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2CD
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NEOS 12108-09CD
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/29/2022
The work of the composer Charles Uzor (*1961) reflects his African origins -- and with it the story of his emigration to Switzerland as a seven-year-old. This also and especially applies to the new double album entitled Mothertongue. Mothertongue is a five-part cycle for mezzo-soprano, tape and ensemble. Uzor is looking for the sounds of his own mother tongue, Igbo, which he lost as an adolescent. The overall program of the two CDs is a journey through Uzor's musical and spiritual cosmos. The works, created between 1989 and 2020, deal with the uprising on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the fairy tale of the Princess of Samarkand, the negative theodicy of the Italian philosopher Sergio Quinzio, and the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis in 2020. Charles Uzor's topics are socially relevant. In this sense, this is a particularly haunting portrait of the Swiss-Nigerian composer.
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2CD
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NEOS 11821-22CD
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The "mimicri" cycle is a central piece by the composer Charles Uzor, in many respects the quintessence of his work since the mid-2010s. Uzor, who was born in Nigeria and moved to Switzerland (where he now lives) at the age of 57, has engaged since 1995 with the music of Machaut and methods of defamiliarization using fixed media. "The phenomenon of concealment strikes me as a survival strategy", says Uzor, transferring the principles of disguise and mimicry as found in nature to his music. He not only takes nature as a formal model, but also borrows sounds from it and changes them, for example birdsong, which he electronically pitch shifts down eight octaves. The main part of the cycle, "Nri/ mimicri", is scored for Ondes Martenot, percussion quartet, and fixed media, with additional parts for piano and fixed media or only the latter. The world premiere recordings on this CD also include vocal music and chamber music in a variety of instrumentations. All in all, this double-CD offers a multi-faceted overview of Charles Uzor's work from the 2000s on. Performers: Caroline Ehret - Ondes Martenot; Ute Gareis - piano; Isabel Pfefferkorn - soprano; Elena Zhunke - violin; Illya Buyalskyy - piano; Percussion Art Ensemble Bern; Ensemble La Notte; SWR Vokalensemble, Rupert Huber - conductor.
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CD
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NEOS 10714CD
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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."
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