NS: Following the strong recommendation of A Member Who Should Always Be Listened To, I snaffled up one of these when it appeared briefly on Amazon at a reasonable price.



My goodness this man Schutz is good. This'll do to get me through the winter.

Last night's bedtime spinning was Berio's Echoing Curves, and I found myself imagining that this might be the kind of music to convince Mr I Rockfan that there's something other than chaos to this "modern" stuff.

Partly this is a question of the kind of timescale Berio works on. He had a fine ear for arresting sound-gestures (the single piano line in this work and Points on the curve to find..., the ubiquitous central pitch of Sequenza VII, the appropriation of the Mahler scherzo in Sinfonia, and so on) but, crucially, he gave them the familiar dimensions of traditional thematic materials - if Berio had written something like Stimmung it would have been ten minutes long rather than 70 - which has meant that many of the sound-images he created turn up endlessly to this day as elements of a kind of lingua franca of contemporary composition. But in Berio's hands they have a freshly-discovered quality and the music is a quite unique mixture of "new and old", to put it in a nutshell.

It's a nice piece but not, I'd say, very typical. If you're looking for a place to start with Xenakis, knowing something of your preferences, I would suggest Jonchaies from this one:

Not typical, no, but excellent. Pléïades, I mean.

Hi IGI
My knowledge of Xenakis is virtually nil but tks to thread on TOP heard a work called Keqrops (available on You Tube)
thought this bit of a nightmarish work but really good - will be interested to hear Pleiades at the proms

I love Tippett 3 and 4, too, though there's still no Davis recording of 4, so you'll have to make do with Solti.

There's another recording of 3 which does work for me, a live Leppard BBC Classics with Josephine Barstow as the soloist: deleted, but turns up regularly on Amazon. (Hickox again, sadly, best avoided.)

Totally concur with r's Dutilleux suggestion.

I got to know both Tippett 2 and 3 (and 1) through the Hickox recordings, which were the most easily available at that time (mid-1990s; in fact I may have been picking them up as they were released, come to think of it). They somehow didn't interfere with my taking a great interest in this music, although the 2nd's never really sunk in very deep. The 3rd is my favourite by some distance of the symphonies. Of course the Davis recordings are all boxed up and repackaged at such a cheap price on Decca now that there's really no reason not to get those.

Adrian Boult did take the blame for the collapse of the Second at its premiere but isn't the real fault supposed to have lain with the leader of the orchestra, who had insisted on having the violin parts re-barred at a late stage in rehearsals to avoid groups of quavers beamed across the bar-lines?

With the two R's on the Dutilleux suggestion. Especially the two symphonies and the violin concerto. And Mystère de l'instant, wonderful piece: I don't think my recording of that piece is on Chandos but I'm pretty sure Yan-Pascal Tortelier did the complete orchestral music so it must be in there somewhere. Sur le meme accord won't be, as it's much more recent, but I wouldn't worry about that if I were you: watered down late Dutilleux, if there's anything to be got I haven't got it yet, and I suspect there isn't.

I know the Ondine catalogue quite well from my harmonia mundi distribution days and will try to think what else there you might like, besides the Roussel which as Richard says is very good indeed. Timpani is an excellent, excellent label (and I've never even worked for or with them!): pity that's not there.