hello!
my ridiculously-protracted blogligence is finally at an end... i shall shortly be posting the promised "translation" of my own drug-induced transmissions from december, and going from there. in the meantime - here's a link to a page which some of you may find useful (as did i). scroll down through that list to the end of december, and you'll find b's recent quartet release from warsaw, 2012; scroll a little further, to october, and there is the roland dahinden concert which came out on leo late last year. please note: these are not cd rips as such, and thus are not intended as substitutes for buying the actual releases; rather they are audio captures from live radio streams, to tide one over until such time, etc etc. i found them both to be rewarding listens - but that's all i'm saying about the music, for the time being.
what i will say is that in each case, there is a bit of a question mark over the track listing. the polish release lists the (diamond curtain wall) performance as being "comp. 363b+", but this seems rather unlikely: last year, tcf released quartet (frm) 2007 vol. 1, which comprises a reading of comp. 363c. what are the chances that b. would have used subdivisions of the same opus number to include pieces from two different musical systems? not great... as a matter of fact, reference to vols. 2-4 in the same series suggests that all the opus numbers within that range were used for falling river music, so i am going to assume that the listing here is simply wrong. (comp. 323a-c was a series of dcw pieces of course; possibly it's just one of those instead.)
- the ensemble montaigne release is more likely to be accurate in its listing of primary materials, since herr dahinden worked closely with/under b., and took part in his ensembles back in the 'nineties. no, in this case it's just the order of things which gives me pause: comp. 174 is given first, but that is a piece for ten percussionists (plus environmental preparations); nothing like that occurs during this reading. again, a transposed digit thereabouts..?
[history suggests that in both cases, we are unlikely to get to the truth of the matter any time soon. in any event, what all these continuing errors tend to indicate is the undoubted difficulty, for anyone apart from the maestro himself or his close collaborators, of correctly identifying and categorising his vast body of musics. i struggle myself, i freely admit; and if a borderline-autistic detail-fascist like me has trouble with it, what chance stands the rest of humanity? :) ]
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incidentally: i happen to know that the composer himself has yet to receive a single copy of the warsaw cd. get your finger out, serpent records!!
