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Mad Sweeney himself actually appears only in the last two of the Irish composer Frank Corcoran's works assembled on this album. ...
This minor Irish king, who went mad in 637 AD and spent the rest of his life as a naked bird-man, eventually turned his madness into a virtue, namely art, or more specifically: "nature-lyrics of great beauty" (Corcoran). And perhaps this is the shadow perceptible here, running through Corcoran's works, at any rate as a basic concept, as the ideal of how to handle antiquity in music. In Quasi Una Missa (1991) Corcoran intended to "create a sound panorama in which to use the gigantic roar of the God-voices of 2,000 years of his Irish isle... as a salute to the Western polyphony of voices, from Palestrina to Cage." A Piano Trio doing away with the tonal advantages of the grand piano, or Balthazar's Dream (1980), which investigates the fundamentals of culture by pre-digital means, are as original examples of Corcoran's oeuvre as the cycle Rosenstock Lieder (1980), which rearticulates the question about the first chicken or egg. In his Third Wind Quintet (2000) Corcoran at long last recalls Sweeney's cries and the origins of music for winds, before Sweeney's Farewell finishes off with the little king: "Sweeney's sounds take leave of his world. Machine-made and natural and human sounds sing their last song... It is my end." (Corcoran) |
1CD | Contemporary | Special Offers |
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The universe of Mr. Xenakis: Early Christian cults in Anastenaria, Greek mythology in Aïs, and clusters and glissandi in the trombone concerto Troorkh.  |
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All you need is air
A songbird that stops singing must die. Georges Aperghis demands a similar degree of self-sacrifice of the performer of his 14 Récitations: |
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| Kabbala, oratorio in Hebrew, originally composed for the „Mittelfest“ in Cividale del Friuli/Italy and first released by col legno in 1993, has been re-released. |
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