Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Un grand sommeil noir - Version for voice & piano - Mireille Delunsch, François Kerdoncuff
2. 1. Chanson de Là-haut (poem by Vincente Huidobro) - Sarah Leonard, Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
3. 2. La croix du sud (poem by José Juan Tablada) - Sarah Leonard, Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
4. Hyperprism - Revised Richard Sarks 1986 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
5. 1. Assez lent - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
6. 2. Très vif et nerveux - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
7. 3. Grave/Animé et jubilatoire - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
8. Intégrales - Revised & Ed. Chou Wen-Chung 1980 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
9. Ecuatorial - Corrections from original m/s by Chou Wen-Chung - Kevin Deas, Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
10. Ionisation - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Asko Ensemble
11. Density 21.5 - Jacques Zoon
12. Part 1 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
13. 1st Interpolation of organised sound - (Pre-Recorded Tape)
14. Part 2 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
15. 2nd Interpolation of organised sound - (Pre-Recorded Tape)
16. Part 3 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
17. 3rd Interpolation of organised sound - (Pre-Recorded Tape)
18. Part 4 - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly
19. Dance for Burgess - Asko Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly

Disc 2:

1. Tuning up - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
2. Amériques - Original version. Ed. Professor Chou Wen-Chung - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
3. Poème Electronique - (Pre-Recorded Tape)
4. Arcana - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
5. Nocturnal - original version - Sarah Leonard, Men of the Prague Philharmonic Choir, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
6. Un grand sommeil noir - Orchestral version arr. Antony Beaumont - Mireille Delunsch, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25290 in Music
• Released on: 2004-02-09
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Box set
• Running time: 149 minutes

Customer Reviews

Joyful Cacophony
If you fancy taking on one of the extraordinary imaginations of the 1920's and 1930's, then this is a very tempting pair of discs. Varese wrote extremely sparingly - like Webern, Barraque, Grisey and a few other important voices, his complete output fits onto just two or three CD's. The big works - Ameriques especially - are going to be perennial classics, for no one before or since has had that freshness of spirit combined with a masterly sense of symphonic drama.
This set carries with it a further special feature which some will regard as a plus and others a minor drawback. In producing it, Decca went back to the raw compositional materials, and the actual scores performed here are some distance from the more familiar versions that have become established in the repertory. On the one hand this is arguably more authentic; on the other, some of the earlier instrumental lines sound materially harder to play, and with this (and perhaps with the unfamiliarity of the players to the slightly more skeletal feel of the revised textures) comes an outcome that doesn't always pack the punch of some of the performances I have heard. Boulez for example recorded a mind-blowing disc of Ameriques, Arcana and Ionisation with the NYPO about 20 years ago, which still amazes me - if you can find that you should be sorely tempted, because some of the other works here, interesting though they are, are certainly less important.
Chailly clearly adores this music and he extracts wonderful precision from both the Concertgebouw (disc 1) and the very talented Asko ensemble (disc 2). This is vibrant music, complete with its Neanderthalic grunts, its wailing sirens and its exuberant percussion lines. I was converted long ago - if you don't know what to expect, just take one piece at a time; if you do, I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Remarkable, but not too much my cup of tea
These CDs contain excellently recorded and performed works...but...they're not too much my cup of tea. But even then, there's a lot in them and I find myself slipping on these CDs every now and again to great pleasure. At the very least, you need not feel compelled to buy another Varese CD again : )

Completely Varèse
This 2-disc set contains basically all of Edgard Varèse's music that has survived, a small but painstakingly crafted oeuvre that's uncompromisingly modern in de mid-20th-century sense, marking a clean break with the past after a fire destroyed virtually all his early work written up to the first world-war. In fact his sound world is so advanced that it's kind of hard to believe most of these pieces date from the 1920s and 1930s rather than decades later. They still sound fresh today, but probably a bit out of fashion as well. Judging from his instrumentation and vision, one can sense he more or less anticipates Messiaen though without any of the religious connotations. There's a kind of mad professor aura about Varèse whose endless tinkering with the material meant most compositions remained works in progress and had to be edited into performance editions by the actual professor Chou Wen-chun, who studied with Varèse.
The first disc has the Poème Electronique tape piece plus orchestral pieces played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the few genuinely successful outings for them in modern art music; the second disc is mostly played by the ASKO chamber music ensemble that specializes in this type of music. Occasionally various soloists and a choir participate as well, and taking everything into account (like the excellent booklet notes) the result is a high quality and pretty definitive Varèse compilation.
Going through some of the pieces: "Tuning Up" is actually a bit more organized than its title suggests and appropriately keeps coming back to the A note; its brassy sounds play a major role in the wild "Ameriques" and "Arcana" pieces too, along with percussion. Varèse's fondness for rising crescendos like in movie music is much in evidence here. "Poème Electronique" is probably Varese's best known work which he took a long time to construct from various electronic and natural sounds (Dutch soprano Gre Brouwenstijn is in the mix somewhere, the only time she featured in any type of modern music). The first disc closes with a soprano/orchestra version of the one early song that survived, the soprano/piano version of which opens the second disc. This is followed by a series of highly exotic and rhythmically complex compositions dominated by wind instruments and percussion. "Octandre" scored for just eight wind instruments offers birdsong-type material, "Equatorial" introduces some variety with a piano part and a couple of Ondes Martenots accompanying a Popol Vuh prayer for bass. Another trademark sound, the air raid siren, again appears in "Hyperprism" and "Ionisation", the latter a great percussion-dominated piece. Finally "Déserts" must be the stand-out piece written after the second world-war, with its combination of by now familiar brass plus percussion sounds and some elemental electronic "interpolations".