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| NOTE: The recording of
Rara Requiem originally included in this installment has been removed
because another recording of this magnificent work is currently
available on CD. It can be ordered here
or here. AGP54 is the second of three dedicated to the Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti. Born in 1931, he is one of the major Italian composers of his generation and while many of his works were recorded and released on LPs, few have found their way onto CD. AGP53-55 include a number of Bussotti's major works, only two of which appear to have been released on CD and none of which is currently available. This is surprising because Bussotti's works were of consistently high quality. They often remind me of Ligeti's works of the 1970's in making effective use of classical harmonies and tonally meaningful chromaticism in the context of the advanced compositional tools of his generation. The second Bussotti installment includes his magnificent Rara Requiem and two shorter works. The Rara Requiem was composed in 1969-70 and is scored for voices, guitar and cello, winds, piano, harp, and percussion. This work features some of the finest late 20th-century vocal music I have heard--not as dense as Ligeti's Requiem or as extreme as Nono's "y entonces comprendio" from the same years, with darker harmonies than Berio's Sinfonia. The instrumentalists punctuate the vocal textures nicely. Frammento is a scoring of Voix de Femme from Pieces de Chair II (1958-59) with Cathy Berberian singing soprano and her husband Luciano Berio playing piano. Fragmentations (1962) is a work for one performer playing two harps. All tracks but Frammento were transcribed from European pressings in excellent condition and very little tracking distortion. Frammento is from the Time Records series organized by Earle Brown. The LP used for the transcription is in excellent condition, but it was recorded in the early 1960s and so has a somewhat leaner, harder sound. The installment includes a text file with liner notes from two of the three LPs from which these recordings were transcribed, as well as an image of the front cover of the Rara Requiem LP. To download
AGP54 files, right-click on each of the following links and select SAVE
LINK AS. 06 - Rara
Requiem, side A [28:23] 08 - Frammento [9:28] 09 - Fragmentations [10:39] Image of LP cover Liner notes from LPs |
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