NEW RELEASES

Christian Wolff: 2 Orchestra Pieces

This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work.

In his essay On Charles Ives (1990) Wolff remarks that in the mid-1970s he had a sudden sense of his own work as "an odd sort of mix of Ives and Satie." The unlikely conjunction of Ives and Satie may provide a clue to such disparities as are evident in these orchestral pieces... The music is continually surprising, exhilarating, and challenging; it resists easy categorisation.

Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert

Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman's, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it. More