Sony Masterworks Salutes 20th Century Musical Visionaries With 'Prophets of the New' Release Series
By: Kelsey Denette May. 23, 2013
It's been a century since Igor
Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring ushered in an age of radical musical
transformation that changed the face of music. A succession of great
twentieth century composers went on to create music that transcended
tradition and moved the art form in a direction unlike anything the
world had heard before. Now Sony Masterworks celebrates these musical
visionaries and introduces their groundbreaking works to a new
generation of listeners with a series of releases collectively titled
"Prophets of the New," available now in digital download format and as
manufacture-on-demand CDs.
Debussy's contemporaneous Jeux, both conducted by Pierre Boulez, one
of the major interpreters of twentieth century music (and a "Prophet
of the New" himself as a composer). Regarding The Rite of Spring,
Boulez wrote that it "has become...the cornerstone of modern music."
Jeux, written for Diaghilev's Ballet Russes in 1912, was Debussy's
last work for orchestra.The second release presents Luciano Berio conducting his own
orchestral works including perhaps the Italian composer's most famous
piece, the 1968 Sinfonia for orchestra and eight voices, with its
tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., and its great third section
building explicitly on the music of Gustav Mahler and incorporating
the words of Samuel Beckett. "[T]here was not a dull moment anywhere,"
wrote Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times of the Sinfonia, "one
of the musics of the future," while Time called it a "white-hot
musical experience that invokes the malaise of the times better than
all the sit-ins, beards, beads and clubbings that wrench contemporary
life." Also included are Berio's Concerto for Two Pianos, Allelujah
II, and Nones. It is the first digital release of these recordings.
Pulitzer Prize-winning modernist master who died just last year at
103. Written in the 1950s and '60s, they include the Variations for
Orchestra (called "a masterpiece" by none other than Stravinsky
himself) and the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two
Chamber Orchestras. The packaging features Carter's own liner notes to
the original Columbia Masterworks recordings of those works. The
release is rounded out by Carter's Piano Concerto performed by Jacob
Lateiner, who commissioned and premiered the piece, with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. All these
performances are released here digitally for the first time.The fourth offering is devoted to the more subdued, often abstract
music of Morton Feldman, one of twentieth century music's most
original voices. A highlight is Rothko Chapel, written in the early
1970s to honor the abstract painter Mark Rothko and to debut at the
famous (and then-new) Rothko Chapel, the Houston "spiritual
environment" that has since been placed on the National Register of
Historic Places. Evoking a continuity in the progression of the music
spotlighted in this series, Feldman's original liner notes (included)
relate that "The soprano melody...was written on the day of
Stravinsky's funeral service in New York." The release also includes
For Frank O'Hara, recorded in 1968, and the hauntingly atmospheric The
King of Denmark performed by famed percussionist and musical innovator
Max Neuhaus. These performances, too, have never before been released
digitally.
New Music, is the first digital reissue of a seminal 1967 album that
features representative works by four important composers of the
postwar era. All were conducted by Bruno Maderna, an early champion of
contemporary music who led premiere performances of many works that
went, as the included original liner notes explain, "beyond the
classical stage of twelve-tone music, taking their lead from Webern
and aiming at the serialization of all musical elements in one unified
structure."
-- Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1952 Kontra-Punkte put the young German in the
front ranks of composers of the time.
-- In Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52
strings (winner of the UNESCO prize in 1961), "every possible way of
attacking a note is explored."
-- In American composer Earle Brown's Available Forms I, the aleatory
principle - freedom of choice in performance - is carried to the
extreme.
-- Henri Pousseur's Rimes pour differentes sources sonores represents an
early example of electronic music, combining electronic sounds recorded
on tape with live instruments.
Taken as a whole, "Prophets of the New" is an eye-opening exploration
of the most important developments in music over the past century,
collected and reissued with a fresh twenty first century perspective. Sony Masterworks comprises Masterworks Broadway, Masterworks, Okeh,
Portrait, RCA Red Seal and Sony Classical imprints. For email updates
and information please visit www.SonyMasterworks.com.
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