Browse by Label: NEOS (GERMANY)

Artist:	BORBOUDAKIS, MINAS
Title:	Piano Works
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10701CD

Performed by Minas Borboudakis, piano and tape. "The composer and pianist Minas Borboudakis, born on Crete in 1974, studied piano and theory in his native city, Heraklion, with Giorgos Kaloutsis and then in Munich and Hamburg with Wilfried Hiller and Peter Michael Hamel (composition), with Olaf Dressler and Ursula Mitrenga (piano); he attended master classes with George Crumb, Luciano Berio, Wolfgang Rihm, Alexander Nasedkin, and Rudolf Kehrer. Minas Borboudakis is one of the most sought-after Greek composers of his generation. He works with renowned ensembles and soloists as the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, the Münchener Kammerorchester, La Camerata of Athens, Kremerata Baltica, the Ensemble Modern, and the percussionist Peter Sadlo. In 2007, Kent Nagano will conduct the premiere of Borboudakis's new work of musical theater at the Münchner Opernfestspiele. The focus of his repertoire as a pianist is, in addition to the performance of his own compositions, the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His oeuvre has received a number of awards: the Günther-Bialas-Kompositionspreis, the Stipendium der Stadt München, the Bayerischer Staatsförderpreis für Musik, the Rodion-Shchedrin-Kammermusikpreis, the scholarship of the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. His music is highly charged with emotion and conforms to no dogmas; rhythm and harmonies are influenced by his Greek origins and moves between the poles of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and the modern natural sciences."

Artist:	BRASS, NIKOLAUS
Title:	Orchestral Works Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10702CD

Featured works: "The Structures of Echo -- Lindauer Beweinung", (Music for 32 Voices and Orchestra, 2002). "Void II" (music for Piano, Saxophone, Percussion and Orchestra, 2001). "It is rare to find composers who can use sounds to tell stories of absolute void and who manage, conversely, in passages of virtual silence to give some sense of the richness of overriding entities. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is one such artist -- a quiet, reflective, and, in the profound sense of the word, friendly man. Because he has never been at the center of the scenes that set the tone, he has, unforgiveably, been scarcely noticed by the very people to whom he has essential things to offer. His music does not seek to shine artistically but is rather the result of a search for the essential core of things that is as truthful as it is intensely probing."

Artist:	CAGE, JOHN
Title:	Music For Piano 1-84
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10703/4CD

Performed by Sabine Liebner, piano; recorded Oct., 2003. "Cage had discovered small irregularities, elevated points, or tiny spots on the surface structure of the paper, distributed completely irregularly. Within a predetermined interval of time he marked with ink as many of these irregularities as he could find. Thus he obtained an absolutely random constellation of a field of points. Then he placed a sheet of transparent music paper over it to convert the dots into exact pitches by means of the key signature and ledger lines. Using chance procedures, each of the notes determined in this way was assigned a dynamic value between pianissimo and fortissimo as well as, in some cases, a sharp or flat. 'Music for Piano 1' was produced in this way in 1952 and choreographed by Jo Anne Melcher as was 'Music for Piano 2' of the following year, for the dancer Louise Lippold. As a balance to his incessant efforts as an artist to make chance graspable in new ways in the points of coincidence and intersection of series of events that occur independently of one another, in 1954/55 he became increasingly at home in the universe of mycology. Perhaps he was haunted by another metaphysics of finding? Wherever he found an opportunity to find and identify mushrooms, Cage pursued this passion with professional depth -- in part, as he explained with a smile, because the word 'mushroom' immediately precedes 'music' in many dictionaries. Over the years he became an expert on mushrooms. He wrote a book on mushrooms with illustrations covered with Japanese silk paper; on an Italian television quiz show he won a lot of money with his expert knowledge. He meditated on the mysterious subterranean grow of mycelia, lichen, and carpophores in Japanese Zen gardens or American forests, and he could enthuse and sympathize with the horizons of sound and silence of this or that mushroom, whether they grew alone or in collections, or in bundles of five to six individual growths, saying that a such a spot of earth is precious."

Artist:	EOTVOS/ZIMMERMANN/SMOLKA
Title:	Musica Viva 15
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10705CD

Featuring compositions by Peter Eötvös, Bernd Alois Zimmermann & Martin Smolka. "Peter Eötvös is one of those who set the tone in the new music scene, not just as a composer but also as a conductor and teacher. 'Cap-ko' is the homage to Eötvös' great model, Bartók. That applies even to the details. Bartók's penchant for parallel lines gave Eötvös the idea of using an instrument that makes it possible to play these parallel lines on the piano not with two hands but rather with one. This necessitated that Eötvös rediscover the digital keyboard. For that made possible that a second note sound with every note played, with the interval between the notes alterable at will, as with an organ mixture. In addition, there is a traditional grand piano with a fixed right pedal, which produces an echo-like reverberation with every note played that is never muted. Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays both instruments alternately.

       Bernd Alois Zimmermann does not have to be introduced anymore. With his opera 'Die Soldaten' and his 'Requiem Für Einen Jungen Dichter' he became known in the 1960s as one of the leading composers of the generation that emerged after the Second World War. The violin concerto is a work that displays the characteristics of Zimmermann's composition: It sets its tone forcefully and unmistakably.

       Martin Smolka works with intervals that he finds in 'natural' sounds. His works, in which he uses various forms of microtonality, are performed at all the current festivals for contemporary music -- this one, recorded at 'musica viva' in Munich was premiered in Donaueschingen in 2000: 'I was asked to write a choral piece on the subject of violence in our society. But I was rather attracted by the violence that our society commits -- against nature, against our home planet. And I preferred to be positive in my music rather than creating a kind of protest song.'"

Artist:	XENAKIS, IANNIS
Title:	Music For Keyboard Instruments
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10707CD

Realized by computer. 'Herma' for piano (1961); 'Mists' for piano (1981); 'Khoaï' for harpsichord (1976); 'Evryali' for piano (1973); 'Naama' for harpsichord (1984). Daniel Grossmann, MIDI programming. "This is the first recording of Xenakis' music for keyboard instruments realized by computer -- unplayable by human hands! The desire to hear a composition exactly as Xenakis had in all probability imagined it -- the notation is precise enough -- remains legitimate nevertheless. The conductor Daniel Grossmann presents possibly the first attempt at a reconstruction of the aural imaginings of the composer. The recordings come across as spontaneous, but are in reality the result of intensive work at the computer. And it was precisely in the field of loudness relationships that a plethora of single notes had to be finely gradated. Rhythmic successions of many other single pitches -- ones that produce the aleatoric sound clouds and which Xenakis deliberately notated imprecisely -- had to be pondered about too, in 'Mists,' (3:15-6:30) for example. Achieving a balanced sound within exactly structured textures and articulating optimum relationships of loudness between superimposed but discretely structured layers remain at the center of Grossmann's approach. He also availed himself of the chary use of panorama effects, that is to say, the acoustic distribution of various notes and note groups between the left and right loudspeaker channels, thus making evident the individuality and autonomy of distinct planes of sound. The strict basic pulse and tempo given by the computer have been rendered slightly more 'human,' and are no less the worse off for this. One important aim of his work was, in the end, to garner a convincing dramaturgy within a single work, and thus bring about the optimum rendition of the relationship between the loud and the soft sections as well the best possible lengths of the crescendi and decrescendi. Paradoxically enough, it is just such a computer-aided recording that wholly evinces through its very rationality the enormous liveliness and freshness immanent in the music of Xenakis. A CD recording is not -- well not primarily, at least -- designed for the reproduction of music within a public concert, and is inapplicable to the problem pertaining to the reception of electroacoustic music. The present recordings should be judged on the basis of any normal recording, namely as a documentation of a single act of interpretation with its own artistic claim. This CD must nevertheless be understood not as a substitute for a 'real' recording already in existence or one to be made in the future. The intention is to enhance the reception of the composer's music -- from the audience and performer perspective alike."

Artist:	SCHONBERG & LUCIANO BERIO, ARNOLD
Title:	Opus 21 Musik Plus
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10709CD

"Schönberg wrote this work between March 12 and July 9, 1912, shortly before he developed the twelve-tone system. He chose 21 poems from a cycle by the French poet Albert Giraud, in the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben. There is no continuous plot. Each poem describes a small scene, a lively image, a macabre anecdote, or a grotesque with the moonstruck Pierrot. Schönberg's music and the singer's 'Sprechgesang' (speech-song) fuse everything into a unity. Berio's 'Folk Songs' is a short anthology of melodies from various sources (sheet music, records, oral recollection) from various epochs and countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, France, North Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and United States), selected, harmonized and arranged by Berio. Sometimes the instrumental setting reinforces typical traits of the cultural frame from which the songs originate, other times these traits are disguised or sublimated. Berio himself writes that 'these arrangements are my contribution to the prevention of folk song performances with piano accompaniment and, of course, constitute also a little homage to the artistry of Cathy Berberian.'"

Artist:	SPAHLINGER, MATHIAS
Title:	Farben der Frühe
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10710CD

Live recording of "Farben der Frühe" (for seven pianos), from 2007. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "Spahlinger is not exactly known as a fast composer, but even by his standards the eight years it took to write this piece represent an extraordinarily long time. The premiere of the piece commissioned by the SDR in 1997 was delayed five times before it finally took place in November 2005. In the end, Spahlinger did indeed reveal something new between the rubble of tonal organization and the new construction of an architecture of sound and noise, something that had never previously been heard in this form. By doing so, he probably created a caesura not only within his own creative work but in the production of music today as a whole. The present multichannel surround recording from March 20, 2007, with the pianists of the premiere is a pioneering act of musica viva in Munich."

Artist:	OSPALD, KLAUS
Title:	Tschappina-Variationen/Konzert für Ensemble und Violine
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10712CD

Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "Klaus Ospald, born in Münster in 1956, studied composition first with Jürgen Ulrich at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold and then with Berthold Hummel at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg, where he completed his studies with a master class diploma. In 1985 he received a scholarship for the Cité des Arts Paris and was awarded the Förderpreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart in 1987. That same year he began supplementary studies with Helmut Lachenmann. In 1988 the Free State of Bavaria honored his work with the Staatspreis. In 1997 he received the XXIII Premio Leonardo da Vinci. Such important podiums for contemporary music as the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, the Bremer Podium, the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and the Münchener Biennale have presented premieres of his works. Klaus Ospald lives as a freelance composer in Würzburg."

Artist:	DEDIU, DAN
Title:	Piano Pieces
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10713CD

Dan Dediu (piano); Valentina Sandu-Dediu (piano). Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "Dan Dediu, born in Braila/Romania in 1967, attended the music school in Bucharest from 1981 to 1985 and then studied until 1989 at the conservatory there with Stefan Niculescu and Dan Constantinescu. He supplemented his studies with Francis Burt, at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and with a scholarship from the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung in Hamburg and the Alban Berg Stiftung in Vienna. In 1991, he received first prize at the George Enescu International Composition Competition; that same year he became assistant professor for composition and form at the National University of Music in Bucharest. In 1994, he was visiting professor at Queen's University of Belfast and attended a course in computers for music at IRCAM in Paris. In 1999 and 2001, he was artistic director of the International Week of New Music Festival in Bucharest. Since 1990, Dan Dediu has been a member of the Romanian Association of Composers, since 1992 of the national group of the ISCM. In 1998, he became professor and in 2000, chair of the composition department at the National University of Music in Bucharest."

Artist:	UZOR, CHARLES
Title:	Quartets/Quintet
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10714CD

Performed by: Wolfgang Meyer (clarinet); Esther Uhland/James Aston, (speakers); Carmina Quartett; Gitarrenensemble quasi fantasia. "In all three pieces -- the 'Guitar Quartet,' the 'String Quartet,' and the 'Clarinet Quintet' -- the melody is the comforting hand that was perhaps the oasis of calm for Saint Augustine. Just as his perception, shaken by the collision with the ego, wandered back to the content of perception, Machaut's melodies wander to me, and perhaps back again, more melodic mass than quotation, more parody than arrangement. Sometimes they are pulverized, smuggled through their spectra, or 'sung through' using traditional procedures of permutation -- inversion, retrograde, augmentation, and diminution. Husserl's On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time has occupied me for 25 years. Husserl's greatest error was perhaps the most fruitful one: the tone is not the slowest thing that decays; its parts decay at different speeds. It is not only impossible to perceive a melody phenomenological: the tone itself is an illusion. Its parts are the whole, up to the regress. With this difference between a remembered melody and one perceived now, between melody, tone, and tonal spectra -- a difference that signifies nothing other than an aesthetic weighting and tendency -- I set off on my search."

Artist:	PLATZ, ROBERT HP
Title:	Piano Pieces
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10715CD

Performed by Rolf Hind, piano; recorded at the Experimentalstudio des SWR. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "The conductor and composer Robert HP Platz, born in Baden-Baden in 1951, studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner and Karlheinz Stockhausen and conducted with Francis Travis. Performances of his works and his conducting activity (more than three hundred world premieres) have taken him throughout Europe and to Japan and the United States. He has worked with, among others, both orchestras of the Südwestrundfunk, the DSO Berlin and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. For 20 years, Platz headed the Ensemble Köln, which he founded, and worked with composers such as Hosokawa, Huber, Stockhausen and Xenakis. Since 1990, he has directed a composition class at the Conservatorium Maastricht that is connected with a seminar on performance practice for New Music. He is a member of the Bureau du Directeur of the electronic studio of the 'Centre de Recherches et Formation Musicales de Wallonie' (CRFMW) in Liège and is the principal guest conductor of the ensembles Alternance in Paris and Musica d'Insieme in Milan."

Artist:	RIHM, WOLFGANG
Title:	Piano Pieces
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10717/8CD

Performed by Markus Bellheim, piano; recorded 2007/2008. "Wolfgang Rihm was born in 1952 in Karlsruhe; between 1968-1976 he studied Composition in Karlsruhe, Cologne and Freiburg with Eugen Werner Velte, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klaus Huber, Wolfgang Fortner and Humphrey Searle. In Freiburg he also studied musicology with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Various stipendiary grants (Villa Massimo, Rome, e.g.) and awards followed, including the Rolf Liebermann Prize, the Jacob Burckhardt Prize given by the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation, the Bach Prize of the City of Hamburg, the Federal Cross of Merit and the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Foundation Prize. From 1978 onwards, Rihm has taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt, and since 1973 in Karlsruhe, where he was given a professorship in composition in 1985. He is a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Mannheim. A number of festivals and concert series have been dedicated to the music of Wolfgang Rihm."

Artist:	WOLPE, STEFAN
Title:	Lieder - Battle Piece
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10719CD

Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (tenor/vocalist); Johan Bossers (piano). "The turn of the year from 1929 to 1930 marked a break in the life of Stefan Wolpe: after long years and many attempts to find his place within the cultural life of the avant-garde in the Weimar Republic, he then made his definitive turn to working as a political composer and worked intensely in the areas of workers' music and agitprop. Without ever abandoning his concepts of the aesthetics of music, which tended toward free atonality, the threat of National Socialist despotism made it necessary for the Jewish avant-garde musician to respond to this threat to human freedom with his music as well. So by the end of the Second World War, he had produced various lieder and instrumental works that reflect the specific circumstances of the composer's life and hence document his development as an artist. This crucial phase of Stefan Wolpe's musical creativity, his transformation from avant-garde musician in Berlin to a pioneering mentor for New Music in America, is revealed in the works selected for the present CD."

