Label: NEOS 10701
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Metal Mechanics I (2006)*; Zykloiden I (2006); Metal Mechanics II (2006)*; Palindromia (2004); Metal Mechanics III (2006)*; Sechs Gedanken (2002/2003)Metal Mechanics IV (2006*; Katharsis (2002); Metal Mechanics V (2006)*; Nachklänge der Vergangenheit (1995); Metal Mechanics I (2006)*
* electronic intermezzo

Minas Borboudakis, piano and tape
The composer and pianist Minas Borboudakis, born on Crete in 1974, studied piano and theory in his native city, Heraklion, with Giorgos Kaloutsis and then in Munich and Hamburg with Wilfried Hiller and Peter Michael Hamel (composition), with Olaf Dressler and Ursula Mitrenga (piano); he attended master classes with George Crumb, Luciano Berio, Wolfgang Rihm, Alexander Nasedkin, and Rudolf Kehrer. Minas Borboudakis is one of the most sought-after Greek composers of his generation. He works with renowned ensembles and soloists as the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, the Münchener Kammerorchester, La Camerata of Athens, Kremerata Baltica, the Ensemble Modern, and the percussionist Peter Sadlo. In 2007 Kent Nagano will conduct the premiere of Borboudakis’s new work of musical theater at the Münchner Opernfestspiele. The focus of his repertoire as a pianist is, in addition to the performance of his own compositions, the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His œuvre has received a number of awards: the Günther-Bialas-Kompositionspreis, the Stipendium der Stadt München, the Bayerischer Staatsförderpreis für Musik, the Rodion-Shchedrin-Kammermusikpreis, the scholarship of the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. His music is highly charged with emotion and conforms to no dogmas; rhythm and harmonies are influenced by his Greek origins and moves between the poles of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and the modern natural sciences.
WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS!!

Label: NEOS 10702
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The structures of echo – lindauer beweinung, Music for 32 voices and orchestra (2002)
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart
SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart/Rupert Huber
Void II, Music for piano, saxophone, percussion and orchestra (2001)
Bejanmin Kobler, piano; Sascha Armbruster, saxophone; Pascal Pons, percussion
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Roland Kluttig
It is rare to find composers who can use sounds to tell stories of absolute void and who manage, conversely, in passages of virtual silence to give some sense of the richness of overriding entities. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is one such artist – a quiet, reflective, and, in the profound sense of the word, friendly man. Because he has never been at the center of the scenes that set the tone, he has, unforgivably, been scarcely noticed by the very people to whom he has essential things to offer. His music does not seek to shine artistically but is rather the result of a search for the essential core of things that is as truthful as it is intensely probing.

Label: NEOS 10703/4
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2 CD Set

Music for Piano 1 (1952); Music for Piano 2 (1953); Music for Piano 3 (1953); Music for Piano 4–19 (1953); Music for Piano 20 (1953); Music for Piano 21–36 (1955)Music for Piano 37–52 (1955); Music for Piano 53–68 (1956); Music for Piano 69–84 (1956)

Sabine Liebner, piano
Cage had discovered small irregularities, elevated points, or tiny spots on the surface structure of the paper, distributed completely irregularly. Within a predetermined interval of time he marked with ink as many of these irregularities as he could find. Thus he obtained an absolutely random constellation of a field of points. Then he placed a sheet of transparent music-paper over it to convert the dots into exact pitches by means of the key signature and ledger lines. Using chance procedures each of the notes determined in this way was assigned a dynamic value between pianissimo and fortissimo as well as, in some cases, a sharp or flat. Music for Piano 1 was produced in this way in 1952 and choreographed by Jo Anne Melcher as was Music for Piano 2 of the following year, for the dancer Louise Lippold. As a balance to his incessant efforts as an artist to make chance graspable in new ways in the points of coincidence and intersection of series of events that occur independently of one another, in 1954/55 he became increasingly at home in the universe of mycology. Perhaps he was haunted by another metaphysics of finding? Wherever he found an opportunity to find and identify mushrooms, Cage pursued this passion with professional depth – in part, as he explained with a smile, because the word “mushroom” immediately precedes “music” in many dictionaries. Over the years he became an expert on mushrooms. He wrote a book on mushrooms with illustrations covered with Japanese silk paper; on an Italian television quiz show he won a lot of money with his expert knowledge. He meditated on the mysterious subterranean grow of mycelia, lichen, and carpophores in Japanese Zen gardens or American forests, and he could enthuse and sympathize with the horizons of sound and silence of this or that mushroom, whether they grew alone or in collections, or in bundles of five to six individual growths, saying that a such a spot of earth is precious. - (2 CDs)

