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[ Deutsche Grammophon / CD ]
Release Date: Tuesday, 10 October, 2006
This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.
"The greatest virtue of this performance is that it manages to preserve the music’s sense of exploratory excitement alongside a proper concern for precision and textural clarity. No mere technical exercise, Gruppen is a marvellous display piece, and it is the Berlin brass and percussion who have the lion’s share of the limelight, rising to the occasion under the well-prepared guidance of Abbado and his two colleagues." (Gramophone 1997)
This recording of works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Kurtág was made in connection with concerts given by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1994 and the recordings of Gruppen and Stele were made live in concert at the end of that year. Abbado, who conducts the second 'group' in this recording of Gruppen, Stockhausen?s celebrated work for three ensembles, has performed the work on several occasions at concerts of contemporary music when he was Music Director of La Scala Milan. He is joined in this Berlin Philharmonic recording by two conductors well-known for their commitment to and involvement in modern music, Marcus Creed and Friedrich Goldman.
György Kurtág's Grabstein für Stephan (Gravestone for Stephan - Stephan was the husband of the psychologist Marianne Stein, and a friend of Kurtág, who died in 1993) is one of the composer's first large scale compositions for orchestra. Like Stockhausen?s Gruppen, it experiments with spatial effects - in this case groups of keyboards and tuned percussion, gongs, football supporters' alarm signals and whistles, reeds and brass, and low strings, all disposed around a solo guitar (performed here by Jürgen Ruck). But whereas Stockhausen?s work is by design uncentered, Kurtág's is obsessively focussed and concrete, beginning with funeral images of bells, for the wailing of mourners. According to the critic of the Salzburger Nachrichten Grabstein für Stephan is a work that exemplifies nobility, self-possession and concentration.
Like Grabstein für Stephan, Stele is concerned with death. Kurtág com-pleted the work in October 1994 at the end of a year in Berlin during which he was composer in residence and had had ample opportunity to attend peformances and rehearsals of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The work is, however, more conventional in its apparatus, consisting of a Bruckneresque orchestra with a quartet of Wagner tubas to which Kurtág adds only a tuned percussion group (cimbalom, piano and upright piano, celesta, vibraphone, marimba).
Tracks:
György Kurtág (1926 - )
Grabstein für Stephan op.15/c
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - )
Gruppen für drei Orchester - Werk Nr.6
György Kurtág (1926 - )
Stele op.33
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