Artist:	CAGE, JOHN
Title:	Seven/Quartets I-VIII
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10720CD

Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. Featured works: "Seven" (for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola and violoncello; 1988); "Quartets I-VIII" (for 24 instruments, 1976). Performed by: Orchester Jakobsplatz München, conducted by Daniel Grossmann. "John Cage's Quartets I-VIII is one of the most unusual and sophisticated orchestral works I know. It was written for the bicentennial of the United States of America. Cage used eight old American chorales, which he then reformed into an entirely new work with the help of the Chinese oracular work, the I Ching. The basic idea is to have just four instruments of the orchestra playing together at any time. As a result, new groups are constantly forming into variously composed quartets. Cage used the I Ching to determine which notes are played by a given instrument. The piece seems very simple from looking at the score. But in fact the fragmentary character of the instrumentation makes it a great challenge to perform. Every musician has to count precisely so as not to miss his or her entry. But the most difficult requirement is fitting the few notes to be played into the overall structure such that meaningful phrases ultimately result. Only by carefully listening to and following the music can players cause the piece to resound." --Daniel Grossmann

Artist:	RIHM, WOLFGANG
Title:	La Musique Creuse Le Ciel
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10721CD

Featured works: "La musique creuse le ciel" music for two pianos and large orchestra (1977/1979) and "Über-Schrift" for two pianos (1992/2003); performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Peter Rundel. "Music from various phases in the output of Wolfgang Rihm, combined into a diptych by one of the most renowned piano duos of our times. Scene One: flexing the muscles with twenty digits, or how does one smash the glasshouse of serialism without rendering one's fingers bloody? Scene Two: some years later (the scabs have gone, but the scars remain): some clever twitching. Sounds typed in create an ever-denser kaleidoscope of colors and spatial effects. The glass cage -- if it ever existed -- has disappeared. Music creates its own structure, a flexible one too. A dazzling tinsel sphere."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Piano Pieces
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10723CD

Performed by: Sabine Liebner (piano). Features: "Tilbury 1" (1969); "Keyboard Miscellany" (1988); Tilbury 2 (1969); "A Piano Piece" (2006); "Tilbury 3" (1969); "Snowdrop" (1970). "Sabine Liebner is active primarily as a performer of New Music. She has made numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In 1998 and 2007, she received the Music Promotion Award of the City of Munich, in 2005 a music scholarship granted by the City of Munich, and in 2007 she was named a recommended pianist by the Goethe-Institut. In recent years, Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the 20th century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage and Morton Feldman."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 Vol. 2
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10725CD

Features one composition Georg Friedrich Haas (concerto for light and orchestra) and one by Jörg Widmann (for orchestral groups). Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "Georg Friedrich Haas, born in Graz in 1953, studied composition with Gösta Neuwirth, piano with Doris Wolf, and music pedagogy. Since 1989, professorship in counterpoint, composition, and analysis at the Musikhochschule Graz; prizes and stipends from the Salzburg Festival, the Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, as well as from the City of Vienna. Jörg Widmann was born in Munich in 1973. He studied clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik München with Gerd Starke later with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York. As a soloist, he has performed with important conductors and orchestras in Germany and abroad. His passion is chamber music, and he performs regularly with partners such as Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Kim Kashkashian and Hélène Grimaud."

Artist:	KAGEL/ALBERTO POSADAS, MAURICIO
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 Vol. 4
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10727CD

Performed by the Schönberg Ensemble Amsterdam, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "Mauricio Kagel, born in Buenos Aires in 1931, studied music, literature, and philosophy there. In 1957, he moved to Germany. He has taught at the Darmstadt Summer Courses; 1964-1965: professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo; 1968: head of the Scandinavian Courses for New Music, Göteborg; 1974: professor of musical theater in Cologne. Awards include the Adolf-Grimme-Preis, the Karl-Sczuka-Preis of the SWR, and the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden. Alberto Posadas, born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1967. He studied composition with Francisco Guerrero in Madrid. Stipend from the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, the audience prize at Ars Musica in Brussels. Lectureship at the Conservatorio de Música de Majadahonda in Madrid."

Artist:	NONO, LUIGI
Title:	Guai Ai Gelidi Mostri
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10801/2CD

Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. Features "Guai ai Gelidi Mostri (1983, for 2 altos, flute, clarinet, tuba, viola, violoncello, contrabass and live electronics) and "Quando Stanno Moredno. Diario Polacco n. 2" (for four female voices, bass flute, violoncello and live electronics). "In March 1983, Nono wrote to a close friend, the painter Emilio Vedova, while staying in the Black Forest: 'I felt at the time, and still feel that I have to compose unforeseen and unforeseeable music for the Carnevali. What interests me personally is [...] not only the grey, not only the prefabricated ruptures, but also the beautiful newness that explodes -- tragically -- also violently -- but which aspires towards the most gentle newness.' At that time, Nono was in a preparatory phase at the Freiburg Experimentalstudio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation where, together with director Hans-Peter Haller, he was able to explore new possibilities of structuring time and space and to study live electronics."

Artist:	FLAMMER, ERNST HELMUTH
Title:	Orchestral Works Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10803CD

Featured works: "Interferenza Mente Sovrapposizione" (1988-1990) for violoncello, orchestra and live electronics performed by Werner F. Selge (violoncello), SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden un Freiburg, Lothar Zagrosek (conductor), EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR, Ernst Helmuth Flammer (sound director). "Das Erschwiegene Wort!... Ausgeweitet?" (1993/1994) for solo percussion and orchestra, performed by Yuko Suzuki (percussion), SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Olaf Henzold, conductor. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HUMMEL, THOMAS
Title:	Aus Trachila
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10804CD

Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. Featured work: Aus Trachila: Searching for the missing Ovid - A hyper-realistic recording for speaker and ensemble. Performed by Christoph Ogiermann (voice artist) and Holst-Sinfonietta. "The production of Aus Trachila is an experiment in recording technique. It is probably the first time that this has been accomplished to such an extent. The work is an attempt to achieve a hyper-realistic recording of a music piece. With this procedure, each instrument of the orchestra is recorded separately with the conductor, musically adapted and specialized. Specially developed software assists the recording process and the manual placement of all fragments. This innovative software makes this enormously complex challenge feasible, and allows the interpretation to achieve a high level of precision and transparency. With the surround-sound version of the recording, the listener finds himself virtually amidst the orchestra. This production is dedicated to the violoncellist Claudius von Wrochem, who accompanied the project with encouragement and support."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Keepsafe Of Modern Age
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10805CD

Featured works: "Duo-Sonate, Op. 139" (1949) by Otto Siegl (1896-1978). "Lullaby and Grotesque" (1916) by Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). "Duett" (1934) by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963). "Duo Für Viola Und Violoncello, Op. 47/4" (1941) by Gunter Raphael (1903-1960). "Bukoliki" (1952/1962) by Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994). "Sonatine Pour Alto Et Violoncello, Op. 378" (1959) by Darius Milhaud (1892-1974). "Chassidische Tänze, Op. 15" (1941/1942) by Siegmund Schul (1916-1944). Performed by: Julia Rebekka Adler (viola) and Thomas Ruge (cello). Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	LACHENMANN, HELMUT
Title:	String Quartets
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10806CD

Performed by Stadler Quartett (Frank Stadler, 1st violin; Izso Bajusz, 2nd violin; Predrag Katanic, viola; Peter Sigl, cello). "Lachenmann is one of the most prolific contemporary German composers whose 75th birthday we celebrate on November 27th (2010). On the occasion, NEOS Music will release his string quartets performed by the Stadler Quartett on May 1, 2010." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HUBER, KLAUS
Title:	Erniedrigt - Geknechtet - Verlassen - Verachtet
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10809CD

Performed by Anne Haenen, mezzo-soprano; Theophil Maier, tenor and speaker; Paul Yoder, bass baritone Treble solo from the Tölzer Knabenchor; Schola Cantorum Stuttgart SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart; SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg Matthias Bamert, conductor Kenneth Jean/Burkhard Rempe/Arturo Tamayo, co-conductors. "This important oratorio by Klaus Huber is both a plea and a defense, the concomitant aspects of the work dealing with physical and spiritual hunger that can not be met by any system, nor by any power, or contained by any set of relations. It asks that we heed others, and create a social working environment of the here and now: 'for heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that one man took and with which he sowed a whole field.' The hope for a life free from violence, free from fear, is articulated in actual historical events. Verses from the Bible, transmuted by Ernesto Cardenal into a political manifesto, are combined with voices off into a complex and ambivalent collage that may now be heard anew, examined again, and discussed once more."

Artist:	ELIASSON, ANDERS
Title:	Desert Point/Ostácoli/Sinfonia Per Archi
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10813CD

Performed by Acros Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John-Edward Kelly. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "'Music was the only way I could survive in this world.'Even as a young boy, Anders Eliasson used to arrange his toy soldiers into an orchestra, sit in front of them and sing, imitating the sounds of the instruments. The earliest music he can remember is 'my own singing.' At the age of nine he was given a trumpet, received some lessons from experienced jazzmen, and soon became the leader of his own combo (two clarinets, trombone, drums, guitar and trumpet). Listening to the three works on this CD, it becomes obvious that Eliasson's style has changed over the years. It is a long way from the vehemence and timbral extremes of 'Desert Point' to 'Ostácoli,' which has become a sort of classic for string orchestras, or the broadly reverberant introspection of 'Sinfonia Per Archi,' circumscribing a huge, delicately gossamer arc of tension. Yet no one can foresee what will come next, for each piece is a self-sufficient entity that poses its own demands."

Artist:	LOPEZ LOPEZ, JOSE MANUEL
Title:	Works For Soloists And Ensemble
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10814CD

Featured works: "Le Parfum De La Lune" for solo violin and ensemble (2003), "El Arte De La Siesta" for solo accordion, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, violoncello and realtime electronics (2005), "A Tempo" for solo violoncello and ensemble (1998), "Rhea" for string trio and ensemble (1989). Performed by: Anne Mercier, violin; Esteban Algora, accordion; David Apellániz, violoncello; Plural Ensemble; Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain; Fabián Panisello, conductor. "There exists 'grave' music -- bound to the earth: it drifts up from below, is pleasant enough but paralysis us in that it moves us. Ponder on the virile strength of rock music, on the chthonic sound masses of Xenakis or the drums of Burundi. And then there is 'weightless' music that, in a Kantian sense, is -- if anything -- sublime and which allows feelings to be engendered, and which -- if anything -- attempts an allusion in the air and brushes poetic and arcane strings. If we were to allocate (with the help of such a simple double image) the music of José Manuel López López such a niche -- one would expect this of course from a musicologist who loves terms and pigeon holes -- then we would expect to see his art as a weightless one. His music may in many ways be taken as an art of the obviously sonic, as an art that seeks a dissolution of material rendered supple and elastic."

Artist:	RIHM, WOLFGANG
Title:	Vigilia
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10817CD

Performed by ChorWerk Ruhr Ensemble Modern/Rupert Huber. "In the Catholic liturgy, Vigils is the nocturnal part of the canonical hours, which are spread over the entire day. In formal terms, they consist of a series of prayers, psalms, and hymns from the so-called Gregorian hymnal. Vigilia, too, satisfies the principle of concatenated form: instrumental and vocal ensembles are heard seven times in alternation before joining forces at the end of the 'Miserere'. The instrumental and vocal sections differ in character. The vocal writing in the sung sections constantly recalls the age of early vocal polyphony as well as sixteenth-century madrigals. Melody, harmony, and rhythm reign supreme. With few exceptions there are no dynamic marks. The instrumental movements are different in kind: rather than representing introductions to or commentaries on the vocal sections, they invoke a field of tension in which the vocal numbers are embedded. The clarinet and horn are stationed apart from the rest of the ensemble, heightening the impact of this field of tension. Here, too, there are echoes of imitation and cantus firmus techniques, albeit fewer than in the vocal ensembles. Yet the instrumental movements, called 'Sonatas,' are marked by extreme dynamic contrasts typical of Rihm's music altogether. The sung texts, in Latin, are taken from the Biblical Good Friday story and its liturgical and mystical adjuncts." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	RUZICKA, PETER
Title:	Complete Works For String Quartet
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10822/3CD

Performed by Minguet Quartett: Ulrich Isfort, 1st violin; Annette Reisinger, 2nd violin; Firmian Lermer, viola; Matthias Diener, violoncello; Mojca Erdmann, soprano; Christoph Bantzer & Peter Ruzicka, speakers. "Literary fixed stars spur Peter Ruzicka to continue on to make new musical observations. He reflects in his quartets the verbal scepticism of Celan, Hofmannsthal and Hölderlin, which allows the composer to examine his own thinking and feelings. He remains acute, too, and is therefore able to risk a glimpse into the depths of the human spirit. Heavy emotional outbursts are tempered by an ethos of reasoning, of reflection, and a certain urbanity if one will. In his later works, Ruzicka allows 'the word' to rest on a firm foundation, one no longer mute, but explicit -- what emerges are sensitive speech and music pregnant with meaning." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007 Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10824CD

Featured works: Logos - Fragmente for 32 singers and three orchestral groups. Quod est Pax? Vers la Raison du Coeur for five solo voices, Arabic percussion, percussion and orchestra. Performed by: SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling; SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Rupert Huber. "From 1956 to 1959 Zender studied piano, conducting, and composition (the latter with Wolfgang Fortner) in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg im Breisgau. From 1959 to 1963 he was Kapellmeister of the Municipal Theatres in Freiburg im Breisgau, after which he became Principal Conductor at the Stadttheater in Bonn. In 1964-65 he attended the Second Cologne Courses for New Music at the Rheinische Musikhochschule, under the artistic direction of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1968 he was called to Kiel, where he was General Music Director until 1972. In this year he began his activity as Principal Conductor of the Radio-Symphony Orchestra in Saarbrücken. In 1984 he became Head of the Hamburg State Opera and General Music Director of the orchestra there, changing in 1987 to the position of Conductor in Chief of the Chamber Orchestra of Radio Netherlands in Hilversum, where he worked until 1990." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007 Vol. 2
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10825CD

Featured works - Hans Thomalla (1975): Ausruff for large ensemble (2007); James Saunders (1972): #211007 for ensemble (2006/2007); Arnulf Herrmann (1968): Monströses Lied for solo clarinet, small ensemble and electronics (2007); François Sarhan (1972): The Name of the Song (Dear Me (Bobok)) for string trio, piano and Fender Rhodes, percussion, narrator and live electronics (2007). Performed by Nina Janssen, clarinet; Ensemble Modern/Johannes Kalitzke; Experimentalstudio des SWR. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007 Vol. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10826CD

Featured works: Helmut Oehring (1961): GOYA I - Yo lo vi for orchestra (2006) performed by SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Rupert Huber; Mark Andre (1964): ...auf...III for orchestra and live electronics (2005-2007); Enno Poppe (1969): Keilschrift for orchestra (2005/2006) performed by SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling Experimentalstudio des SWR. "As in previous years, NEOS was trusted with the live recording of the most important premieres at the Donaueschingen Music Days -- this time with a special bonus: a jazz session is part of the 2007 package! Mark Andre, Arnulf Herrmann, Klaus Huber, Helmut Oehring, Enno Poppe, François Sarhan, James Sauners, Hans Thomalla and Hans Zender are the names that appear with greatest frequency at the 2007 Donaueschingen Festival." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HARVEY, JONATHAN
Title:	Works For Piano - Works For Flute And Piano
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10828CD

Featured works: "Nataraja" for flute and piano (1983); "Vers" for piano (2000); "Run Before Lightning" for flute and piano (2004); "Tombeau de messiaen" for piano and Digital Audio Tape (1994); "ff" for piano (1995); "Haiku" for piano (1997); "Four Images After Yeats" for piano (1969); "Homage to Cage, à Chopin (und Ligeti ist auch dabei)" for piano and Digital Audio Tape (1998). Performed by Florian Hoelscher (piano) and Pirmin Grehl (flute). "Jonathan Harvey is one of the most outstanding British composers. He composes for almost all genres: orchestra ('Tranquil Abiding,' 'White as Jasmine' and 'Madonna of Winter and Spring' -- the latter performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle in 2006), chamber (four string quartets, 'Soleil Noir/Chitra,' and 'Death of Light, Light of Death,' for instance) as well as works for solo instruments."