Label: NEOS 10705
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PETER EOTVOS (*1944): CAP-KO, Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard and Orchestra (Dedicated to Bela Bartok, 2005)
BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN (1918 – 1970): Concerto for Violin and Large Orchestra (1950)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano/keyboard; Martin Mumelter, violin
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/Peter Eötvös
MARTIN SMOLKA (*1959): Walden, The Distiller of Celestial Dews, five pieces for mixed choir and percussion, on verses of Henry David Thoreau (2000)
Wolfram Winkel, percussion
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks/ Peter Eötvös
Live recordings: Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich; January 26, 2006 & April 7, 1989 (Zimmermann)
Peter Eötvös is one of those who set the tone in the New Music scene, not just as a composer but also as a conductor and teacher. "Cap-ko" is the homage to Eötvös' great model Bartók. That applies even to the details. Bartók’s penchant for parallel lines gave Eötvös the idea of using an instrument that makes it possible to play these parallel lines on the piano not with two hands but rather with one. This necessitated that Eötvös rediscovered the digital keyboard. For that made possible that a second note sound with every note played, with the interval between the notes alterable at will, as with an organ mixture. In addition there is a traditional grand piano with a fixed right pedal, which produces an echolike reverberation with every note played that is never muted. Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays both instruments alternately. Bernd Alois Zimmermann does not have to be introduced anymore. With his opera "Die Soldaten" and his "Requiem für einen jungen Dichter" he became known in the 1960s as one of the leading composers of the generation that emerged after the Second World War. The violin concerto is a work that displays the characteristics of Zimmermann's composition: It sets ist tone forcefully and unmistakably. Martin Smolka works with intervals that he finds in "natural" sounds. His works, in which he uses various forms of microtonality, are performed at all the current festivals for contemporary music – this one, recorded at "musica viva" in Munich was premiered in Donaueschingen in 2000: "I was asked to write a choral piece on the subject of violence in our society. But I was rather attracted by the violence that our society commits – against nature, against our home planet. And I preferred to be positive in my music rather than creating a kind of protest song."

Label: NEOS 10706
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WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS!!!
String Quartet No. 3, Op. 50 (1997/98); String Quartet No. 1, Op. 30 (1983); String Quartet No. 2, Op. 42 (1990)

Arditti Quartet: Irvine Arditti, violin; Graeme Jennings, violin; Dov Scheindlin, viola; Rohan de Saram, violoncello
As a composer I am like an architect building a house for music and hoping that music will move into this house – not as content occupies form but as the spirit moves into the soul. A musical score is usually notated such that we can read the sounds vertically and time horizontally, with many possibilities for the symbols and methods. The organization into bars and the continuation into clearly perceptible beats have led to an idea of music in which the events of sound are arranged as if on a temporal string. In order to arrive at a completely different conception of music, we need only think of a situation in which the sounds are placed in different positions in a room without any clear temporal change such that the music that might result does not move past our ears, but instead we move within it as if within a space. - Erhard Grosskopf

Label: NEOS 10707
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WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS!!!
Herma for piano (1961); Mists for piano (1981); Khoaï for harpsichord (1976); Evryali for piano (1973); Naama for harpsichord (1984)

