Rückblick Moderne: 20th Century Orchestral Music [Box Set]

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Description of Rückblick Moderne: 20th Century Orchestral Music [Box Set]

Rückblick Moderne: 20th Century Orchestral Music represents as fine a look back at musical modernism as you're likely to get. And in what a lavish package! A tall box holding two multi-CD jewel boxes and a beautifully printed booklet with photographs of modern and postmodern architecture and extensive liner notes (in German). Even the CDs themselves look handsome. All the more amazing when you realize that the entire set was digitally recorded live--with coughs, turning pages, chair creaks, and vivid sound--during one week in 1998 in Stuttgart (where, it seems, you have to travel nowadays even to hear about this kind of music), by such groups as the RSO Saarbrücken and the Bamberger Symphoniker, led by Dennis Russell Davies, Michael Gielen, Heinz Holliger, and other risk takers. Each CD has been programmed around a theme; for example, "Explosion/Implosion" (featuring Varèse and Mahler's tone poem Totenfeier, later becoming the first movement of his Second Symphony) and "Minimal Postludien," which includes (heads up, completists) Philip Glass's Echorus for two solo violins and string orchestra and Ligeti's Ramifications. Stravinsky, who, like Schoenberg and Cage, appears to cast a long shadow over this imposing collection, remains one of the highlights: a sharp, fiercely erotic performance of Le Sacre by Lothar Zagrosek and the Stattsorchester Stuttgart that helps remind us how much modern music has done, in the face of controversy and disaster, to ground us in our humanity. --Robert Burns Neveldine

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