Alberto Ginastera left his massive orchestral piece Popol Vuh, which had been commissioned by Eugene Ormandy, unfinished at his death in 1983, and it was only after it was discovered by pianist Barbara Nissman that it had its premiere in 1989, with Leonard Slatkin and Saint Louis Symphony. A musical reimagining of Mayan creation mythology, it's a monumental piece that viscerally evokes a primitive world using both folk elements and sophisticated modernist techniques. The composer wrote that he was aiming for a "reconstitution of the transcendental aspect of the ancient pre-Columbian world," and the piece is fully successful at capturing that vision with music that is powerfully primal, strange, and darkly beautiful.

Much of the solo literature for double bass requires the instrument to change its tuning from its standard orchestral arrangement, raising the pitch of each string by a whole step (if not more) in an attempt to increase its clarity, projection, nimbleness. This Neos album, Music for Double Bass with German bassist Frank Reinecke, steers away from works that employ scordatura in favor of those that use the typical orchestral tuning on the bass. The idea: to focus on and explore the depth and resonance for which the instrument was constructed.

Helmut Lachenmann was honoured for his life’s work with the Golden Lion at the 2008 Biennale. Listening to Lachenmann’s string quartets, we sense how their aural landscape turns from a ‘field of rubble’ into a ‘field of tension’ – how scrapings, draggings, scratchings and rustlings can fulfill the promise of ‘a new beauty’ by avoiding the habitual.

Minas Borboudakis has explored much mythology, philosophy, technology and the natural sciences, and the compositions in this collection reflect this. The CD includes the percussion concerto Archégonon: written for Peter Sadlo, it is a work dealing with “very beginnings”. Also included are two works written for the ensemble spectral: Tetraktys (a string quartet on the number 4) and Krámata (a sextet on alloys).

The five orchestral works in this comprehensive anthology have a common nucleus pointing to the core interests which Bruno Maderna pursued from 1954 to 1966: experiments with a post-serial harmonic vocabulary, and a search for dramatic structures. This CD includes Composition in Three Tempi, Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, Aria, Dimension III and Stele per Diotima.

Bavarian-born composer Michael Bastian Weiß has studied both music and philosophy, and his notes to the two-movement Fragmenta Missarum pro Defunctis (Fragments of a Mass for the Dead) – although not, curiously, for the other work on the disc, the Sonate über die Dunkelheit (Simphonie Nr. 2) – have a philosophical orientation. The Fragmenta Missarum, he said, apply "a topos of recent musical history, namely working with stillness," to the problem of "reacting to a historical disaster that caused considerable pain to countless people." The work was composed in 2000, and this presumably refers to the Holocaust.

Franz Liszt's Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), composed in 1878, dates from the end of his career, when the formerly flamboyant composer joined a monastic order and spent part of his time living a spartan life in a small apartment near Rome. The work combines extreme spareness with the chromatic experimentation characteristic of the composer's late years, with simple melodies subjected Bachian part-writing that veers into expressive chromatic depths. The work shows off the powers of a small choir and has been recorded many times, but this German release, featuring the West German Radio Chorus of Cologne under Rupert Huber, is a standout for several reasons.

Beautiful Collision is the second solo album by New Zealand artist Bic Runga, released on 1 July 2002 in New Zealand, 15 July 2002 in Australia, and 5 November 2002 in the United States. Ken Goldstein of PopMatters gave the album a positive review, as did Emma Phillpott from NZ Musician. At the 2003 New Zealand Music Awards, Beautiful Collision was nominated for Album of the Year, Best Female Vocalist, Best Solo Artist and Producer of the Year. It lost Album of the Year to The Datsuns' self-titled album, but won the other three categories.

It hardly seems creditable that not one but two multi-disc sets of the piano music of Wolfgang Rihm could be released within months of each other. But so it is: Telos Music released a three-disc set of Rihm's complete output for solo piano from 1966 through 2000 featuring Udo Falkner in late spring 2008, while here Neos Music has released a two-disc set of much of Rihm's music for solo piano written between 1970 and 2000, plus a couple of more recent pieces featuring Markus Bellheim in the summer of the same year.

Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) is considered one of the most enigmatic musical figures in the history of 20th century music. He very famously, after suffering a breakdown in the late 1950’s, sat and played a single note on the piano for hour after hour, in an attempt, as he said, “to absorb the world and its overtones.” This is a fascinating sound world both simple and complex and at times hauntingly beautiful.

Christian Wolff was once the baby of the New York School, only 19 when he cast his lot with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown; in 2008, he is the last man standing. Solo piano music is central to Wolff's output, and on Neos' Christian Wolff: Piano Pieces, German pianist Sabine Liebner performs a nice cross section of his efforts in this medium from 1969 to 2006. It takes a pianist with some amount of insight to realize Wolff's compositions, all to some degree open ended, and he does not spell out all of the details.

Luigi Nono (1924-90) was one of the foremost composers in the 20th century who experimented in the field of electronic music. The musical score, written and adhered to by the performers, could be changed and altered by a process of electronic manipulation during the performance.

There are those for whom playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on anything but a harpsichord is an aesthetic sin. The work, they argue, was written to be played on the harpsichord and any other instrument is simply wrong. Then there are those for whom playing the Goldberg Variations on anything but a modern piano is an aesthetic mistake. The work, they contend, may have been written to be played on the harpsichord, but that is no reason to deny the music the clarity and power of the modern concert grand.

The conductor and composer Robert HP Platz was born in Baden-Baden in 1951. His musical mentor and teacher was Karlheinz Stockhausen. Robert Platz was the founder of the Ensemble Koln and was its leader for over 20 years. Rolf Hind had appeared at all the major contemporary music festivals, including Huddersfield and Brighton, and has earned himself the reputation of one of the foremost interpreters of new music.

Recorded and originally released in 1996, Rheo-Umbra is a two-part composition by Elliott Sharp for a typically bizarre ensemble consisting of electric harp, electric bass, two bass clarinets, percussion, sampler, string quartet, and electric guitar (along with the Slab, a somewhat guitarish instrument invented by Sharp himself). The first six minutes of "Rheo-Umbra 1" are built on a repetitive theme that is carried by the string quartet and muttered about, commented upon, subtly undermined and sometimes supported by the others.