Artist:	HOLLER, YORK
Title:	Topic/Horizont/Mythos/Schwarze Halbinseln
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10829CD

Topic for large orchestra, dedicated to Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1967); performed by WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Michael Gielen. Horizont quadrophonic electronic music, dedicated to Ursula und Cuno Theobald (1971/1972); performed by Studio für Elektronische Musik des WDR, Peter Eötvös and Volker Müller, realization. Mythos for 13 instruments, percussion and 4-channel tape, dedicated to Hans Zender (1979/1980, rev. 1995); performed by MusikFabrik/Zsolt Nagy, Studio für Elektronische Musik des WDR, Volker Müller, sound direction. Schwarze Halbinseln for large orchestra, vocal and electronic sounds on 4-channel tape, dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen (1982); performed by WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln; WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Diego Masson, Studio für Elektronische Musik des WDR; Volker Müller, sound direction, Marie-Louise Gilles, speaker (tape).

Artist:	WEISS, MICHAEL BASTIAN
Title:	Piano And Harpsichord Works
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10830CD

Performed by Andreas Skouras, piano and harpsichord. "The Charm of the Impossible: Micheal Bastian Weiß has discovered the subject-matter of his life in the richly-layered relationship between art and science, between music and philosophy. He lives in Munich as a composer and philosopher. For Weiß, rather, the challenge is to extend the instrument and its possibilities out beyond itself. Likewise, the entire duration of the Sonata on Obscurity, which is also his 2nd Symphony, is colossal. At 50 minutes it explodes every conventional notion of cembalo music. He liberates the instrument from older and more recent historical models and creates a wholly new kind of music for it."

Artist:	ROSLAVETS, NIKOLAY A.
Title:	Works For Piano
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10902CD

Featured works: 3 Compositions (1914); 3 Etudes (1914); Sonata No. 1 (1914); Prelude (1915); 2 Compositions (1915); Sonata No. 2 (1916); 2 Poems (1920); 5 Preludes (1919-22); Sonata No. 5 (1923). Performed by Irina Emeliantseva, piano. "The man was a political suspect: a free-thinker, a romantic social revolutionary, one who was not able to gain a footing on the floor of Marxist-Leninist ideology. As a musician and philosopher he experimented with new tonal systems, which led to him being banned as a composer. And for decades after his death he remained for Soviet authorities an 'unperson'. Abroad, in the West, his music - despite recommendation by Igor Stravinsky - was hardly ever heard, up to 1989. After the pioneering recordings by Marc-André Hamelin and others a new generation of musicians has begun to discover his music: the young Russian pianist and composer Irina Emeliantseva is one good example, a player who is also a painter and who has really taken on board the expressive style of Roslavets."

Artist:	USTVOLSKAYA, GALINA
Title:	Complete Works For Piano
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10904/5CD

Featured works: 12 Preludes (1953); Piano Sonata No. 1 (1947); Piano Sonata No. 2 (1949), Piano Sonata No. 3 (1952); Piano Sonata No. 4 (1957); Piano Sonata No. 5 (1986), Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988). Performed by Sabine Liebner, piano. "A figure who remained true to her cause, and resisted any enticement to be opportunistic, she was to remain silent in the Soviet Union for many a long year. But her spirit was never broken. Galina Ustvolskaya lived and survived in a small, constricting space. To call her music that of 'protest' would be somewhat too facile -- it was simply 'different.' The complete recording of her works by Sabine Liebner demonstrates her individuality and strict stylistic continuity, displaying too a slow progress of radicalization deep within her soul. From simple building blocks of sound she cultivates clear but complex structures; a non-military step of crotchets is changed into the tintinnabulation of bells, which finally crack." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	FUENTES, ARTURO
Title:	Chamber Music
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10906CD

Performed by ensemble Intégrales. "Arturo Fuentes composes instrumental works with live electronics and literary, visual and scenic elements. In Paris he earned a doctorate in composition and a master in philosophy under the direction of Horacio Vaggione and Antonia Soulez respectively. He attended the IRCAM-Cursus in Composition and Computer Music. He received the diplomas on guitar and music theory by the Associate Board of the Royal Schools of Music of London. In Milan he studied with Franco Donatoni and in Mexico he earned a bachelor's degree from CIEM and attended the composition workshops of Juan Trigos. His articles about composition, computer music and philosophy have been published in Mexico, Denmark, Spain, Austria and Germany." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	MESSIAEN, OLIVER
Title:	Complete Works For Piano Solo Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10907/8CD

"Markus Bellheim opens the present recording of the piano works of Olivier Messiaen with a major piece, one in which various key elements of the composer's later music come well to the fore: a French sense of mysticism, synesthesia, the ascetic, the love of the voices of nature, and the notion that our senses may be honed if we listen in to foreign musical cultures with their rich hoard of melody and rhythm. In 'Regard des prophètes, des bergers et des Mages,' exotic colours dominate. And in 'Regard de l'Esprit de Joie,' the Oriental source of Gregorian chant is immediately recognizable. The 'Vingt Regards' were written in 1944 in Paris, in the months before the city was freed. They are a document of expectation, of contemporaneity, and are an expression of an unruly era in which life would be defined anew and where a hunger for the future was to exist." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	GLAZOUNOV, NICOLA LEFANU, KRZYSZTOF MEYER, ALEXANDRE
Title:	Saxophone Concertos
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10910CD

"Alexandre Glazounov's Saxophone Concerto is easily the most famous work ever written for saxophone. It has also become the most frequently performed work of Glazounov, as, sadly, his large oeuvre has fallen into neglect. Glazounov was neither a modernist nor a particularly fashionable composer, but rather a devout representative of Russian music in the tradition of Rimsky-Korsakov and -- in the noblest sense -- an exacting craftsman. Once considered the greatest musical talent of Russia, his remarkable musical abilities were legendary even during his lifetime (there are multiple references to these in Shostakovich's autobiography Testament). The Saxophone Concerto, too, is by no means a 'progressive' work, but rather a delightful presentation of an instrument Glazounov obviously loved. He did as much as any other composer to help the saxophone become accepted as a concert instrument, and he has given the saxophone its only truly romantic concerto." Artists include: John-Edward Kelly, alto saxophone. Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, John-Edward Kelly & Micha Hamel, conductors.

Artist:	APERGHIS, GEORGES
Title:	Works For Piano
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10912CD

Featured works: À Tombeau Ouvert (1997, complete version); Les Secrets Élémentaires (1998), Printmusic (2001); Pièce pour jeunes pianistes (2004), Simata for prepared piano (1969). Performed by Nicolas Hodges, piano. "A naked and honest piano sound was cultivated relatively late by Aperghis -- the results are highly concentrated as might be expected. Nicholas Hodges has concerned himself with these works since 1997: he places emphasis on clarity, sharply-defined lines and the brilliance of timbres. He manages somehow to metamorphose grace into rapid motion and back again. He creates a plasticity of rhythm and harmony, allowing these to somersault over each other or to trickle ever onwards as in the subtle Pièce pour jeunes pianistes. As a bonus track we present Simata, rendered new with a ring modulator: it hovers between an aggressive techno sound and a kind of romanticism dissolved in acid." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	GINASTERA, ALBERTO
Title:	Popol Vuh - Cantata Para América Mágica
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10918CD

Featured work: Popol Vuh, La creación del mundo maya - The Creation of the Mayan World for orchestra, Op. 44 (1975-1983); Cantata para América Mágica, for dramatic soprano and percussion orchestra on poems by Mercedes de Toro after ancient pre-Columbian manuscripts, Op. 27 (1960). Performed by: Rayanne Dupuis, soprano; Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo Ensemble_S (Norbert Krämer R Arnold Marinissen R Stephan Meier R Adam Weisman) Schlagzeugensemble der Musikhochschule Köln; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Stefan Asbury. "The pre-Columbian myths are a force that can not be tamed, reborn as they are in a wholly new language. Stefan Asbury brings the WDR Symphony Orchestra to boiling point with Alberto Ginastera's late work Popol Vuh (1975?83), the creation story as told by the Maya people. At the centre of the Cantata para América Mágica (1960) to words by Mercedes de Toro is the human voice, although the culture has long since disappeared. The protagonist is Rayanne Dupuis, who intones prayers, love songs and songs of farewell, surrounded by a flamboyant and vivid instrumental apparatus: the percussion ensemble of the Conservatory of Music in Cologne, Ensemble S, and the piano duo Bugallo-Williams." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HAAS, GEORG FRIEDRICH
Title:	Works For Ensemble
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10919CD

Featured works: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich ... for percussion and ensemble (1999); ... aus freier Lust ... verbunden ... for bass flute, bass clarinet and two percussions (1994/95/96); ... und ... for chamber ensemble and electronics (2008, First version). Works commissioned by Pro Helvetia, Schweizer Kulturstiftung for the Collegium Novum Zürich; Collegium Novum Zürich/Enno Poppe; Martin Lorenz, percussion; Experimentalstudio des SWR, live electronics. "Georg Friedrich Haas writes music that is strongly hypnotic. A simple title like ... und ... (... and ...) forces together the ensemble and electronics, the microtones and the tempered system, this in a unique way. The result - at the premiere in September 2008 - are 27 minutes of intensely exciting playing, with the Experimentalstudio of the SWR and the Collegium Novum Zürich under Enno Poppe. These sounds impinge on the ear, and find their corollary in a vision no less intense: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich ... (Who heard me when I cried...), with the percussion soloist Martin Lorenz. Other completely different but also fervent notions held by the composer Haas are more redolent of a piece for merely solo voices, which ... aus freier Lust ... verbunden ... (... arising out of free volition ... shall join ...), and are able to - here for example in the chamber music quartet-intermezzo." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Musica Viva Festival 2008
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	6CD/SACD
Price:	$105.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10926/31CD

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Mixtur 2003 for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine-wave generator players, 4 sound mixers, with 4 ring modulators and sound projectionist (2003) (Forward version & Retrograde version). Performed by Experimentalstudio Des Swr. Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/Lucas Vis
       Live recording: Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich, January 25, 2008

       Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905 - 1963): Symphonie 'L'Oeuvre" (1937/38); Aribert Reimann (1936): Cantus for clarinet and orchestra (2006); Jörg Widmann (1973): Armonica for orchestra (2006); Mattias Pintscher (1971): Hèrodiade-Fragmente, Dramatic scenes for soprano and orchestra (1999) performed by Jörg Widmann, clarinet; Marisol Montalvo, soprano; Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/Emilio Pomárico (Hartmann, Reimann). Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern/Christoph Poppen. Live recording: Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich, February 15, 2008 (Hartmann), February 9, 2008

       Iannis Xenakis (1922 - 2001): Antikhthon for orchestra (1971); James Dillon (1950): La Navette for orchestra (2001); Beat Furrer (1954): Concerto for piano and orchestra (2007); Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988): Uaxuctum for 7 percussionists, timpanist, chorus and orchestra (1966). Performed by Nicolas Hodges, piano; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Brad Lubman (Xenakis, Furrer); Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern/Christoph Poppen (Dillon); Chor und Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/Emilio Pomárico. Live recording: Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich, February 3, 2008, February 9, 2008, February 15, 2008

       Chaya Czernowin (1957): Pilgerfahrten for speaker, treble choir, and instruments after texts by Tove Jansson and Stefan George (2006/2007). Performed by Matthias Bundschuh, speaker; Dresdner Kreuzchor; Ensemble Courage/Roderich Kreile. Live recording: Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich, February 2, 2008.

       Kaija Saariaho (1952): Nocturen for viola and electronics (2006); Liza Lim (1966): Ochred String for oboe, viola, violoncello and double bass (2007); Rebecca Saunders (1967): Blue and Gray for two double basses (2006); Adriana Hölszky (1953): Countdown, Scenic concert pieces after texts by Ver du Bois (2007). Performed by Nimrod Guez, viola; Josh Martin, live electronics; Stefan Schilli, oboe; Sebastian Klinger, violoncello; Philipp Stubenrauch, Frank Reinecke, double bass; Daniel Gloger, countertenor; Malte Burba, Georg Birner, Lutz Mandler, Paul Hübner, alphorn, trumpet; Armin Rosin, Berthold Schick, Dieter Eckert, Viacheslau Chumachenko, alphorn, trombone; Markus Stange, Anna Zassimova, Yukiko Naito, Jürg Henneberger, piano; Thomas Hastreiter, Sebastian Hausl, Wolfram Winkel, Alexander Glöggler, Philipp Jungk, Martin Ruhland, Werner Hoffmeister, Stefan Blum, percussion; Rüdiger Bohn, conducted. Live recording: Museum Villa Stuck,Munich & Muffathalle,Munich, February 10, 2008 & February 8, 2008

       Traditional Music From Egypt And Persia: Songs Of The Sufis: Improvisation 1 & 2; Performed by Ensemble Sheik Ahmad Al Tuni. Persian Drummers: Tchai Kuneh, Fada, Tappeh & Molla Nasrdin performed by Trio Chemirani. Live recording: Muffathalle, Munich, January 27, 2008. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	MADERNA, BRUNO
Title:	Complete Works For Orchestra Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10933CD

Featured works: Composizione No. 1 for orchestra (1948-1949); Composizione No. 2 for orchestra (1950); Studi per "Il Processo" di Franz Kafka for speaker, soprano and orchestra (1950); Improvvisazione No. 1 for orchestra (1952); Improvvisazione No. 2 for orchestra (1953). Performed by Michael Quast, speaker; Claudia Barainsky, soprano; hr-Sinfonieorchester/Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Tamayo. "Everything must be looked at again: Bruno Maderna followed this post-war maxim in his choice of simple 'work-shop' titles. Composition, practice, improvisation -- this meant the greatest amount of freedom possible, but it was also his way of recognizing how to realize polyphony, logic and flexibility of thought. Towards floating and transparent forms, which move beyond their own boundaries and question themselves. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of its foundation, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, along with the conductor Arturo Tamayo, has recorded the entire orchestral music of Bruno Maderna. Amongst the early works is a vocal composition, one which was valued highly by Maderna's friend and pupil Luigi Nono: a study on the 'Process' fragment by Franz Kafka, in the present recording with the characteristic voices of Michael Quast and Claudia Barainsky." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	MADERNA, BRUNO
Title:	Complete Works For Orchestra Vol. 2
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10934CD

