Xenakis : Orchestral Works

Album review

One must have an acquired taste for Xenakis’ music and his architectural constructions – let’s not forget that he was a colleague of Le Corbusier – which can often be bafflingly complex, and not immediately accessible to the listener. But one has to admit that if anyone knows how to present the world of Xenakis to orchestras and audiences, it is Arturo Tamayo, who has brought out a number of orchestral recordings of works by the architect-composer. And it is precisely architecture and mathematics which serve as the point of departure for Metastaseis, presented here in its original 1955 version, which the composer thought of as his Opus 1. There follows Terretektorh for 88 musicians scattered among the audience  from 1966, and even if the scattering is hardly perceptible from the recording, we can nevertheless tell that there are different sounds taking off in all directions. The album closes with Nomos gamma from 1968, written for a huge orchestra of 98 musicians – who are also distributed around the hall. A visceral, savage, primitive work: its structure obeys schemas with a diabolical complexity which, if they do not necessarily grab the listener's interest, are no less fascinating as a set of specifications. After half a century, these works have lost none of their insolent modernity. © SM/Qobuz

Details of the original recording : Live recording from 2008 (Metastaseis), live recording from The Holland Festival, Amsterdam 2011 (Terretektorh, Nomos Gamma)