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CD/SACD
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NEOS 10934CD
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Featured works: Composizione in tre tempi (1954), Concerto per flauto e orchestre (1954) performed by Thaddeus Watson, flute; Aria for soprano, flute and orchestra (1964) Claudia Barainsky, soprano; Sebastian Wittiber, flute. Dimensioni III for flute and orchestra (1962-1963) performed by Clara Andrada de la Calle, flute/piccolo. Stele per Diotima for orchestra (1966) performed by Alejandro Rutkauskas, violin; Jochen Tschabrun, clarinet; Ulrich Büsing, bass clarinet; John MacDonald, horn; hr-Sinfonieorchester/Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Tamayo. "At the centre of the second part of our Maderna edition are concertante works, many of which formed the building blocks for the opera 'Hyperion.' Conductor Arturo Tamayo was able to draw all instrumental soloists from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra: in the Hölderlin 'aria' and flute concertos with Thaddeus Watson, Sebastian Wittiber and Clara Andrada de la Calle, in the 'Stele per Diotima' with concert master Alejandro Rutkauskas as well as Jochen Tschabrun (clarinet), Ulrich Büsing (bass clarinet) and John MacDonald (horn). One main theme of the works remains the way the individual is torn between rebellion and resigna-tion, reflected in the words from the 'Thalia' fragment, sung here by Claudia Barainsky: 'I question the stars...the day, and the night, but they do not answer...'." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.
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CD/SACD
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NEOS 10935CD
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Featured works: Ausstrahlung (1971) for female voice, flute, oboe, large orchestra and tape; Biogramma (1972) for large orchestra; Grande Aulodia (1970) for flute, oboe and orchestra. "Of the leading figures of Europe's postwar avant-garde, Bruno Maderna was the embodiment of the free spirit. More than any other, he was at once a visionary and a pragmatist and referred to his music with modest understatement as 'conductor's music.' The truth was that, being an expressive and highly sensitive conductor with no patience for arid sobriety, he knew more about the orchestra and bestrode a more spacious music-historical terrain than his colleagues. His repertoire, which included early music as well as the great symphonic masterpieces, reads like a lexicon of advanced modernism. He had a low opinion of the rigorous radicalism championed by Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, and compared rigid ideological stances with the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. His music represents a fruitful interaction between tradition and the new and unknown; he considered the idea of stylistic hermeticism to be a dead end incompatible with human nature." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.
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CD/SACD
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NEOS 10936CD
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2012 release. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. 'Aura' was commissioned for the 80th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which gave the work its premiere in Chicago under Maderna's baton on 23 March 1972. The 54 strings are divided into six groups while the winds players and percussionists function as a single group, often adding musical punctuation. It is very difficult for the listener to distinguish between aleatoric passages and rigorously composed sections, for the divergent sound sources are subjected to a process of amalgamation: the parts interweave to create mood-paintings ranging from delicate poetry to tempestuous outbursts. 'Aura' is marked by violent contrasts, such as the nostalgic expression of the strings (reminiscent of Alban Berg) and the eruptive force of the brass. In the composer's integrative world view, it probably formed a sort of aural reflection of the life's reality in all its multi-layered simultaneities and contradictions. 'Amanda,' Maderna called it 'a sort of serenade,' was composed in 1966 and premiered in Naples on 25 October 1966. It is the most uninhibited, cheerful and lyrical composition among the works included in Vol. 4. Apart from a few percussion instruments, the chamber ensemble consists entirely of members of the string family, including mandolin and guitar. The piece quotes fragments from Maderna's earlier works, such as 'Stele per Diotima'; in turn, fragments from 'Amanda' would later crop up in new surroundings in the 'Violin Concerto' of 1969, which many consider Maderna's crowing work of the 1960s. 'Giardino religioso' was composed in 1972 and performed in public for the first time in Tanglewood on 8 August 1972, after which it was recorded for Columbia. It was written on a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation. Maderna had paid a visit to the American patron Paul Fromm and admired the idyll of his splendid gardens. The piece makes use of a smaller orchestra than its predecessors 'Quadrivium' and 'Aura.' The conductor moves among the various orchestral groups as if traversing paths in a garden. Much space is given over to free improvisation, albeit with many detailed instructions from the composer. One of these instructions, at the opening, reads 'like the awakening of little birds'; later we find 'at the climax the conductor may add timpani and winds at his discretion' and, at the end, 'the conductor is at liberty to improvise with the trumpets and double bass.' Performed by: hr-Sinfonieorchester/Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Tamayo (conductor), Alejandro Rutkauskas (violin), percussionists Konrad Graf, Andreas Hepp, Burkhard Roggenbruck, Andreas Boettger.
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