Featured works: Composizione in tre tempi (1954), Concerto per flauto e orchestre (1954) performed by Thaddeus Watson, flute; Aria for soprano, flute and orchestra (1964) Claudia Barainsky, soprano; Sebastian Wittiber, flute. Dimensioni III for flute and orchestra (1962-1963) performed by Clara Andrada de la Calle, flute/piccolo. Stele per Diotima for orchestra (1966) performed by Alejandro Rutkauskas, violin; Jochen Tschabrun, clarinet; Ulrich Büsing, bass clarinet; John MacDonald, horn; hr-Sinfonieorchester/Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Tamayo. "At the centre of the second part of our Maderna edition are concertante works, many of which formed the building blocks for the opera 'Hyperion.' Conductor Arturo Tamayo was able to draw all instrumental soloists from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra: in the Hölderlin 'aria' and flute concertos with Thaddeus Watson, Sebastian Wittiber and Clara Andrada de la Calle, in the 'Stele per Diotima' with concert master Alejandro Rutkauskas as well as Jochen Tschabrun (clarinet), Ulrich Büsing (bass clarinet) and John MacDonald (horn). One main theme of the works remains the way the individual is torn between rebellion and resigna-tion, reflected in the words from the 'Thalia' fragment, sung here by Claudia Barainsky: 'I question the stars...the day, and the night, but they do not answer...'." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	MADERNA, BRUNO
Title:	Complete Works For Orchestra Vol. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10935CD

Featured works: Ausstrahlung (1971) for female voice, flute, oboe, large orchestra and tape; Biogramma (1972) for large orchestra; Grande Aulodia (1970) for flute, oboe and orchestra. "Of the leading figures of Europe's postwar avant-garde, Bruno Maderna was the embodiment of the free spirit. More than any other, he was at once a visionary and a pragmatist and referred to his music with modest understatement as 'conductor's music.' The truth was that, being an expressive and highly sensitive conductor with no patience for arid sobriety, he knew more about the orchestra and bestrode a more spacious music-historical terrain than his colleagues. His repertoire, which included early music as well as the great symphonic masterpieces, reads like a lexicon of advanced modernism. He had a low opinion of the rigorous radicalism championed by Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, and compared rigid ideological stances with the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. His music represents a fruitful interaction between tradition and the new and unknown; he considered the idea of stylistic hermeticism to be a dead end incompatible with human nature." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	ARTER, MATTHIAS
Title:	Solo Pieces 1993-2007
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10940CD

Featured works: Solo 2007 "Dialog" for accordion (2007); Solo 2002 for violin (2002) Voice for horn (1995); Solo 1993 for recorder (1993, rev. 2009) Cadenza for violoncello (2005); 3 Klavierstücke (1999) Cantando for violin (2006); Música for voice (2000) Solo 2001 for flute (2001) Solo 2006 "cantando - recitando" for violoncello (2006). Performed by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Boris Previsic, flute; Tobias Moster, violoncello Vladimir Blagojevic, accordion; Céline Herrero, recorder; Olivier Darbellay, horn Sylvia Nopper, soprano; Kristine Sutidze, piano. "This music has vitality, and is played here by an amazing soloist, one who knows just about everything his own instrument can do, and many others besides. This sense of detail and of discovery leads to many a risible scene. Matthias Arter, a pupil of Heinz Holliger, is a composer, oboist and conductor, and has developed many creative projects and events. His works are playful, concrete, associative: the twin bellows of the accordion tell of this (Vladimir Blagojevic); streams of air and concomitant resonances are tested out with a panoply of flutes (Boris Previ?ic); and various registers of the piano come into play too (Kristine Sutidze). Horn (Olivier Darbellay) and recorder (Céline Herrero) raise their voices too. The musical language is full of contradictions, and the strings are a veritable ban-shee of voices: violin (Patricia Kopatchinskaja), violoncello (Tobias Moster) -- plus a poem by Cecília Meireles: 'Música', soprano (Sylvia Nopper), which is read, rent asunder and, to much rustling, put back together..." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2008
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	3CD/SACD
Price:	$63.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10944CD

Featured works: Georges Apreghis: Teeter-totter; Brian Ferneyhough: Chronos-Aion; Dror Feiler: Müll; Bernhard Gander: Beine und Strümpfe; Saed Haddad: The Sublime; Enno Poppe: Altbau; Arnulf Herrmann: Fiktive Tänze; Ben Johnston: Quintet for Groups; Isabel Mundry: Ich und Du; Eduoardo Moguillansky: Cire perdue; Brice Pauset: Die Tänzerin. "'One hundred years of New Music -- so what now.' This rhetorical question posed by the promoters of the event provoked various responses. Enno Poppe occupied one corner (a dusty one at that), and Isabel Mundry quite another -- playing the role philosopher. As for Ben Johnston, he celebrated a late Donaueschingen debut with his Quintet for Groups. Brice Pauset, Arnulf Hermann and Bernhard Gander allowed their thoughts to roam a little, as a series of solos receding into the distance, if apparently chaotic when viewed up close, not unlike a disco just around the corner. Saed Haddad demanded luxury goods, and Eduardo Moguillansky held white-hot forms in his hands. Georges Aperghis achieved a remarkable balancing act. Brian Ferneyhough felt, 'The plethora of phenomena that surround us is confusing, incommensurable.' Stay awake, opined Dror Feiler, watch and see how it all develops. Cheers ... let's make a joyful racket!" Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	PANISELLO & GYORGY LIGETI, FABIAN
Title:	Piano Etudes
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10946CD

Performed by: Dimitri Vassilakis. "The 'etude' was originally a small-scale composition that was mainly didactic in intent and presented the player with a technical problem. Gyorgy Ligeti had this more or less specifically in mind when he wrote the first book of his Etudes pour piano in 1985. However, Ligeti's Etudes open a new chapter in his oeuvre. Allusions of tonality enter his harmonic language; echoes of folk music crop up, recalling Bela Bartok; on the whole, the sound became brighter. In Estudios para piano by Fabian Panisello the generic term 'etude' is restored to its original meaning of a preparatory study."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Salzburg Biennial Festival For New Music 2009
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	4CD/SACD
Price:	$63.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10947/50CD

Featured works: Beat Furrer (b. 1954): Spur (1998); Xenos (2008); Mauricio Sotelo (b. 1961): Audéeis (2004); György Kurtág (b.1926): ...quasi una fantasia...op 27/2 (1988); What is the word, Op. 30b; Steve Reich (b. 1936): Different Trains for string quartet and pre-recorded tape (1988); Sextet (1984-85); György Ligeti (1923-2006): Drei Stücke für zwei Klaviere (1976); Continuum for harpsichord (1968); Toshio Hosokawa (b. 1955): Cloud and Light for shô and orchestra (2008); Landscape V for shô and string quartet (1993); John Cage (1912-1992): Two3 (1991); Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006): Composition no 2 (1972/1973); Klaus Huber (b. 1924): Kammerkonzert "Intarsi". In memoriam; Witold Lutosławski (1993/1994): Tempora Concerto for violin and small orchestra (1970); Franck Christoph Yeznikian (b. 1969): Harnischstriemen(Faltenachsen) (2008).
Stereo/multichannel hybrid 4xSACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	WEINBERG/FYODOR DRUZHININ, MIECZYSLAW
Title:	Sonatas For Viola Solo - Sonata Op. 28
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11008/9CD

Featured works: Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 28 (1945, Version for Viola and Piano); Sonata for Viola Solo No. 1, Op. 107 (1971); Sonata for Viola Solo No. 2, Op. 123 (1978); Sonata for Viola Solo No. 3, Op. 135 (1982); Sonata for Viola Solo No. 4, Op. 136 (1983)

Fyodor Druzhinin: Sonata for Viola Solo No. 1 (1959). Performed by Julia Rebekka Adler, viola; Jascha Nemtsov, piano. "After fleeing from occupied Poland, Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) survived in Soviet exile. Defended by Shostakovich in times of crisis, he was tolerated as a symphonist and composer of film music (The Storks Leave, 1957) but was always to remain an outsider. His rich stock of chamber music has been examined by Julia Rebekka Adler, who presents the four solo sonatas for viola, works written between 1971 and 1983. The first is dedicated to the violist Fyodor Druzhinin (1932-2007) and was edited and premiered by him; the others remain unpublished today. The program is rounded out with a solo sonata by Druzhinin himself, as well as an arrangement of Weinberg's early Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, the Klezmer sounds of which may be glimpsed in the version for viola too. The pianist is Jascha Nemtsov, who shares an intimate knowledge of contemporary East European Jewish music and previously rediscovered the violin sonatas by Weinberg."

Artist:	GOTO/JEREMAIAS SCHWARZER, MAKIKO
Title:	Three Haikei And More
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11010CD

"What does 'modern' music sound like in the age of global awareness? This is the question taken up by three haikei and more, using examples from traditional music and new works based on the Japanese musical tradition. The koto (the Japanese zither) originally arrived in Japan by way of China in the Nara period (8th century) as an instrument in the gagaku ensemble. Later it evolved into a solo instrument whose important traditional repertoire was provided by Yatsuhashi Kengyo in the 17th century. At the same time as the koto, the recorder had its music-historical heyday in the Baroque age of the 17th and early 18th centuries. During the 20th century, in the wake of the early music movement, it became a concert instrument for which contemporary composers have written an increasing number of works. The koto and the recorder can be found in both the folk and the art music of their respective cultures. The composers commissioned to write new works for Makiko Goto and Jeremias Schwarzer were thus able to draw their material from many and varied realms of musical association." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	CARTER/UDO ZIMMERMANN, ELLIOTT
Title:	Musica Viva 18
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11014CD

Featured works: Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto (2001); Udo Zimmermann's Lieder Von Einer Insel (2009). "The English conductor Oliver Knussen sees in Elliott Carter the 'most important musical dramatist of the present age working in the area of instrumental composition'. With his scores, Carter fashions dramatic scenarios in which instrumentalists act as individual characters. In his Cello Concerto, too, dating from 2001, he treats the soloist and the individual orchestra musicians as independent protagonists. Elliott Carter's compositions are metrically complex and labyrinthine in the way they are interlocked; they are impressive in their structural density and incredible virtuosity. We recognize the influences of neoclassicism and Schönbergian dodecaphony. It was almost an 'anti-concert': contrary to the usual solo concerto, in which the soloist is presented as someone who forms and shapes the music, in order to keep up -- in a dramatic sense -- a dialogue with the orchestra, we meet here the experienced opera composer Udo Zimmermann, who shifts these scenic elements towards the middle. With his score, the quiet notes dominate, and the opening is not only the most private kind of music, but a song whispered rather than a song sung." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HEFTI, DAVID PHILIP
Title:	ROTAS/Wunderhorn-Musik
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11016CD

"ROTAS, a concerto for oboe and orchestra, was composed in 2009 to a commission from the Augsburg Philharmonic Orchestra and is dedicated to that orchestra, to its conductor Rudolf Piehlmayer, and to the soloist Thomas Indermühle. ROTAS is the last composition of my five-part SATOR cycle. These five compositions are united through the use of common musical material derived from the famous 'SATOR square' (sator, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas) that serves as the germ cell of these works. All the parameters of this music are developed from it, as are the formal structures. The Oboe Concerto is particularly closely related to the first composition of the cycle, my Clarinet Concerto, and this creates an arch stretching across the whole cycle. In this three-movement composition, the solo oboe contrasts short phrases played in a single breath (and thus of a 'natural' length) with overlong passages that can only be played by means of circular breathing. An area of conflict is thus created between passages that are perceived as organic in conception, and melodies that seem almost unending. Wunderhorn-Musik was composed in 2008 to a commission from the Ensemble Theater am Gleis in Winterthur (TaG) and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and is dedicated to the violinist Rahel Cunz, the TaG Ensemble and the conductor Jac van Steen. Wunderhorn-Musik was inspired by the folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which was published by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in 1806. Its subtitle 7 Sound Pictures for Violin and Ensemble refers to the fact that the texts on which the work is founded were used in neither a pictorial nor an onomatopoeic fashion during the process of composition. Rather is this work a setting of impressions that were evoked while reading the seven texts in question." - David Philip Hefti

Artist:	TROJAHN, MANFRED
Title:	String Quartets
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11017CD

Performed by Henschel Quartett. "Manfred Trojahn was born in Cremlingen near Braunschweig in 1949. Today he is professor of composition at the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media in Dusseldorf and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Hamburg Free Academy of the Arts, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science and Art and the Berlin Academy of the Arts. Manfred Trojahn composes for orchestra (including five symphonies to date) and chorus as well as songs and chamber music for various combinations of instruments. Henschel Quartett: Their path to international prominence was paved by celebrated debus tin major music centers and a rouings acclaimed substitution for the Juilliard Quartet in London's Wigmore Hall, a performance broadcast live on the BBC. 'The Henschel Quartet is unquestionably one of the best ensembles in the world -- a magnificent quartet!' -- Los Angeles Times

Artist:	VA
Title:	Music For Double Bass
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11018CD

Featured works: Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988): Nuit: C'est Bien La Nuit & Le Réveil Profound (1972); Isang Yun (1917-1995): Für Aki I (1981), Für Aki II (1981); Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Theraps (1976); Hans Manfred Stahnke (1951): Streetmusic III (1995, dedicated to Frank Reinecke); Werner Henze (1926): S. Biagio 9 Agosto Ore 1207, Ricordo Per Un Contrabasso Solo (1977); Bent Lorentzen (1935): Tiefe (1993, dedicated to Frank Reinecke). Performed by Frank Reinecke, double bass. "As Elgin Heuerding remarks in her introduction, Frank Reinecke plays an instrument that one can not 'hear out' from the musical texture but which can only be felt as part of the immense forces involved in orchestral sound. When allotted a solo role, the double bass reveals its otherwise reticent brilliance and is able to display some remarkable colors. In Nuits (1972) by Giacinto Scelsi, it takes on the garb of an Aeolian harp; in For Aki (1981) it sings many a beautiful melody... he was the son of a friend whose life was saved by Isang Yun. From the 'dirty notes' of Streetmusic (1995) by Manfred Stahnke we arrive at the wild and reeling sound world of Iannis Xenakis' Theraps (1976). This is a lonely reminiscence of the bells at midday, heard by Hans Werner Henze in 1977 in the Italian village of San Biagio. Finally we meet Bent Lorentzen, whose Tiefe (1993) gradually sounds out of the depths."

Artist:	KATZER, GEORG
Title:	String Quartets
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11020CD

Featured works: Georg Katzer (b. 1935): String Quartets: String Quartet No. 1(1965), String Quartet No. 3 (1987); String Quartet No. 4 'Tempi Fragili' (2004). Performed by Sonar Quartett: Susanne Zapf, Kirsten Harms (violins); NIkolaus Schlierf (viola); Cosima Gerhardt (cello). "Silesian-born composer Georg Katzer grew up after the war near Magdeburg. He was at first a musical autodidact, because those post-war years precluded any thoughts of systematic music instruction. After a requisite year of preliminary study, he was accepted for composition studies at the Berlin Conservatory, where he studied with Rudolf Wagner-Régeny and later with Ruth Zechlin. What influenced him most were the teachings of Hanns Eisler, with whom he studied from 1960 onwards. Although the string quartets are certainly not located at the centre of the extensive output of Georg Katzer, they nevertheless accompany his entire development as a composer, representing not the sum of his work, but a picture of his artistic development. In the first quartet, an alternation of asynchronous, aleatoric fields of dissolution and more or less strictly synchronized moving patterns is carried out. Of the third quartet, the composer has written: 'One summer evening my ear honed in on the singing of crickets. I was awake and fully conscious, but for the first time I heard them as a thickly-meshed fabric around a central tone. These extra-musical associations coagulated into something else: human experience as an analogy of art.' The 'String Quartet No. 4' oscillates episodically between moving forward and stopping still, between stasis and dynamic change, between mechanistic, empty operations and rude outbreaks, treating time as a broken continuum, until towards the end any sense of coordination is given up and a conclusion is offered in which each flageolet sounds on in spheric aloofness." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	BRASS, NIKOLAUS
Title:	Songlines
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11021CD

Performed by Helge Slaatto, violin; Klaus-Peter Werani, viola; Erik Borgir, violoncello; Frank Reinecke, double bass. "Various moods are encountered here, each strophe of a demonstrably vocal part reaching ever upwards into the jubilant light and descending into the shadows. Helge Slaatto (violin) takes over the line from Klaus- Peter Werani (viola), passes the word back to him and indulges in a little duet with Frank Reinecke (double bass). And then again, right up to the close, the song is sung on its own, by Erik Borgir (violoncello) and finally by the bassist. In a series of short but personal booklet texts, the four interpreters tell us how they feel about the music they play: as a fanfare, as a heady current, as an ocean voyage, into unknown vistas. As an encounter with never-ending pain. And as a glimpse of hope of something that lies beyond, a life after death."