Daniel Grossmann, MIDI programming
This is the first recording of Xenakis‘ music for keyboard instruments realized by computer – unplayable by human hands! The desire to hear a composition exactly as Xenakis had in all probability imagined it – the notation is precise enough – remains legitimate nevertheless. The conductor Daniel Grossmann presents with this CD possibly the first attempt at a reconstruction of the aural imaginings of the composer. The recordings come across as spontaneous, but are in reality the result of intensive work at the computer. And it was precisely in the field of loudness relationships that a plethora of single notes had to be finely gradated. Rhythmic successions of many other single pitches – ones that produce the aleatoric sound clouds and which Xenakis deliberately notated imprecisely – had to be pondered about too, in Mists (3:15–6:30) for example. Achieving a balanced sound within exactly structured textures and articulating optimum relationships of loudness between superimposed but discretely structured layers remain at the centre of Grossmann’s approach. He also availed himself of the chary use of panorama effects, that is to say the acoustic distribution of various notes and note groups between the left and right loudspeaker channels, thus making evident the individuality and autonomy of distinct planes of sound. The strict basic pulse and tempo given by the computer have been rendered slightly more “human”, and are no less the worse off for this. One important aim of his work was, in the end, to garner a convincing dramaturgy within a single work, and thus bring about the optimum rendition of the relationship between the loud and the soft sections as well the best possible lengths of the crescendi and decrescendi. Paradoxically enough, it is just such a computer-aided recording that wholly evinces through its very rationality the enormous liveliness and freshness immanent in the music of Xenakis. A CD recording is not – well not primarily at least – designed for the reproduction of music within a public concert, and is inapplicable to the problem pertaining to the reception of electro-acoustic music. The present recordings should be judged on the basis of any normal recording, namely as a documentation of a single act of interpretation with its own artistic claim. This CD must nevertheless be understood not as a substitute for a “real” recording already in existence or one to be made in the future. The intention is to enhance the reception of the composer’s music – from the audience and performer perspective alike.

Label: NEOS 10708
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GYORGY KURTAG (*1926): Botschaften des verstorbenen Fräuleins R.V. Trussowa, Op. 17 (1976/1980); 21 songs for soprano and chamber ensemble on Russian poems by Rimma Dalos

Claudia Barainsky, soprano
Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik (OENM)/Rüdiger Bohn
JORG WIDMANN (*1973): … umdüstert … for chamber ensemble (1999/2000)

Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik (OENM)
In different ways the music of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be described as an individual, productive dialogue with musical stimulations of the past. This is evidenced in Kurtág’s works by the great breadth of musical forms that he references, extending from the traditional triad by way of highly diverse canonic techniques onto the use of noise – mostly articulated in fragment-like miniatures or in cyclical compositions consisting of such miniatures. In contrast, Widmann is gravitated to the musical expressions of Romanticism and tends to connect their possibilities to his personal ways of sound exploration. Kurtág’s cycle Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber orchestra, Op. 17 (1976–1980), which treats of the failure of human relations, is based on the poems by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos. In language as grotesque as it is drastic and at the limits of self-respect, it lays out one woman’s ideas about loneliness, exhibitionism, and deprivation. Widmann focuses on the sculpting of sounds: individual instrumental textures of variable density alternate and thereby initiate a process of slipping in and out of different tonal qualities that grows ever thinner toward the end until it finally dissolves into quiet fragments. The word “umdüstert” occurred frequently in Romantic literature, and this fading out of the composition can certainly be read as an indication of an existential point of reference of the music.

Label: NEOS 10709
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ARNOLD SCHONBERG (1874 - 1951): Pierrot lunair, Op. 21 (1912)
LUCIANO BERIO (1925 - 2003): Folk Songs for mezzo-soprano, flute (piccolo), clarinet, viola, harp and percussion (1964)
Stella Doufexis, speaking voice/mezzo; Maria Baptist, piano/jazz improvisations

Opus21musikplus: Bruno Jouard, flute; Dörte Sehrer, clarinet/bass clarinet; Lisa Schatzmann, violin; Nils Mönkemeyer, viola; Benjamin Santora, cello; Helen Radice, harp; Philipp Jungk & Alex Glöggler, percussion
Konstantia Gourzi, conductor
Schönberg wrote this work between March 12 and July 9, 1912, shortly before he developed the twelve-tone system. He chose twenty-one poems from a cycle by the French poet Albert Giraud, in the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben. There is no continuous plot. Each poem describes a small scene, a lively image, a macabre anecdote, or a grotesque with the moonstruck Pierrot. Schönberg's music and the singer's "Sprechgesang" (speech-song) fuse everything into a unity.Berio's "Folk Songs" is a short anthology of melodies from various sources (sheet music, records, oral recollection) from various epochs and countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, France, North Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and United States), selected, harmonized and arranged by Berio. Sometimes the instrumental setting reinforces typical traits of the cultural frame from which the songs originate, other times these traits are disguised or sublimated. Berio himself writes that "these arrangements are my contribution to the prevention of folk song performances with piano accompaniment and, of course, constitute also a little homage to the artistry of Cathy Berberian".

