18 April 2017

Ensemble Heute - Homage to Bela Bartok and John Cage (granit 2001)


From the usual people of Reform Art, but here completely different music from what I'v heard from them until now.The title says it all.

Paul Fields - violin
Margarete Jungen - mezzosoprano
Karl Wilhelm Krbavac - viola da gamba
Sepp Mitterbauer - trumpet
Fritz Novotny - glockenspiel, gongs, flute, soprano sax
Giselher Smekal - piano
Monika Stadler - harp

1. Pierrot Songs (Smekal)
2. Bela (Novotny)
3. John (Fields, Novotny)
4. Ovid (Fields, Novotny)

recorded between december 2000 and june 2001

Granit record, CD
GR 2001-0-05

6 comments:

  1. https://www.mediafire.com/?lju0qy428127fb7

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks corvimax. Bartok = genius, Cage = fraud!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks corvimax.

    @timmo: if fraud is able to sound like the prepared piano works of John Cage (played by Maro Ajemian, f.e.), I'm a big fraud admirer (P. S.: my son is named after Bartók's first name).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Say hello to little Bela for me. Cage is still a fraud.

    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks for this one, too, among the many wonderful records posted here — too many to comment on or to say thank you for them all.

    @timmo: to anyone who has heard the steepling greatness in much of Cage, your dismissal is simply off the mark. Also, you come close to saying not only that Cage perpetrated a fraud on music lovers, but that his instrumentalists and those of us who are his admirers may be in on the fraud and prolonging it. There is music I don't get, but I try to avoid badmouthing it. From experience I know that one day it may open up and make perfect sense to me. Some Cage has been like that, Xenakis even more so. There is still Scelsi where I cannot find the music in the sound, in spite of Scelsi when I do hear it for me standing alongside Cage in towering above the rest in the same genre and period, which is not to discount the greatness of many others. Appreciation is an area where live and let live is becoming. There is music I have listened to, but may never grasp, and until I do I shall never know whether the music properly is there or not. A lot of Christian Marclay still strikes me that way. But that gives me no reason to think that he is a fraud or that his followers are. You come across less as an admirer of the grace in music as such than as a supporter of a particular team, and a shrill one at that. If you want to have another go, in my opinion it takes a bit of effort to avoid the musical pleasures of two brief pieces of Cage: Steffen Schleiermacher's "The Unavailable Memory Of" (come to think of it, a slower version on As It Is is wonderful, too) and Mary Leng Tan's "Summer".

    Peace. msj

    ReplyDelete