Artist:	TRAVERSA, MARTINO
Title:	Manhattan Bridge
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11023CD

Performed by: Mario Caroli, flute, bass flute; Garth Knox, viola; Roberta Gottardi, clarinet; Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan, violins; Ralf Ehlers, viola; Lucas Fels, cello; Ensemble Algoritmo, Marco Angius, conductor. "Martino Traversa, a music autodidact at age seven, was originally a jazz musician. He went on to study composition, electronic music, and information technology, obtaining a diploma at the high perfecting Academy of Pescara. He attended the summer courses in Siena, as well as those at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) of Stanford University. He studied with Luigi Nono from 1987 to 1989. In 1990, with the support of Luigi Nono, he founded Ensemble Edgard Varèse. In 1991 he instituted the international review of modern and contemporary music Traiettorie. He's a composer and a researcher in the field of electronic technologies applied to musical acoustics and spatialization techniques. His works are performed by the most important international interpreters." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	RIHM/BELA BARTOK, WOLFGANG
Title:	Schrift-Um-Schrift
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11032CD

Featured works: Wolfgang Rihm: Schrift-Um-Schrift (1993/2007) and Béla Bartók: Sonata For Two Pianos And Percussion (1937). Performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo; Franz Schindlbeck, Jan Schlichte (percussion). "In Wolfgang Rihm's Schrift-Um-Schrift there is a successive development of discrete musical events and attenuated sounds, transformed into a complex, atrophied space. Filled with echoes and resonances which are in turn multicolored, glistening and occasionally subdued vibrations and susurrations, it contains many 'over-written' pre-events, as Rihm remarks in his commentary on the piece: 'The musical environment out of which the work emerges is a labyrinthine field, a group that is entropic -- criss-crossing and rejecting itself as new parts undergo genesis. It is a nature-like process, one not planned.' Béla Bartók treats the pianos as percussion instruments -- in their orchestral guise, so to speak -- in the sonata, such that together they become a force equal to the striking sounds of the individual percussion instruments. An exceptionally-fine sense of formal proportion, and a masterful balance of chromatic and diatonic material, is notable in this piece." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	KURTAG, GYORGY
Title:	Complete Works For String Quartet
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11033CD

Performed by Athena Quartett. "Any attempt to describe Gyorgy Kurtag or to praise him for his music is largely superfluous at this stage. Without doubt Kurtag is one of the most important composers of our time. The Athena Quartett of Berlin takes its name from Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of arts and sciences. Founded in Berlin in 1999, the ensemble studied with the Alban Berg Quartet and attended master classes headed by Ferenc Rados, Gabor Takacz and the Arditti Quartet. Thanks to its close collaboration with composers of the stature of Gyorgy Kurtag, Henri Dutilleux, Pascal Dusapin, Konstantinia Gourzi and Hans Zender, the young musicians developed a keen interest in contemporary music. Another focus in their broad repertoire is a deep study of the masterpieces of Viennese classicism with an eye to period performance practice. The Athena Quartet has won the Geneva Competition and the Joseph Joachim International Chamber Music Competition in Weimar. Performed by Athena Quartett." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	GOURZI, KONSTANTIA
Title:	Conjunctions - Synápsies
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11035CD

"Konstantia Gourzi is one of the most important mentors of contemporary music. As a prize-winner of the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Foundation she stands alongside Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti, and she has founded or directed a number of contemporary music organizations. Her compositions bridge traditional music with contemporary sources of expression." Performed by: Vassilis Agrokostas, psalmist; Michalis Cholevas, tarhu, saz, ney; Christian Elsässer, piano; Konstantia Gourzi, piano and conductor; Appolon Musagète Quartett: Pawel Zalejski, Bartosz Zachlod, violins; Piotr Szumiel, viola; Piotr Skweres, cello.

Artist:	MAHNKOPF, CLAUS-STEFFEN
Title:	Pynchon Cycle
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11036CD

Performed by Peter Veale (oboe), Franklin Cox (cello, Ensemble SurPlus, James Avery (conductor). "Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, born in 1962 in Mannheim, studies in Composition, Music Theory, Piano, Musicology, Philosophy and Sociology with Brian Ferneyhough, Klaus Huber, Jurgen Habermas among others. Music degree and PhD. Since 1984 international prizes and awards, including the Gaudemas Prize, Stuttgart Composition Prize, Ernst von Siemens Music Grant, Villa Massimo, important commissions, numerous portrait concerts worldwide. Principal works: 'Rhizom,' 'Medusa,' 'Kammerzyklus.' Performed by Peter Veale, oboe, Franklin Cox, cello, Ensemble SurPlus, James Avery, Conductor."

Artist:	HOLLER, YORK
Title:	Sphären - Der Ewige Tag
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11039CD

Sphären for large orchestra and live electronics (2001 - 2006) performed by 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Der ewige Tag for mixed chorus, large orchestra andlive electronics (1998 - 2000, rev. 2002) performed by WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Semyon Bychkov. "With his orchestral cycle Sphären (Spheres), composer York Höller created a large-scale work that bundles together the literary, artistic, and personal experiences of the past decades like in a magnifying glass. Spheres consists of six 'sound images' of different character, of which the first five were written during the years 2001 to 2005; after the death of his wife, Ursula Höller-Heidemann, in January 2006, Höller added the concluding sixth movement and dedicated the music 'in love and gratitude' to the deceased. By giving names both to the cycle as well as the individual movements, the composer brings into play an evocativeness on the level of the titles that reflects some of the stimuli and impulses for the creation of the work. York Höller studied composition in Cologne with B.A. Zimmermann and Herbert Eimert, and piano with Alfons Kontarsky, on top of his studies in music education and musicology. He received important impulses from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, having frequently worked at Boulez's IRCAM institute in Paris. His oeuvre encompasses an opera (The Master and Margarita, premiered in 1989 in Paris), orchestral works, chamber and piano music, as well as electronic and live-electronic compositions. From 1990 to 1999 he was artistic director of the Studio for Electronic Music of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), and is currently Professor of Composition at the Cologne College of Music. Höller attained international fame as a result of numerous performances throughout Europe and the USA and a number of CD releases, and last but not least with his orchestral work Aufbruch (Departure) which was a commission from the German Government of the occasion of the parliament's move to the occasion of the parliament's move to the new capital Berlin. This year, York Höller will receive the prestigious American Grawemeyer Award 2010 for Sphären, the highest music prize ever bestowed on a single composition."

Artist:	KELLER, HERMANN
Title:	Second Piano Concerto And Chamber Music
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11040CD

Featured works: Hermann Keller (b. 1945): Concerto for Piano and 13 Instruments; Sonata for String Trio and Piano; Scene for solo trombone, part 2; Scenes for Violinist (e) and Pianist(e). Performed by Antje Messerschmidt (violin); Hermann Keller (piano); Martin Flade (viola); Ralph-Raimund (cello); Matthias Jann (trombone); Ensemble Chronophonie, Manuel Nawri (conductor). "Hermann Keller is the prototype of a circumspect and restless experimenter, an improviser who turns out unprecedented inventions while holding his audience in thrall. One of his favorite occupations is to play ex tempore at the piano, attacking the keys and the body of the instrument in veritable transports of madness. Anything that can be coaxed and twisted from the instrument is brought to bear on his music. There are bonus features as well, the most familiar being preparations, i.e. distorting the piano sound with such implements as erasers, screws, mallets or cymbals. He works with cluster bars, fingernails, fists, elbows -- the entire body, it would seem. He claims that he has never laid eyes on a Cagean prepared piano, but of course he knows the relevant Cage recordings. Henry Cowell, John Cage and Hermann Keller, according to the composer and piano preparer Hans Rempel, form a single a line of evolution. Rempel is right: over the years Keller has experimented ceaselessly with preparation and produced truly evolutionary achievements."

Artist:	CAGE, JOHN
Title:	ASLSP
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11042CD

Performed by Sabine Liebner (piano). "Liebner is active primarily as a performer of new music. Numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist, document her work as an artist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In recent years Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the twentieth century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage, and her recording of Cage's Music for Piano 1-84 is legendary."

Artist:	CAGE, JOHN
Title:	One - One2 - One5
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11043CD

Featured works: One for piano solo (1987); One2 for 1-4 pianos (1989); One5 for piano solo (1990). "Sabine Liebner is active primarily as a performer of new music. Numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist, document her work as an artist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In recent years Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the twentieth century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage, and her recording of Cage's Music for Piano 1-84 is legendary."

Artist:	RUZICKA, PETER
Title:	Orchestra Works Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11045CD

"The bulk of Peter Ruzicka's catalogue of works is taken up by pieces for or with orchestra. For an artist whose intellectual purlieus have always centered on modernism, this is nothing to be taken for granted. The post-war avant-garde found its preferred vehicle in works for small ensemble and struggled to come to terms with large forms and forces. That Ruzicka turned to the orchestra from a sense of inner necessity has to do with the peculiar make-up of his creative imagination, which takes sound as its point of departure." Featured artists: Jeroen Berwaerts, trumpet. NDR Sinfonieorchester, Peter Ruzicka, conductor.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Pasajes - México
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11047CD

"Mexico is an ancient country that views itself in the tradition of the great pre-Columbian civilisations and the Spanish colonial legacy. It is a melting pot for contrasting cultures, societies, languages and traditions. In 2010 Mexico is celebrating its 'bicentenario', the 200th anniversary of its independence and revolution. Past and present alike have left traces which the ensemble Intégrales is intent on pursuing. Their aim is to overcome artistic prejudices and to give a hearing to voices from different mentalities. The criteria for their choice of composers to portray were the expressive intensity, expert craftsmanship and above all the sensuality of their music. To this end, the ensemble Intégrales commissioned four new works in conjunction with Deutschlandfunk and the Netzwerk Neue Musik KLANG! in Hamburg. They were premiered in April 2009 at the Forum Neuer Musik 'La otra América' in Cologne. The humorous or spiritual concepts of an Alejandro Castaños or Aleyda Moreno project an image of a young generation pursuing individual paths, while a composer such as Gabriela Ortiz, who stands at the zenith of her career, hails from the world of classical modernism. Juan José Bárcenas writes on current Mexican topics with a critical eye, while Georgina Derbez Roque draws on European cultural history. That Europe and Mexico still form a bond for Mexican artists is especially evident in Arturo Fuentes, whose music conveys echoes of his years in Paris. It is the youngest composers, Bárcenas and Moreno, who cast doubt on this tradition and turn deliberately and expressively to Mexican themes and topics."

Artist:	SCHNEBEL, DIETER
Title:	String Quartets
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11048CD

"Dieter Schnebel has written three works for string quartet -- the genre where the things we associate with the expression of civilized behavior were most concisely compressed, where living space was cultivated for sublime intimacy and the exchange of freedom-inspired ideas, where the craft of composition reached its finest efflorescence. Schnebel's dealings with the implications of this hallowed genre have brought forth quite distinctive works of art: all three are musical distillates with fully germinated seeds and novel offshoots. Streichquartett Im Raum ('String Quartet In Space') was composed in 2005-06 and premiered by the Quatuor Diotima in February 2008. Taking the miniaturized proportions of Webern's music as his guide, he composed his five brief Stücke ('Pieces') for string quartet in 1954-55, a full half-century before his other two quartets. Schnebel's Second String Quartet was written in 2006-07 to satisfy a commission for a specific occasion: the 45th annual congress of the International Psychanalytical Association, held in Berlin in 2007. The vocal part -- assembled by Schnebel himself from phonemes, scraps of memory and exclamations -- can be performed either by the musicians or by additional actors. Sounds, motifs and motions, time-bound pathways in space, retrospective dependencies: such is the essence of the art of Dieter Schnebel. Katarin Rasinski, Michael Hirsch, vocals; Quatuor Diotima, Naaman Sluchin, violin; Yun-Peng Zhao, violin; Franck Chevalier, viola; Pierre Morlet, cello." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009 Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11051CD

Featured works: Salvatore Sciarrino (1947): World Premiere commissioned by SWR: "Libro notturno delle voci" (for flute and orchestra; 2009). Performed by: Mario Caroli and conducted by SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Beat Furrer. Beat Furrer (1954): "Apon" (for orchestra and speaking voice; 2009); Text by: Händl Klaus, spoken by Helmut Vogel, and conducted by SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Beat Furrer. Jimmy Lopez (1978): World Premiere commissioned by SWR: "Incubus III" (for clarinet, percussion and live electronics; 2009); Poem by: Paul Williams, performed by soloists of musikFabrik, Carl Rosman and Dirk Rothbrust. "Featured on this CD as both composer and conductor, Beat Furrer was born in 1954 in Schaffhausen [Switzerland] and studied composition and conducting in Vienna with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Otmar Suitner respectively. Today he is not only Artistic Director of Klangforum Wien but also a Professor of Composition in Graz, Austria." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009 Vol. 2
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11052CD

Featured works: Frank Bedrossian's Swing; Raphael Cendo's Introduction Aux Tenebres; Christopher Trebue Moore's Strange Attractors. Performed by: Peter Veale, oboe; Carl Rosman, clarinet; Alban Wesly, bassoon; Dirk Rothbrust, percussion; Ictus Ensemble, Michael Schmind, flute; Dirk Descheemaeker, clarinet; Dirk Noyen, bassoon; Rico Gübler, saxophones; Bruce Richards, horn; Toon Van Ulsen, trombone; Pascal Roussea, tuba; Jean-Luc Plouvier, piano; Gerrit Nulens/Miquel Bernat, percussion; Hughes Kolp, guitar; George Van Dam/Igor Semenoff, violin; Bram Bossier, viola; François Deppe/Geert De Bièvre/Arne Deforce/Séverine Ballon, violoncello. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	TSANGARIS, MANOS
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009 Vol. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11053CD

Featured work: Batsheba. Eat The History! (Radioplay after an installation opera for actors, singers, chorus, orchestra and electronics [2008/2009]). "As always, during last year's the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009 tickets were sold out completely. Some world premieres -- according to those people who could not get admission -- should have been repeated. Due to organizational circumstances this was not possible. On this disc NEOS offers a representative selection out of all the concerts, and again of highest quality surround technology. We hope that interested people will understand that we cannot present all of the performed compositions." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	6CD BOX
Price:	$105.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11060CD