Label: NEOS 10714
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WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS!!!
“a chanter m’er di so q’ieu no voldria…” for clarinet, string quartet & tape (2004-2005); Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 for string quartet and tape (2001-2002); “qui ainsi me refait… veoir seulement et oïr” for guitar quartet (2003)

Wolfgang Meyer, clarinet; Esther Uhland/James Aston, speakers
Carmina Quartett
Gitarrenensemble quasi fantasia
In all three pieces - the Guitar Quartet, the String Quartet, and the Clarinet Quintet - the melody is the comforting hand that was perhaps the oasis of calm for Saint Augustine. Just as his perception, shaken by the collision with the ego, wandered back to the content of perception, Machaut’s melodies wander to me, and perhaps back again, more melodic mass than quotation, more parody than arrangement. Sometimes they are pulverized, smuggled through their spectra, or “sung through” using traditional procedures of permutation - inversion, retrograde, augmentation, and diminution. Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time has occupied me for twenty-five years. Husserl’s greatest error was perhaps the most fruitful one: the tone is not the slowest thing that decays; its parts decay at different speeds. It is not only impossible to perceive a melody phenomenological: the tone itself is an illusion. Its parts are the whole, up to the regress. With this difference between a remembered melody and one perceived now, between melody, tone, and tonal spectra - a difference that signifies nothing other than an aesthetic weighting and tendency - I set off on my search.

Label: NEOS 10717/8
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2 CD Set

Klavierstück No. 1 Op. 8a (1970); Klavierstück No. 2 Op. 8b (1971); Ländler (1979); Klavierstück No. 4 (1974); Klavierstück No. 5 “Tombeau” (1975); Klavierstück No. 6 “Bagatellen” (1977/78); Klavierstück No. 7 (1980); Brahmsliebewalzer (1985); Nachstudie (1992/94); Zwiesprache (1999); Auf einem anderen Blatt (2000); Zwei kleine Schwingungen (2004/05); Wortlos (2007)

Markus Bellheim, piano
Wolfgang Rihm was born in 1952 in Karlsruhe; between 1968–1976 he studied Composition in Karlsruhe, Cologne and Freiburg with Eugen Werner Velte, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klaus Huber, Wolfgang Fortner and Humphrey Searle. In Freiburg he also studied Musicology with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Various stipendiary grants (Villa Massimo, Rome, e.g.) and awards followed, including the Rolf Liebermann Prize, the Jacob Burckhardt Prize given by the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation, the Bach Prize of the City of Hamburg, the Federal Cross of Merit and the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Foundation Prize. From 1978 onwards Rihm has taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt, and since 1973 in Karlsruhe, where he was given a professorship in composition in 1985. He is a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Mannheim. A number of festivals and concert series have been dedicated to the music of Wolfgang Rihm. (2 CDs)

Label: NEOS 10719
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An Anna Blume für Klavier und Musikal-Clown (Tenor), Op. 5/III (1929)
From: Vier Lieder auf Texte von Lenin, Majakowski und anderen, Op. 7: 1. Eine unterdrückte Klasse (1929); 2. Decret No. 2: An die Armee der Künstler (1929); 3. Was ist "Aufruhr"? (1929); 4. Auch die kleinste Tat (1930)
From: Acht Lieder auf Texte von Heine, Ottwalt, Weinert und anderen, Op. 12: 1. Das Lied vom Abbau (1931); 4. Die Herren der Welt (1931); 6. Wir sind entlassen (1932)
From: Massenlieder, Op. 17: 1. Arbeit und Kapital (1932); 7. Haben Sie Kummer (1931)
From: Drei Lieder nach Gedichten von Erich Kästner: 1. Fantasie von Übermorgen; 2. Brief eines Dienstmädchens mit Namen Amalie (1929); 3. Ansprache einer Bardame (1929); Drei Lieder nach Bertold Brecht (1943): 1. Ballade von den Osseger Witwen; 2. Der Gottseibeiuns; 3. Keiner oder alle; From: Zwei Lieder von Berthold Viertel: 1. Lebensmüdigkeit (1945)
Battle Piece: Encouragements for Piano – First piece, in seven parts (1943–1947)

Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson, tenor/vocalist; Johan Bossers, piano
The turn of the year from 1929 to 1930 marked a break in the life of Stefan Wolpe: after long years and many attempts to find his place within the cultural life of the avant-garde in the Weimar Republic, he then made his definitive turn to working as a political composer and worked intensely in the areas of workers' music and agitprop. Without ever abandoning his concepts of the aesthetics of music, which tended toward free atonality, the threat of National Socialist despotism made it necessary for the Jewish avant-garde musician to respond to this threat to human freedom with his music as well. So by the end of the Second World War he had produced various lieder and instrumental works that reflect the specific circumstances of the composer's life and hence document his development as an artist. This crucial phase of Stefan Wolpe's musical creativity, his transformation from avant-garde musician in Berlin to a pioneering mentor for New Music in America, is revealed in the works selected for the present CD.

Label: NEOS 10721
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WOLFGANG RIHM (*1952)
La musique creuse le ciel, Music for two pianos and large orchestra (1977/1979)
Über-Schrift for two pianos (1992/2003)

GrauSchumacher Piano Duo

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Peter Rundel
Music from various phases in the output of Wolfgang Rihm, combined into a diptych by one of the most renowned piano duos of our times. Scene One: flexing the muscles with twenty digits, or how does one smash the glasshouse of serialism without rendering one’s fingers bloody? Scene Two: some years later (the scabs have gone, but the scars remain): some clever twitching. Sounds typed in create an ever-denser kaleidoscope of colors and spatial effects. The glass cage – if it ever existed – has disappeared. Music creates its own structure, a flexible one too. A dazzling tinsel sphere.

Label: NEOS 10722
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Chukrum for Large String Orchestra (1963); Quattro Pezzi for Orchestra (1959); Natura Renovatur for Eleven Strings (1967); Hymnos for Organ and Two Orchestra Groups (1963)

Elisabeth Zawadke, organ
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/Peter Rundel/Hans Zender
Live recordings: Munich, February 2, 2001; March 3, 2006

Label: NEOS 10723
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Tilbury 1 (1969); Keyboard Miscellany (1988-); Tilbury 2 (1969); A Piano Piece (2006); Tilbury 3 (1969); Snowdrop (1970)

Sabine Liebner, piano
Sabine Liebner is active primarily as a performer of New Music. She has made numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist, document her work as an artist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In 1998 and 2007 she received the Music Promotion Award of the City of Munich, in 2005 a music scholarship granted by the City of Munich, and in 2007 she was named a recommended pianist by the Goethe-Institut. In recent years Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the twentieth century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Label: NEOS 10809
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KLAUS HUBER (*1924)
Erniedrigt – Geknechtet – Verlassen – Verachtet ... for solo voices, chorus, orchestra and tape (1975/1978–83)

Anne Haenen, mezzo-soprano; Theophil Maier, tenor and speaker; Paul Yoder, bass baritone

Treble solo from the Tölzer Knabenchor; Schola Cantorum Stuttgart

SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart; SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

Matthias Bamert, conductor

Kenneth Jean/Burkhard Rempe/Arturo Tamayo, co-conductors
This important oratorio by Klaus Huber is both a plea and a defense, the concomitant aspects of the work dealing with physical and spiritual hunger that can not be met by any system, nor by any power, or contained by any set of relations. It asks that we heed others, and create a social working environment of the here and now: “for heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that one man took and with which he sowed a whole filed”. The hope for a life free from violence, free from fear, is articulated in actual historical events. Verses from the Bible, transmuted by Ernesto Cardenal into a political manifesto, are combined with voices off into a complex and ambivalent collage that may now be heard anew, examined again, and discussed once more.