Darcy James Argue has an excellent post about an all-Varèse concert. Among other pieces, he likes the Manhattan School of Music performance of the percusion piece Ionisation, making an interesting generational comment:
Having grown up surrounded by hiphop, industrial, and electronica, these kids find nothing unusual in the idea of a piece which is all about sirens, noise and thunderous percussion.
It's hard to call the music of Varèse "normal," but here's hoping...
The alexbach.dk/klingklang page has an Ionisation MP3.
Also, in preparation for my February composer of the month, I bought two CDs at Amoeba today of Pierre Boulez conducting Varèse. And no, Boulez is not the composer du mois although I am reading The Cage/Boulez Correspondence.
The Boulez recordings of the orchestral works are quite good. But for me the best recording of Arcana is the Abravanel/Utah Symph from the 60's that were rereleased on CD sometime in the 80's. The best performance I've ever heard of Octandre (which just might be the most perfect short piece of music in the 20C IMHO) was never recorded as far as I know... Jim Tenney conducted a performance in the '60's at NYU as part of his Tone Roads series of concerts. I can still hear it now....
So does this mean you're getting in to Varese?
Posted by: richard friedman | January 29, 2007 at 10:36 PM