Subtitled: Composers - Conductors: Composers conducting their own works. "We do not ordinarily associate the terms 'cultural heritage' or 'cultural legacy' with works, objects and materials of recent vintage, but rather with things unearthed from bygone ages. However, a closer look at the archive of the Darmstadt International Institute of Music (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, IMD), the organiser of the International Summer Courses for New Music held in Darmstadt since 1946, reveals that these terms are perfectly apt. The IMD's archive preserves the history of one of the central institutions of post-war music, making it both a German and an international cultural legacy. The boxed set of CDs Composers -- Conductors, which opens the Darmstadt Aural Documents series, presents a counterpoint of voices, artistic and practical, from the history of the International Summer Courses for New Music. These courses, launched in Darmstadt in 1946, have proved to be an ongoing 'Bauhaus' for contemporary music -- a house of many workshops that has uniquely promoted the potential and needs of New Music and new ways of thinking about music. Here the suspension of the customary division of labour has been and remains (at least temporarily) of great importance."
Contents: Earle Brown (1926 - 2002): Available Forms No 1; Gerhard Müller-Hornbach (B. 1951): Innere Spuren; René Leibowitz (1913 - 1972): Chamber Symphonie For 12 Instruments, Op. 16; Johannes Kalitzke (B. 1959): Cruxification No 2; Mauricio Kagel (1931 - 2008): Orchestrion-Straat; 1898; Sonant; Wolfgang Fortner (1907 - 1987): Mitte Des Lebens; Beat Furrer (B. 1954): À Un Moment De Terre Perdu; Ernst Krenek (1900 - 1991): Cantata For Wartime, Op. 95; Michael Finnissy (B. 1946): Piano Concerto No 3; Bruno Maderna (1920 - 1973): Concerto For Piano And Orchestra; Concertos For Oboe No 1 & 2; Dimensioni No 4; Robert Hp Platz (B. 1951): From Fear Of Thunder, Dreams...; Carmen Maria Cârneci (B. 1957): The Mado Songs; Manfred Trojahn (B. 1949): Chamber Concerto; Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (B. 1934): Continuo; András Mihály (1917 - 1993): 3 Pieces For Chamber Ensemble; Herbert Brün (1918 - 2000): Sonoriferous Loops, Op. 32; Pierre Boulez (1918 - 2000): Doubles; Henri Pousseur (1929 - 2009): Répons For 7 Miusicians; Hans Otte (1926 - 2007): Tasso-Concetti; Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007): Kreuzspiel Part 3.

Artist:	GUBAIDULINA, SOFIA
Title:	Chamber Music With Double Bass
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	3CD
Price:	$49.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11106/8CD

"When I took up the double bass many years ago I developed certain premonitions of what music for double bass might be. The elemental force of its dark, earthy tone, and especially its incidental sounds, noises and overtone series, kindled my imagination. Over the years I have performed many pieces that skillfully exploit the instrument's potential. But in Sofia Gubaidulina's work I found music that exhausts the essence of my instrument in previously unparalleled depth and truthfulness. Here I was able to revisit the sonic fantasies of my past, brilliantly compressed into musical form. The present recording is being released in honor of Sofia Gubaidulina's 80th birthday. Especially in recent years she has increasingly written music for the double bass and produced new double bass versions of several earlier pieces. Our recording allows listeners to hear these works for the first time in their entirety. It also allows them to retrace the evolution of her music over a period of five decades." --Martin Heinze. Featured artists: Martin Heinze, double bass; Heike Gneiting, piano.

Artist:	ENSEMBLE VORTEX
Title:	Corrales; Menoud; Garnero; Huguet; Schuler; Mihaylov; Zea
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11113CD

Featured works: Arturo Corrales (1973): Canon fractal por aumentacion sobre una melodia poular (Folk you!) for recorder, violin and electronics. John Menoud (1976): Acephale for computer. Fernando Garnero (1976): Luminar for oboe, guitar, percussion, violin, and double bass. Francisco Huguet (1976): The Corners of this Section for computer. Denis Schuler (1970): Teh for voice, oboe, guitar, percussion, violin and double bass. Nikolay Mihaylov (1975): Flashback for tape. Daniel Zea (1976): Elegant Sparkling for violin, cello, double bass, clarinet and electronics. "Ensemble Vortex is a very unusual collective of musicians & composers (Geneva, Switzerland), composing and interpreting music of the XXI century -- acoustic, electroacoustic, electronic -- realizing a strong character of their own."

Artist:	KELTERBORN, RUDOLF
Title:	Latest Works
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11118CD

"Rudolf Kelterborn is the Grandseigneur under the living Swiss composers. The artists who play his works are always first choice." Featured works: Hommage a FD (2010); Chamber Symphony 3 (2007); ich hore mich (2006); Concerto For Viola And Orchestra (2009). Performed by: Jeannine Hirzel, soprano. Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain NEC, Pierre-Alain Monot, conductor. Adrienne Soos and Ivo Haag, Piano Duo. Jessica Rona, viola. Sinfonie Orchester Biel, Thomas Rosner, conductor.

Artist:	NONO, LUIGI
Title:	Risonanze Erranti
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11119CD

"NEOS is developing an especially outstanding series of productions in cooperation with the worldwide unique Experimental Studio Freiburg. This release offers Nono's Risonanze erranti not only as some kind of reference-recording: it is a real world premiere, since because of its complex difficulties it was never recorded before. Furthermore this recording matches the outrageous capacity of the interpreting artists and the technicians of the Institute, and is one of the most important works of the great Italian composer." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	WEINBERG, MIECZYSLAW
Title:	Weinberg Edition Vol. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11127CD

"The Weinberg retrospective at the Bregenz Festival in 2010 was centred round the world stage premiere of his opera, The Passenger, but with over twenty other works it opened a door onto the incredible richness in this forgotten composer's oeuvre. Weinberg felt compelled to compose to justify his survival from the Holocaust -- the sole member of his family to do so, and his magnificent output of symphonic and chamber music is full of the melancholy and defiance that survival engendered. We are very grateful to NEOS for enabling others to participate in the resurrection of this inspired and important composer." - David Pountney. Requiem, performed by: Elena Kelessidi, soprano. Wiener Sangerknaben, Gerald Wirth, choirmaster. Prague Philharmonic Choir, Lukas Vasilek, choirmaster. Wiener Symphoniker, Vladimir Fedoseyev, conductor. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	CASSIDY, AARON
Title:	The Crutch Of Memory
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11201CD

"The works on this disc trace the ongoing history of a straight forward but fundamental re-conception of instrumental performance, followed through uncompromisingly to uncover a new, alien world of musical material. That conception is the idea of instrumental decoupling: the independent treatment of the physical components of performance (embouchure and fingers on a wind instrument, for example, or the two hands of a string player). A simple, if counterintuitive, idea. But right away, pursued with Cassidy's diligence and self-awareness, consequences multiply: the dismantling of a performer's acquired physical, musical and technical relationship to his instrument; a shift in emphasis from the sounds produced to the means of producing them; the displacement of pitch from its inherited position at the center of musical discourse; the necessity of new hierarchies and new perceptual vocabularies." Performed by Elision Ensemble: Daryl Buckley, Artistic Director. Richard Haynes, clarinets and saxophone; Graeme Jennings, violin; Benjamin Marks, trombone; Carl Rosman, bass clarinet and voice. Peter Veale, oboes; Tristram Williams, trumpet.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Kosmos
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20802CD

Featured works: George Crumb (1929): Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Cosmic Dances for amplified piano four hands (1979); Gyorgy Kurtag (1926): Játékok for piano four hands (1973 - ); Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Tierkreis - 12 Melodien der Sternzeichen for two pianos (1975-1976): Steinbock - Capricorn, Widder-Aries, Waage - Libra & Krebs - Cancer; Peter Eotvos (1944): Kosmos, Version for two pianos (1961/1999); Bela Bartok (1881-1945): Seven Pieces for Two Pianos (Nos. 1-7) from Mikrokosmos (1939). Performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo. "Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher reach out towards the stars. The central idea of their latest recital is a hiemal and glistening vision of a young Péter Eötvös on how the cosmos comes into existence and decays. It is a journey through musical worlds. A sense of longing is inculcated and, as if from the depths of the universe, we observe the dance and song studies from the Mikrokosmos by Bela Bartok. Sounds produced by musical clocks in Tierkreis by Karlheinz Stockhausen are placed alongside flower pictures and constellations from Játékok (Games) by Gyorgy Kurtag. The final and most extensive sphere is the Makrokosmos IV (Celestial Mechanics) by George Crumb. These 'cosmic dances' strengthen with their foreign trimbres the fundamental sound of distance, stillness and loneliness." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	YUN/LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, ISANG
Title:	Pathétique
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20803CD

Featured works: "Shao Yang Yin" (1968, piano version 1996), "Five Pieces for Piano" (1958) and "Interludium A" (1982) by Isang Yun (1917-1995); "Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, Grande Sonate pathétique" (1798/99) by Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827). Performed by Kara Han (piano). "Freedom, equality and brotherhood -- Beethoven represented the ideals of the French Revolution, whereas Yun fought for the liberation of his country from military dictatorship and despotism. He longed for the reunification of his homeland, one that had been divided by foreign powers as a result of the Second World War; he suffered under the division of Korea and had to endure imprisonment and torture. Certain similarities may also be made out in the music, despite the cultural and historical distance of roughly two centuries. Melodic intensity, suspense and drama; character of speech and speech-like syntax; a dramaturgy -- pugnacious up to now -- that aims at a concrete turning point and which evinces at least in Yun's late works the imagery of advancement, all these things can be distinguished in his music. Beethoven, like Yun, searched for a balance between expression and structural thinking, between apparent inordinateness and a continually lotic sound continuum." Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	DEBUSSY, CLAUDE/IGOR STRAVINSKY
Title:	Le Sacre
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20805CD

Featured works: "En Blanc Et Noir" (1914/15) for two pianos and "Six Épigraphes Antiques" (1915) for piano four hands by Claude Debussy (1862-1918); "Sonata For Two Pianos" (1943/44) and "Le Sacre Du Printemps" (1912) (version for piano four hands) by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Performed by: GrauSchumacher Piano Duo (Andreas Grau & Götz Schumacher). "Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, although contemporaries, followed very different musical paths. Whereas Stravinsky went on the attack with shocking new rhythmic and metric devices, Debussy revolutionized music in a much more subtle way: with harmonic schemes that are no longer rooted in tonality, and a musical language that offers a freedom not found in the cold logic of Stravinsky, banning herewith constructivist moments via an approach to open form never previously encountered. That gainsaid, the two composers influenced each other strongly and even learned from each other during a short phase of their creativity. This was the Europe of the post-1914 era, with all its portentous outcomes. Debussy was fascinated with the explosive power of 'Sacre'; Stravinsky -- for his part -- recognized around this time Debussy's modernity, to which his groundbreaking cantata 'Le Roi Des Étoiles' was dedicated, a work composed as early as 1911. And even if both composers finally went their own way, for a short moment in time their ideas augmented each other and led to a kind of cross-fertilization despite the fundamentally dissimilar nature of their musical vision." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HUMMEL/LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, FRANZ
Title:	Diabelli Variations
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20807/8CD

Featured work: "33 Veränderungen über einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli." Performed by Carmen Piazzini (piano). "Throughout the history of music, the art of variation was always held in high esteem. Added to which, the genius of Beethoven was never outstripped by any other -- this, at least, is known and accepted. So how can it be, that at the heart of his most fascinating, greatest and perhaps profoundest work for piano there lies a harmless waltz by Anton Diabelli, a ditty so to speak and one whose theme Beethoven once deridingly called 'a tune with a cobbler's patch' because of a somewhat banal harmonic change that employs a seventh chord. Was he just trying to prove that an immensely creative spirit is capable of setting light to any musical idea, however simple? And that the most inconspicuous thematic cell can enter captivating improvisational and compositional realms, and admit the most audacious interpretation of the world? This much is certain: Beethoven's late works are reflected in their entirety in the Diabelli Variations, every connoisseur of this music being transported by the temerity of this derring-do, the very solutions, the richness of inspiration, the ardour of expression, the heavenly perfection of simplistic strategies, not to forget the pianistic virtuosity that in essence can literally count on Virtus as a companion. What drives a contemporary composer to start out on this undertaking, given the prevailing conditions and the need to attain such heights? Consider too the dichotomy of pretence and claim, and the exegetical, nay egocentric furore of debauchery that must be inculcated. It is a sacrilege if truth be told, any attempt to pen another 33 variations on this 'cobbler's patch' of a tune, for we pay trepidation no heed. Three things must be considered: -- The belief that all and any philosophy may be perceived as but motes in the air, and that one only has to reach out in order to turn them into music. -- The arcane knowledge pertaining to the pull of gravity in a game that answers its own questions and which often causes the composer to stare in rapt contemplation at what has been created, although chance has intervened and threatened to over power the creator. -- Finally, the enjoyable freedom that precludes a self-expression which up to now was mandatory and that inculcates adherence to everything early experience continues to dictate. If I believe that I owe such sincere self-reflection to mankind's cultural burden, in order not to be crucified by it, I too would simply be being sanctimonious, for this category is one I only trust with great circumspect. But my Diabelli Variations are I believe something special and despite my profound understanding of the Beethoven work -- one I play myself -- they remain separate from it. They are, bar any individual positioning, truly improvisatory and were 'grabbed out of the very air', being free from taste, without style, artistically absolutely unprincipled and in no sense 'modern'. In a way, this makes them modern perhaps, for which I can only blame my pubescent state. As for the order, it turns out to be untamed and random. In due course, and at the flick of a wrist, quotable quotes appear whose posturing admits many a colleague long since dead who extends a hearty invitation to participate in this illustrious guessing game." -- Franz Hummel

Artist:	VA
Title:	Concerti I
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20901CD

Featured works: W.A. Mozart: Concerto for two pianos & orchestra. Franz Liszt: Concerto Pathetique. Bela Bartok: Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra. Performed by: Grauschumacher Piano Duo, Franz Schindlbeck & Jan Schlichte, percussion, DSO Berlin, Ruben Gazarian, conductor. "Today, the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo is one of the most prolific piano duos worldwide, and a regular guest at many important festivals and concert halls, including the Schwetzinger Festspiele, Berliner Festspiele, Ultraschall, and Alte Oper Frankfurt. The duo frequently works together with such renowned conductors as Heinz Holliger, Bertrand di Billy, Georges Pretre and Zubin Mehta. An integral aspect of their programmatic conception is the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity. For this reason, Andreas Grau and Gotz Schumacher maintain an active dialogue with contemporary composers such as Peter Eotvos, Wolfgang Rihm or Karlheinz Stockhausen, who worked in close collaboration with the duo throughout the development of his monumental MANTRA for two pianists."

