Search - Iannis Xenakis, Maurice Ravel, Marc Ponthus :: Xenakis: Complete Music for Piano; Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit

Morphological shapes' eternal blessings of the avant-garde

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 01/08/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Yes Ponthus is most accurate, with a piece like :evyrali: on one of the Gorgon women myths,(the other being Medusa and that of la terra) this one encompassing the realms of the sea, and the pianist needs to quite swim along, emerse its Being in/as accuracy, but I can't see how it is possible to play all the cascades and clouds of tones Xenakis writes for they displace different registers of the piano simultaneously even with a break-neck tempo of quarter equals 120,you cannot negotiate the myriad numbers of tones reiterated brutally;the piece is incredibly violent,clangorous, ringing every decibel of the piano; a reflection on the wrath of the gods,or the power of nature.If you isolate the tones here,slowing down the tempi however you find a beautiful sense of private beauty, the Eastern European timeless melos.I don't know if this askew examination is intentional but certainly makes sense.It is easy to also isolate the music of Xenakis as a purveyor of eternal truths,through numbers, and statistical thinking, through morphological thought ascribed to music. Aki Takahashi brings more that end-of-the-world feel to this topology as well, a performer who is known for her restraint here summons the powers of the myth from the depths of the marine life wherever it resides. Ponthus does this as well, the dryness of the strident brass-like timbres piece senza damper pedal is also heard herein. The earlier :Herma: is also suppose to suffuse the listener with an automaton in motion,endless pointillism for tis timbral display with some human intervention proclaimed and it does, for its time :Herma: was a real step forward into the abyss.Xenakis does write these pieces separetly on graph paper; planning, deploying making distributions of fistfuls of tones prior to transcribing the piece then on traditional notation. :mists: written later than evyrali as well is a wonderful piece again beginning within the depths of the piano with its ascending tropes again some are physically impossible, yet you hear them herein. The short piece to Ravel is also quite gentle and evocative, a mere bon-bon. the piano solo music of Xenakis is merely an extension of those conceptual ideas he worked so thoroughly witihn his lifeworld as "clouds" of tones, density- distributions, arborecences,like the beauty of the complexity of a tree during wointer months exposing its graphic beauty of lines,also the use of natural graphic configurations as templates,graphic metaphors for sound makes this interesting piano music. . . Then hearing all this beautiful Ravel has some measure of the evolution of the piano."

Cool to say the least

E. Murphy-Mancini | Wilbraham, MA USA | 06/22/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This was a very interesting recording. First, the choice of programming was different. Ponthus paired Xenakis and Ravel together. However, he uses excellent discretion when playing the two radically different composers. They both have a certain melancholy, I guess. There is really no word to describe it. The music is kind of somber, even in the most passionate parts. I think that is what the performer saw in both Ravel's and Xenakis's music. Overall, an excellent CD."