If only he were wearing a jumpsuit...

I've not had any trouble with the old-style Kairos discs, fortunately, despite the way they bend when they come out. However, I did lose the Lachenmann Kontrakadenz/Klangschatten/Fassade disc to a cat who thought she'd found a brand new chew toy.

Needless to say, that particular recording was pretty much at the bottom of the sacrifice-to-Bast list.

I would rather think that where Berg was concerned he might have been more susceptible to an absence of glue? 

Haven't heard that disc, though, so can't comment further.  Sorry about the stickiness; I've not had that problem myself with those paper cases.

dc, that's precisely the section where I find the recordings misrepresent the piece the most drastically. I have indeed seen it performed live (and turned pages for it); in that context the notes aren't sustained as they are in all recordings I know but the player alternates between the staves (if you look at the score there are little arpeggiation arrows to show which line to play first where the lines coincide).

In performance it's quite breathtaking. In recording I suppose so too, as the cellist sprouts a multitracked alter ego, so to that extent it's fair enough. Still, I wouldn't mind a recording that gives an idea how the thing actually sounds in concert...

Rohan has recorded it and the ending is certainly multitracked. In some recordings some of the middle bits have been multitracked as well - there are some double-stops which involve both the detuned string and high harmonics, which are a pretty delicate business.

The arrows do help really - often the things written simultaneously (or which if not for the arrows would have been) can't be played simultaneously so jumping from one to the other is the only way.

yes, in reply to IP, i think the multiple glissandi material in Xenakis can be very exhilirating, only sometimes wonder what is it that is being represented and if the line-induced image formation 'gathered' in my head is more important than the fact of the continuous note-renewal taking place at different rates.

In formalised music, (just to point out, I don't have a copy with me), much is made of the lines of architecture, or the drawing out of the perspectives in the architecture itself. A further example can be found in Evryali: if one looks at the continuous lines the pitches make in Evryali, can be followed until you get to a cluster chord, which then , appropriately enough, work out as being the sonic 'translations' of purely vertical lines.

so, motorbikes or not, it often appears that X composes graphically first to achieve his sonic result. The sound of masses of glissandi certainly have their immediacy & also their distraction; there was an orchestral piece in Donaueschingen (a long time ago) by Julio Estrada which also had masses of glissandi, but frankly i considered his position (with this piece) to be really not far enough away from X & I think , in my arrogance, part of a possible reason for this is that one can go a lot further with the glissando as a sonic problem in itself than X has : the glissando mass has sounded 'classical for  some time now .