Artist:	LISZT/YOUNGHI PAGH-PAAN, FRANZ
Title:	Via Crucis
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20902CD

Featured works: "Via Crucis: Les 14 stations de la croix for choir, solo voices and piano four hands" (1878) (composed by Franz Liszt (1811-1886); performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, Harald Martini, baritone [Jesus]; Franz Gerihsen, bass [Pilatus]; Andrea Weigt, soprano; Marietta Schwittay-Niedzwicki, mezzo-soprano; Beata Borchert, alto; Boris Pohlmann, tenor; Hee-Kwang Lee, bass; WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Rupert Huber).
"Vide Domine, vide afflictionem nostram for mixed choir a cappella" on texts from the letters of the Korean priest Yang-Eop Choe (1821-1861) and from the Responsory for Good Friday (2007)" (composed by Younghi Pagh-Paan (1945); performed by Benita Borbonus, soprano; Andrea Weigt, soprano; Markus Francke, tenor; Hee-Kwang Lee, bass, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Rupert Huber.
"Two highly intense works on the events of Good Friday: Franz Liszt desired a new way forward for the music of the Catholic Church, and was ready to draw too on the Protestant tradition left by Johann Sebastian Bach. Liszt understood Bach's legacy however as a kind of musical landscape that pushed tonality to its limits. Although the music of Via Crucis presents a folk-like character, this is by no means a superficial score, one relying merely on stale conventions. The composer creates a dramatic Way of the Cross that remains humble in intention. The present recording -- in the version for choir, soli, and piano four hands -- is one authorized by Liszt himself. During the 19th Century, the priest Yang-Eop Choe acted as pastor to a Catholic community that had become widely dispersed following suppression by government of Korea. His letters, written in Latin, demonstrate a devotion to God as well as a readiness to die for his faith. In her new work for choir a cappella, the Korean composer Younghi Pagh-Paan uses excerpts from the Good Friday responsorium to point up these poignant missives. (For Christians, the Way of the Cross is the path taken by Jesus -- marked by various stations -- on his way to being condemned by Pontius Pilate and the subsequent crucifixion. This is in preparation for Easter, the festival marking the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.)" Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Virtuoso
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD + DVD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 20904CD

Featured works: Matthias Müller (1966): Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (2007-2008); 6 Études de Concert for solo clarinet (2006-2008); Gioacchino Rossini (1792 - 1868): Andante and Variations for clarinet and orchestra (1829) Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971): 3 Pieces for Clarinet (1918); Niccolo Paganini (1782 - 1840): Moto perpetuo, Op. 11, No. 6 post. for clarinet (1831-1832). Performed by Matthias Müller, clarinet ensemble zero/David Philip Hefti.
Bonus DVD: Matthias Müller: 6 Études de Concert for clarinet (2006-2008) (Cyril Gfeller and Rosa Monika Guggenheim, film directors); Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Der kleine Harlekin for clarinet (1975) (Simon Könz, film director). "Matthias Müller demonstrates here to great effect that this wind instrument is well suited to feats of virtuosity. Rossini's Variations celebrate the romantic and bravura aspects of performance. The new concerto, which the Swiss soloist has rendered a bespoke work, centers on subtle aspects of sound as well as rhythmic flexibility. The solo works on the present recording push these ideas to their limit. Along with classic items from the solo repertoire -- the Three Pieces by Igor Stravinsky -- only Paganini can match Rossini in terms of virtuosity; and in the Etudes de Concert, by Matthias Müller himself, the clarinet technique is advanced yet another notch. It would seem he had in mind the studies by Chopin und Debussy, and this allows him to give full vent to the clarinet's capability of expression. In the videos, recorded here as a bonus DVD, Matthias Müller encroaches on new territory: while the music theatre work Der kleine Harlekin by Stockhausen has been captured in a more classical manner, the Etudes de Concert are ample evidence of his work with video artists, whose background is the genre of the pop music video clip. The result remains pure art and speaks for itself." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player. All region bonus DVD.

Artist:	BACH, JOHANN SEBASTIAN
Title:	Goldberg-Variationen
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 30801CD

Goldberg-Variationen BWV 988. Stereo/5.1 multichannel hybrid CD/SACD release that can be played on any CD player. "First recording of the version for string trio by Dmitry Sitkovetsky, taking into account the Urtext of the New Bach Edition, Bärenreiter 1977Swiss Chamber Soloists: Hanna Weinmeister (violin); Jürg Dähler (viola); Thomas Grossenbacher (cello). Played on original instruments by Jacobus Stainer. Around the turn of the millennium, the idea formed to found a first-class Swiss chamber ensemble that would bring together leading performers on the Swiss scene with renowned guests from abroad for ambitious chamber music projects. The ensemble performs in various combinations, and its repertoire includes not only famous and rediscovered works from the Baroque to Modernism but above all, numerous contemporary compositions, many of which were composed for and dedicated to the Swiss Chamber Soloists. They have earned a reputation in particular for performances and radio broadcasts of important contemporary works by Carter, Ferneyhough, Kurtág, Ligeti, Yun, and Zender, as well as world premieres of numerous works by Swiss composers such as Blank, Dayer, Furrer-Münch, Gaudibert, Gubler, Haubensak, Holliger, Käser, Kelterborn, Kessler, Kyburz, Lehmann, Moser, Roth, Schnyder, Tognetti, Wyttenbach, Vassena, and Zimmerlin. Already in its very first year of existence, the soloist ensemble was booked for concerts and tours throughout Europe, the United States, and Australia. Numerous CD and radio recordings and countless concert reviews testify to the first-class reputation of this renowned Swiss ensemble."

Artist:	BRAHMS, JOHANNES
Title:	Liebeslieder & Walzer
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 30804CD

Featured works: "Liebeslieder," 18 waltzes for chorus and piano four hands, Op. 52 (1868/69); "Walzer," 16 waltzes for piano four hands, Op. 39 (1865); "Neue Liebeslieder," 15 waltzes for chorus and piano four hands, Op. 65 (1874/75). Performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Rupert Huber. "The present interpretation fulfills in a special way Brahms' desire to produce a work that unites music not far removed from folk origins with formal ingenuity. The conductor, the singers and the pianists lend this recording a remarkable authenticity, their music-making pointed up by the declamatory phrasing and articulation of the waltz: its melodic gesture is underlined by the traditional acceleration and holding back of tempo, something that lends the internal structure meaningful form and which helps the piece divest itself of any tub-thumping amateurism. A most apposite sound world is conjured up too by the generous but transparent colors of the historic Erard grand, built in 1839 and one of the many still playable keyboard instruments belonging to the piano collection of the WDR. It is these components that most convincingly demonstrates the claim by Brahms on music that 'is eternal,' the present performance confirming these waltzes -- pieces which are cast of course in a small form -- as character pieces, elevating them on occasion to the status of works which hold up a mirror to the soul." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	SCHUMANN, ROBERT
Title:	Concert Pour Piano Seul
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 30805CD

Florian Henschel, piano. "Florian Henschel was born in Berlin in 1970. He grew up in Nuremberg and started to learn the piano at the age of six. In 1985, while still at school, his unusual talent led not only to his being accepted as a guest student at the Nuremberg Meister-singerkonservatorium, studying double bass and piano, but, more significantly, to his embarking on a wide range of musical activities. Between the ages of 17 and 19, and working as a double bass player in the fields of both classical music and jazz, he made two recordings for duo and two for trio. He played in both formations in five European countries. From 1988 onwards, the personal support of Yehudi Menuhin for the Trio AVODAH (in which Florian Henschel played double bass) led to a live television appearance in Manchester and numerous concerts at prestigious international chamber music festivals, as well as a short appearance in the film, Menuhin -- a Family Portrait, by Tony Palmer."

Artist:	JONELEIT, JENS
Title:	Arbitrary
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40701CD

Artists: Tom Schüler (trumpet and flugelhorn); Jens Joneleit (drums, bass, electric piano, grand piano). "The word 'arbitrary' means operating freely, on one's own authority or will -- and hence what jazz has to be above all. The improvisation here is based not on tiny musical material such as phrases or themes but on musical auras. On Arbitrary the musicians 'take power' with clear and to-the-point auras: above all, the aura of the electric period of Miles Davis in the 1970s and the 'wall of sound' of Albert Ayler's rhythm section (Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock). Such an arbitrary combination of two such crucial and fundamentally different aesthetics of jazz has its dangers, but nevertheless it opens up new perspectives thanks precisely to the risks taken."

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	Tectonics Errata Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40702CD

First in a series of archival recordings from the Elliott Sharp vaults. Performed and composed by Elliott Sharp. Recorded at Studio zOaR New York, 1998. "The roots of my Tectonics project may be found in my early fascination with all things futuristic and electronic. I read science-fiction from my youngest days and planned to become a scientist... At Bard College and in graduate studies at the University of Buffalo, I worked with EML and Moog synthesizers and the Music IV programming language and began developing projects that would incorporate analog sequencers and synthesized percussion mixed with improvised guitars and reeds using extended techniques and processed with modulators, filters, and tape delay. This approach extended into instrument building and design including the slabs, pantars, violinoids, as well as fretless guitars plus doubleneck and 8-string guitarbasses with extended range. Conceptually, the music drew upon chaos theory and fractal geometry, algorithmic approaches, and acoustic phenomena... The third Tectonics CD, Errata (first released by the Knitting Factory in 1998) delved deeply into chaos and glitches, saturated timbres and hyper-pixillated rhythms."

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	SyndaKit Vol. 2
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40703CD

Performed by: Orchestra Carbon: Judith Insell (viola); Rea Mochiach (percussion); Zeena Parkins (electric harp); Jim Pugliese (percussion); Ted Reichman (accordion); Marc Sloan (electric bass); Tim Smith (bass clarinet); David Soldier (violin); Evan Spritzer (bass clarinet); Joseph Trump (drums & percussion); David Weinstein (synthesizer and sampler); Elliott Sharp (electroacoustic guitar). Recorded December 1998. "Composed in 1998 for my ensemble Orchestra Carbon, SyndaKit utilizes a collection of biological metaphors to create an ever-shifting rhythmic and timbral matrix. Improvisatory and algorithmic but not improvisation, SyndaKit's essence is a transformative organism consisting of 144 composed cores on 12 sheets divided among the 12 players with a set of simple rules for their use through processes of imitation, addition, recombination, transposition, and mutation. These actions are based on the activities of flocking birds, African drum choirs, cellular automata, hunting packs, and recombinant amino acids."

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	Larynx Vol. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40704CD

"Larynx is an analogy; the orchestra as a throat. It follows as corollary to the throat as orchestra: throat singing as practiced by the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and the hoomii singing of Mongolia, as well as by related jawharp techniques found throughout the world. The natural overtone series is the melodic core of much of these musics and of much of Larynx. Ratios derived from the Fibonacci Series are used to generate tunings and melodic/harmonic material for the strings, brass, slabs, pantars and doubleneck guitarbass, as well as rhythmic material for the ensemble." Performers: Samm Bennett (drums & percussion); Lesli Dalaba (trumpet & slab); David Fulton (trombone, slab, pantar); Ken Heer (trombone, slab, pantar); David Linton (drums); Charles K. Noyes (drums); Bobby Previte (drums); Jim Staley (trombone); Soldier String Quartet: Saura Seaton (violin), David Soldier (violin), Ron Lawrence (viola), Mary Wooten (cello); Elliott Sharp (doubleneck guitarbass, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet and sampler). Recorded and mixed at BC Studio, Brooklyn, New York, June-October 1987.

Artist:	JONELEIT, JENS
Title:	Illuviation
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40705CD

Artists: Roscoe Mitchell (tenor saxophone, flute, piccolo, soprano saxophone, bass saxophone, sopranino saxophone, alto saxophone); Jens Joneliet (drums, bass and piano). "Illuviation is an attempt to start out and develop precisely from where it gets 'dangerous' for many jazz performers and fans, transgressing a certain tolerance level. Illuviation is also an attempt to cause seemingly irreconcilable stylistic directions and sound worlds to collide, but not to blur them mercilessly as in crossover or to allow one 'world' to force the other 'world' off the road, but rather to let each hear the other at the same time and to enter into a dialog previously considered impossible. As a guest on compositions by and with Jens Joneleit, free jazz legend and multi-instrumental virtuoso Roscoe Mitchell is heard here, opening up for the first time his full talent for a very different musical spectrum, thus confirming Duke Ellington's motto: 'If it sounds good, it is good.'"

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	Rheo~Umbra
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40706CD

"'Flow of shadows' is how I would translate the composite neolog title of this 1997 work for Orchestra Carbon and how I might describe the musical gestures therein. In seven sections, 'Rheo~Umbra' layers through composed materials, algorithmic strategies for the ensemble, and improvisations by various soloists. The algorithmic approaches include the 'transient additive pulse' where a percussive hit and its reverberations morph into a pulsing groove. There are also hockets and phased looping/transformation of the composed material designed to gradually translate the horizontal -- notes and lines -- into vertical simultaneities. The overall sound design of the composition is an important structural element with the two keyboardists playing samples constructed by me and derived from my own extended techniques on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet as well as an array of sounds produced on the slabs, sounds then layered with their 'live' manifestations." --Elliott Sharp

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	Spring & Neap
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40708CD

"'Spring & Neap' -- a central event during Carbon's 1996 Japanese tour was the Music Merge Festival taking place over 3 days at Tokyo's Shinjuku Pit Inn and bringing together a diverse and international collection of wonderful musicians including Michiyo Yagi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Jim O'Rourke, Yumiko Tanaka, David Grubbs and more. In addition to sets from Carbon and my solo Tectonics project, I was asked to create an algorithmic structure that I would conduct, composed for a small orchestra made up of players from the festival. Re:Iterations -- it was a happy coincidence that Paul Dunkel (Associate Conductor of the American Composers Orchestra) contacted me in January 1986 about a commissioned piece for the orchestra at the same time that I had been thinking about applying my Fibonacci-series work to an ensemble of strings, essentially re-orchestrating ideas evolved on the guitar. As I was completing Re:Iterations, another useful coincidence: David Soldier had formed the Soldier String Quartet and asked me for a composition for their debut concert at the Miller Theater in NYC. I decided to re-orchestrate Re:Iterations for quartet -- 'Tessalation Row' was the result. Both pieces use the Fibonacci series to generate tunings, rhythms, and forms. All pitches are played on open strings (tuned to 1/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5) or overtones of those open strings. The score uses graphic modules which contain information on the various operations to be performed and give exact rhythmic, timing and pitch information. There are times when the players can vary the overtone melodies and timbres in a section but strictly within the parameters indicated in the score, not improvising. I was very concerned with identity -- the ability of sonic flux and internal detail to vary greatly in each performance without destroying the essence and exact proportions of the piece."

Artist:	JONELEIT, JENS
Title:	Maze Drum Solo
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40709CD

Jens Joneleit (drums). Recorded live on July 2, 2004 at Audio for the Arts Studio, Madison, WI. "Jens Joneleit is a gifted contemporary composer, born in Offenbach, Germany, in 1968. In his formative years as a composer, he was largely influenced by the musical environment provided by his parents who both play the piano. Realizing their son's talent in music early on, Jens Joneleit was sent to a music school to learn basic theory skills when he was seven years old. In 1975, Jens started to take percussion lessons and successively took part in performing with the marching band of his hometown, Nieder-Roden. From 1984-1986, Jens Joneleit taught himself the piano, during which time he became more interested in composing music, writing compositions for solo piano and percussion."

