is our second collection of Iannis Xenakis’ music recorded under the aegis of Konstantin Simonovitch. It includes Atrées and Morsima-Amorsima (“what comes by fate-what doesn’t”), two works composed using probability theory, as well as notable chamber and solo pieces such as ST/4 for string quartet. Featuring the young Georges Pludermacher in one of his earliest recordings!

In November 2014, Radio France inaugurated its new auditorium with a programme giving carte blanche to one of the most eminent composers of our time, Peter Eötvös, who was then celebrating his seventieth birthday. On this occasion, three of his concertos were given their world premiere recordings under his direction with three soloists of the front rank. The violin concerto DoReMi, played here by its dedicatee Midori, is followed by Cello Concerto Grosso, a triangular dialogue between the solo cello, the cello section, and the full orchestra. The spectacular Speaking Drums concludes the programme on a highpoint: the orchestra (around forty musicians) prolongs the performance theatrical as much as musical of the percussionist, who declaims texts by the poets Sándor Weöres (in Hungarian) and Jayadeva (in Sanskrit) and moves from point to point on the platform, thus creating links with various instruments of the orchestra. The stunning Martin Grubinger lends his voice and his percussion playing to this piece, which ends in highly virtuosic polyrhythm.