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Esa-Pekka Salonen: Foreign Bodies; Wing On Wing; Insomnia (2005)

Posted By: Piterets
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Foreign Bodies; Wing On Wing; Insomnia (2005)

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Foreign Bodies; Wing On Wing; Insomnia (2005)
Contemporary Classical | DG | 2005 | 66:29 | EAC (FLAC, cue, no log) | Booklet | 327 MB
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor, Anu Komsi, soprano, Piia Komsi, soprano

This trio of recent works by Salonen (b. 1958) suggests that he's one of the most interesting composers on today's scene. All three share the virtues of his highly individual style, modernistic and accessible. Foreign Bodies and Insomnia are very physical in expression, highly charged, pulsating virtuosi works. Wing on Wing, his most recent orchestral composition and written for the opening of the new Disney Hall, is technically demanding as well as lyrical. With its great washes of sound waves it has an impressionistic texture reminiscent of Debussy’s La Mer. Yet the same love of extreme registers and use of startlingly brilliant orchestration found in all Salonen's works, makes it unmistakably him.

“Foreign Bodies” is music of muscular, extroverted energy; “Wing on Wing” meditates mesmerizingly on the architectural ideas of Frank Gehry, assembling high-tech orchestral-electronic textures that gleam and shimmer like the wings of Disney Hall.
"Wing on Wing uses metaphors of water and wind. I also decided to use the weird sound of a fish from the local waters of Southern California, the Plainfin Midshipman, as an instrument. (A school of fish uses this sound probably as a means of staying in formation.) Fish, of course, was Gehry’s unexpected move in the post-modern game of architecture. The image is beautiful, perfect, and yet completely surprising in the context of intellectual discourse. We hear Gehry’s sampled (and modified) voice here and there. Sometimes we can discern words, key words in his work and life. Sometimes words become musical sounds, and they lose their intelligibility wholly or partially. ...two coloratura sopranos join the orchestra sometimes as soloists, sometimes as instruments among others. In the beginning of the piece I pair them with the lowest-sounding woodwind instruments, the contrabassoon and the contrabass clarinet, and create a new kind of hybrid instrument, a sci-fi fantasy of a union between humans and machines."


Track list:

Foreign Bodies (2001)
for orchestra
commissioned by the Finnish Radio Corporation
dedicated to Jukka-Pekka Saraste
1) Part I: Body Language [9’52]
2) Part II: Language [6’03]
3) Part III: Dance [3’39]

4) Wing on Wing (2004) 25’56
written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic
for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall
dedicated to Frank Gehry, Yasuhiso Toyota, Deborah Borda
Anu Komsi, soprano
Piia Komsi, soprano

5) Insomnia (2002) 21’14
for orchestra
co-commissioned by Suntory Hall, Tokyo
and Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg
dedicated to Christoph Eschenbach

Read more about the CD here.
Read more about Esa-Pekka Salonen here.

Download Links:
Part 1
Part 2

2099epswow

3% recovery record is included.

Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky & Lutoslawski / Gloria Cheng (2008)

More contemporary American and European music is available at my blog.