Artist:	NEUWIRTH & ICI ENSEMBLE, OLGA
Title:	Composer In Dialogue - Who Am I?/No More
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40807CD

"The title Composer in Dialogue stands for a biennial cooperation between the ICI Ensemble and a contemporary figure, the aim of which is to create a kind of 'work in progress' through composition itself but also by involving improvisational forms. Performances of pieces thus created remain the intention. The present recording documents an ICI concert with the composer Olga Neuwirth. Olga Neuwirth began her musical career on the trumpet, before she embraced composition as her favoured means of expression. She remains one of today's most important protagonists in the field. She can thank exchanges with Adriana Hölszky and Luigi Nono, studies with Tristan Murail, and a befriended author, Elfriede Jelinek, for the path her professional life took. Olga Neuwirth meets an ICI Ensemble whose calling card is a kind of improvised music that draws on Afro- American roots. Here we must look to Vinko Globokar, Barry Guy, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and George E. Lewis for any explanation. NEOS will now release, after the duo CD JOMO (Johanna Varner & Mary Oliver), the second recording in the ICI Edition. The most exciting thing about this meeting of musical minds is the feeling that opposites impinge on each other. Here, that which is composed comes into head-on conflict with what has been -- or can be -- improvised. This simultaneity of determination and random coincidence, the inherent paradox of which is something that especially interests Olga Neuwirth, guarantees friction. As for the medium of live electronics and the use of samples, which have such an important bearing on the way instruments actually sound, these too point in this direction. Olga Neuwirth likes to describe her music as 'music for catastrophes', because just beneath the surface with its confusing patterns of sound -- ones which resemble a series of labyrinths -- there is a dark undertow that suddenly takes the music in new and unexpected directions."

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT/BERNHARD LANG
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007: War Zones
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40808CD

Featured works: "Ripples From The Bang" (2007) composed by Elliott Sharp. "Paranoia" (2007) composed by Bernhard Lang. Performed by: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, text & vocals; mixmastertodd, electronics & vocals; Philip Jeck, turntables; Hans Koch, reeds; Bernhard Lang, keyboard/electronics; Elliott Sharp, 8-string guitarbass/electronics; Fredy Studer, drums/percussion. Bernhard Lang on "Paranoia": "'Paranoia' is a sequence of eight semi-improvised blocks that were extracted from the sketches to Act III of the music theatre work Der Alte Vom Berge and developed further. Three text groups are used: 'Justifications,' a cut-up from Internet researches on paranoia as a political function; 'The CIA Protocols Of Political Assassination,' a collection of various strategies for political murders. The contents page of the American magazine Paranoia. The improvisations are based on scratched loops and 'damage beats', which make reference to the turntable art of Phil Jeck and the films of Martin Arnold as well as to my series of compositions Differenz/Wiederholung. Both parts lie above the loop scenario as contrapuntal rap poetry. The work was inspired by the book Conspiracy Nation: The Politics Of Paranoia In Postwar America (ed. Peter Knight): paranoia as a new feeling in our lives, paranoia as a political instrument." Elliott Sharp on "Ripples From The Bang": "'Ripples From The Bang' is a set of reflections on causality. The perception we each have of a chain of events remains extremely personal and varies greatly, sometimes being dependent on factors beyond our individual vision. These events may be a personal journey, a state of war, or a cataclysm of cosmic scale. The score that allows the musicians to surf the sonic fall-out produced by the big bang includes through composed parts, algorithmic strategies, graphic performance directions, pre-prepared electronic sound files, and improvisations." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	KNIEL AND HIS REDUCTION QUARTET, MANFRED
Title:	Low Down Music
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40902CD

"Low Down Music is a clear, uncompromisingly reduced, and independent musical language, which includes the basic elements of all possible kinds of music. Low Down Music is an idea for the illuminated, and part of a canny ability to fail -- at the end of the day, it is my music. The first title 'Bürgermusi' -- in American, 'Burgermusi' -- is dedicated to the successful German musician, composer and producer Dieter Bohlen. The second title, 'Naiv, Tief und Grausig-Schön,' is dedicated to our trombonist Mike Svoboda. Mike cooperates closely with star composers of the contemporary music scene. For him, some particularly difficult, highly complex trombone concertos have been written. The 'Low Down Trombone Concerto' is naive, bass and awful in its beauty. The third title, called 'Miss Blue,' is dedicated to an Irish landowner, in whose house my wife and I spent a beautiful and bizarre vacation. This aged, educated, and distinguished lady nourished herself almost exclusively on biscuits and whiskey. I wrote the fourth title, 'Eklat,' for a person whom I know pretty well, and whom I would like to know even better. I dedicated the piece to myself. More than that, I cannot say. The fifth title, 'Free 'n' Open', I dedicate to our bass player. American southern 'down home feeling' is mixed up with the edifying and comforting of the wind players in a Salvation Army band. The sixth title, 'Pozilei,' is an attempt to write a musical comic strip. The comic heroes, two high-ranking police chiefs, meet regularly at a secret place to fool around. A quote: 'This is the only way to carry on with such a job in the long term.' At the center of the composition there is a dramatic break. Without any preliminary warning one finds oneself as part of the reality of a television program discussing politics. Two European parliamentary delegates are arguing the toss. The topic...are we defending Germany at the Hindu Kusch. Yes or no? But, back to our comic heroes. The police officer duo carries on with badinage. A dumb job. No question. The seventh title, 'Klagelied,' is a mixture of African polymetric rhythms and a Czech polka. The dirge is written in a major key. Africans complain in major, Europeans in the minor mode! I have no idea whether this statement is correct. I shall however stick to my guns. The eighth title, 'Schneefelder,' relates to my childhood." -- Manfred Kniel

Artist:	SHARP, ELLIOTT
Title:	Spectropia Suite
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 40905CD

Original soundtrack to the film Spectropia, performed by Elliott Sharp with The '31 Band; Sirius Sting Quartet & Debbie Harry (Blondie). "Spectropia is both a full-length feature film and an interactive media event set in a possible England in 2099, and in New York City in 1931 after the stock market crash. Directed by Toni Dove, it tells a story of time travel and supernatural possession to explore the disorders brought on by consumer culture. For the score, I endeavored to create two different noir soundworlds: for the future, one of distressed computers and tortured guitars -- for New York 1931, one based on an imagined meeting of the musics of Duke Ellington and Edgar Varèse. The song 'This Time That Place' appears in various versions heard throughout the film: as a tango, as a feedbacked guitar solo, as a swing tune, a classical piano etude, and as a rock ballad sung by the great Debbie Harry of Blondie. To perform Spectropia Suite, I assembled an ensemble of musicians, The '31 Band, all of whom have extensive experience in many realms of music. All have worked with me on many projects, from the various Western traditions of jazz and classical music to the farthest reaches of contemporary music, free jazz, and improvisation. We recorded the music in the traditional manner of a film orchestra, cue by cue (though not working to picture as most of the timings were not that precise.) Overdubbing, editing, and processing all took place at my Studio zOaR including the tender yet sardonic vocals of Ms. Harry. This music has evolved from a set of cues into a suite for performance with The '31 Band expanding on the written material with solos and other interpretive actions by the players." -- Eliot Sharp, 2009

Artist:	HUBSCH, CARL LUDWIG
Title:	Longrun Development Of The Universe
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 41003CD

Subtitled: The Creators Bend A Master Plan. Featured works: Carl Ludwig Hübsch (b. 1966): Lumière; Not Even; Three Pinups; Orbiting and Module Modulations. Performed by Gerry Hemingway (drums); Carl Ludwig Hübsch (tuba); Matthias Schubert (tenor saxophone); Wolter Wierbos (trombone). "This recording marks Gerry Hemingway's first appearance on disc with the Hübsch-Schubert-Wierbos brass trio, who have recorded together for more than a decade. A drummer himself, Hübsch chose Hemingway for his innate creativity, organic flexibility and singular style. In Gerry Hemingway he knew he had a singular personality who could function as a melodic voice, as on Lumière, or as a source of metric propulsion, as on Orbiting, or at times move freely between the two roles, as on Module Modulations."

Artist:	SHARP & SCOTT FIELDS, ELLIOTT
Title:	Afiadacampos
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 41004CD

"Our emphasis on composition, and specifically composition for the relatively narrow dynamic range and timbral pallet of paired steel-string, acoustic guitars, directs us away from dependence on muscle memory and set phrases. These structures focus us on interactions that grow out of our immediate reactions to how each of us is, in the moment, interpreting the material." -- Scott Fields.
"With Afiadacampos, I feel that Scott and I have deepened our ability to improvise together and to orchestrate compositional strategies, pointing the way to our future work together." -- Elliott Sharp

Artist:	FIELDS & STEPHAN RATH, SCOTT
Title:	What We Talk
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 41005CD

All compositions by Scott Fields. Artists: Scott Fields, guitar; Stephan Rath, theorbo. "On this recording Scott Fields plays a 1999 Robert Ruck guitar and Stephan Rath plays a 1988 Hendrik Hasenfuss 14-string theorbo, after an instrument of Tieffenbrucker/Edlinger. Our duo was formed for the 2007 Cologne Music Triennial (MusikTriennale Köln) series 'Solos for duos, improvisation from yesterday and today' (Solo für Zwei, Improvisation gestern und heute). Festival yentas matched six early music specialists with six new music specialists. Each pair played similar instruments. Harpsichord and piano. Medieval organ and analog synthesizer. The beauty of pairing theorbo and guitar is that neither musician is channeled into the role of accompanist or soloist. Either can supply bass, chords, melody, or musical noise. Roles can change instantly and seamlessly or can disappear entirely. The music on this CD was composed for the Triennale."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2005: Allurements Of The Ellipsoid
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 41006/7CD

"The newly formed Otomo Yoshihide Quartet made its debut in Donaueschingen in 2005 where it attracted quite a bit of attention. Even the new music specialists were impressed by the strong formal consistency in the approach of the four improvisers. Having defined avantgarde noise rock as well as experimental reductionism with the band Ground Zero, the Tokyo-based musician of many talents Otomo Yoshihide teamed up with a group of like-minded performers for the Donaueshingen Festival. Along with Sachiko M, Otomo's Quartet also features two leading figures from the European improvising scene, trumpet player Axel Dornere and drummer Martin Brandlymayr. It is the versatility and open-mindedness that fused the four musicians into an extraordinary unit right from the start during the rehearsals before the Donauschingen performance. Hence the release, besides the performance program, also consists of the two most remarkable studio takes (SACD 1)." Performed by Otomo Yoshihide, Axel Dorner, Sachiko M, Martin Brandlmayr. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	PARKER & ICI ENSEMBLE, WILLIAM
Title:	Winter Sun Crying
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 41008CD

Performed by: William Parker, double-bass, piccolo trumpet, shakuhachi, double reeds; David Jager, soprano & tenor saxophones; Roger Jannotta, alto saxophone, piccolo, flute, clarinet; Markus Heinze, baritone & tenor saxophones; Christofer Varner, trombone, sampler; Gunnar Geisse, laptop & laptop guitar; Georg Janker, double-bass, G2; Sunk Poschi, drum. Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACD that can be played on any CD player.

Artist:	HALFFTER, CRISTOBAL
Title:	Lázaro
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	DVD
Price:	$45.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 50802DVD

An opera in one act, based on texts by Juan Carlos Marset. "The guards of the Sanhedrin are hunting for Lazarus, after Jesus of Nazareth's arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Lazarus flees to his home, where he lives with his sisters Martha and Mary, before finally taking refuge in his tomb. There, in dreams, he relives his own past death and encounters Jesus' four most trusted disciples (Simon, Andrew, John and Jacob) and Judas. On waking from his sleep, Lazarus returns to his home. A meeting is taking place between the four disciples, his sisters and Judas, who attempts to excuse his treachery and convince the others to follow his plans. Judas fails in his endeavor, and Lazarus decides to give himself up to the guards and die once more, only this time in a fully aware state. The opera house Theater Kiel recently garnered much praise in German-speaking territories for its performances of Halffter's opera Don Quijote (following the Madrid premiere in 2003). Cristóbal Halffter entrusted his new opera Lázaro to the same house, which mounted the first performance in May 2008, using much the same cast. The entire production was filmed and edited by NEOS. Reviews of the opera Lázaro: 'On Sunday May 4, we were among the eager public at the Kiel Opera watching the premiere of Cristóbal Halffter's magnificent opera Lázaro. At the age of 78, the great Spanish composer is in every word, every sound and every gesture, the grand seigneur of the old school, the humanist insightful of human emotions, the aesthete of harmonious proportions, richly inspired.' -- (Peter Krause Die Welt, 06.05.2008) 'The piece opens space after space of subtle, iridescent orchestral structures that unfold symphonically in four major interludes. In the action scenes, the music follows the reading of the Spanish text, to which the orchestra lends a gentle rhythmic impetus. What impresses us here is the composer's utter dominance of the whole ensemble, the way the personal tone Halffter uses in his music conveys to us his own religious convictions. With Lázaro he has created an opera worthy to take its place beside the great spiritual works.' -- (Christian Wildhagen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06.05.2008)" NTSC All Region; Dolby Digital 5.1; 6:9; Approx. 111 mins. Includes 136-page libretto.

Artist:	VA
Title:	Salzburg Biennale: Festival For New Music 2009
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2DVD
Price:	$68.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 50905DVD

"These two DVDs reflect the visually most interesting performances during Salzburg Biennale 2009. They do not overlap the compositions presented on NEOS' Salzburg Biennale audio box. The discs do not only show the music: additionally, you can watch informative interviews with the composers Beat Furrer, Toshio Hosokawa, and Klaus Huber. Artists and works include: Mauricio Sotelo (1961): Cripta. Musica para Luigi Nono (2004?2005/2008), Flamenco; Two pieces from Puro y hondo; Steve Reich (1936): City Life for amplified ensemble and tape (1995), Music for 18 Musicians Gamelan Music from Bali; Toshio Hosokawa (1955): Silent Flowers for string quartet (1998), In Ajimano from Somon-Ka for voice, koto, violoncello and ensemble (2001); Anton Webern (1883?1945): Sechs Bagatellen fur Streichquartett op. 9 (1911/1913), Funf Satze fur Streichquartett op. 5 (1909); Helmut Lachenmann (1935): temA for flute, voice and violoncello (1968), Traditional Japanese Music for Koto; Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614?1685): Rokudan (Danmoto) Traditional Japanese Music for Shakuhachi: Koku, Tsuru no sugomori ; Klaus Huber (1924): Die Erde dreht sich auf den Honern eines Stieres, Ecce Homines for string quintet (1998)." Total playing time: DVD1: 127 minutes; DVD2: 136 minutes. Picture format: 16:9. Dolby Digital & Stereo 2.0 sound. PAL & NTSC format.

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Artist:	SCELSI, GIACINTO
Title:	Chukrum/Quattro Pezzi/Natura Renovatur/Hymnos
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10722CD

Artist:	VA
Title:	43 Internationale Ferienkurse Fur Neue Musik Darmstadt 2006
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10821CD

Artist:	SPINA, ANNA
Title:	Works For Viola Solo
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10920CD

Artist:	WIDMANN, JORG
Title:	Works For Ensemble
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10923CD

Artist:	KUBIK, LADISLAV
Title:	Sinfoniettas Nos. 1 & 3 - Piano Concerto No. 3
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11011CD

Artist:	CASTIGLIONI, NICCOLO
Title:	Altisonanza; Le Favole di Esopo
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD/SACD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11031CD

Artist:	RIHM/ERNST TOCH, WOLFGANG
Title:	Cello Concertos
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11038CD

Artist:	QUELL, MICHAEL
Title:	Chamber Music
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11046CD

Artist:	VA
Title:	Donaueschinger Musiktage 2010
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	4CD/SACD
Price:	$63.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 1114/7CD

Artist:	ALEPH GITARRENQUARTETT
Title:	Haas/Furrer/Hidalgo/Oehring/Hechtle
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 11208CD