Luciano BERIO
Linea
Dieter MACK
Rafting & Beyond
George CRUMB
Makrokosmos III
Piano & Percussion (Susan Wenckus, Markus Stange, Lutz Bidlingmaier,
Markus Hauke, Michael Kiedaisch)
SDR Audite 97.455 [66 mins]
A delectable CD by the group Piano & Percussion which had been
heard by S&H (to less advantage) at
Stuttgart.
Linea (1973) is one of Berio's happier creations of the early
'70s. He takes a very simple 'melody' and explores its implied elements,
the players sometimes diverging, at others meeting on the same line, the
two pianos joined by marimba and vibraphone.
The German composer Dieter Mack (b.1954), who studied with Ferneyhough
and Huber, and has a special interest in South-East Asian music, is likely
to be the least known to readers. The title of his piece, composed whilst
composer in residence in Wellington, alludes to personal relationships which
develop and are disrupted participating in the water sport popular in the
rapids of New Zealand. The percussion instruments used, with precision and
quite sparingly, are helpfully listed in the detailed documentation with
this CD, as are the many required for George Crumb's Music for
a Summer Evening, the third part of his extended Makrokosmos. The
first two volumes (1972-73) are for solo amplified piano, the title obviously
relating to Bartók's Mikrokosmos. In his note, Crumb also
acknowledges his debt to Bartók's Sonata for two pianos and
percussion, expressing surprise that this fruitful combination did not
lead to a rapid proliferation of works in that genre.
Makrokosmos III is a major work of approx. 40 mins (35 in this
performance) for which the pianos are amplified and often set in a halo of
evocative sounds, the odd-numbered movements on a large scale, with cosmic
and philosophical programmes. They are separated by dreamlike intermezzi,
a wistful Wanderer Fantasy mostly for the pianos alone, and
Myth for the percussionists. Crumb's music is always easily accessible
and often relatively simple - even simplistic in essence - its main constituent
colouration from a wide sound palette of exotic instruments. The SDR recording
is of demonstration quality.
Peter Grahame Woolf
UK distributor: Priory Records, 3 Eden Court, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire,
LU7 8FY 01525 377566 Fax 01525 371477
