I really love that recording of the Concerto so it's the principal motivation for spinning the thing, but I also like Sixty Eight as long as I'm in the right mood. It's the sort of listen that will either bore you or infuriate you if the planets are not in the correct conjunction for you.

To some extent, but Max has actually gone to a staggering amount of trouble to attempt to control the amount of variation. I was completely unaware of the extent of this idiot-proofing until he sat in on a rehearsal of a frankly execrable performance into which an undergrad roped me to play clarinet (I'd played it before). At the end of the rehearsal Max gave up trying to help the vocalist (but in a very gracious way) and simply said 'it's a piece that just works'. I've performed in two versions (one more accurate than the other), seen three (two professional) versions and heard the Julius Eastman recording, and I don't really think that a change in vocalist changes the piece all that much.

Just spun Walter Zimmermann's Zehn fränkische Tänze courtesy of one Turfan Fragment. It makes me want to look at the score. (That means that I enjoyed it by the way, just fascinated by some of the timbres).

Thanks, hh, that's very interesting. I suppose I felt that the vocalising seemed so particular in the way it bared the soul of the music and (I imagine) so hard to annotate, that it would really vary a lot with a change of interpreter.


Me too. I find them enchanting. Thanks, Turfan Fragment.

I thought it might be. I was more interested in the drones. Are they just natural harmonics as well or is there some scordatura involved? Wonderful combinations whichever way it's played.
But I'm going to bed now.

I'm very pleased some members are interested to know more about Walter Zimmermann's music. As well as the discs Richard mentions, there is also a disc on Wergo of his stage works Singbarer Rest and Die Blinden (this Maeterlinck text has also been set by Beat Furrer). As mentioned, I have recorded his piano works (up to 1998); I feel Wüstenwanderung is the finest of these. It has also been recorded by Daniel Seel (on a recital disc on Hat Art) and Hermann Kretzchmar (on one of the Mode discs), and has been taken up by other pianists including Philip Thomas and Heather O'Donnell. His longest piano work Beginner's Mind is on my discs, and also on an old LP by Herbert Henck - an excellent performance (pianistically, at least - without making any claims for my own singing (quite out of tune), I think the intonation there holds its own against Henck's ) well worth getting. Recently his music has become more eclectic; I'm not sure quite where this is leading, but the results remain interesting.

Walter's other string quartet, Festina Lente, is recorded on the Arditti's 'For Germany' disc (which also contains Mathias Spahlinger's fantastic quartet Apo do). This work is known colloquially amngst the quartet as 'The Rack', because of the agonising unisons they have to maintain for long stretches of time.

Ah. Ich sehe.

I haven't looked at that thread for two or three weeks now - basically since my 3 excerpts were solved, and I realised I'd mislaid the CD on which I'd burned the next six or seven ready for uploading.

Well. lookee here:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.roy-hart.com/picture/songs1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.roy-hart.com/songs.htm&h=368&w=362&sz=81&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=XnRicGYxzrOVhM:&tbnh=122&tbnw=120&prev=/images%3Fq%3Deight%2Bsongs%2Bfor%2Ba%2Bmad%2Bking%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff

Also includes the most famous page of the MS...