Birtwistle: Pulse Shadows

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From Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire to Boulez's Le marteau sans maître and Kurtág's Messages of the late RV Troussova, modernist composers have used the medium of voice with mixed instrumental... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010 More…

Catalogue No: 3984268672
Label: Teldec
Length: 63 minutes

Gramophone Awards

2002

Winner - Contemporary
Gramophone Magazine

March 2002

Editor's Choice

Birtwistle: Pulse Shadows : I Fantasia 1

Work length3:03

$1.30

$1.70

Arditti Quartet (string quartet), Claron McFadden (soprano)
The Nash Ensemble
Reinbert de Leeuw

Birtwistle: Pulse Shadows

Work length1:00:24

$22.10

$28.90

Arditti Quartet (string quartet), Claron McFadden (soprano)
The Nash Ensemble
Reinbert de Leeuw

II Thread suns

Track length2:53

$1.30

$1.70

III Frieze 1

Track length3:36

$1.30

$1.70

IV White and Light

Track length6:12

$1.30

$1.70

V Fantasia 2

Track length3:07

$1.30

$1.70

VI Psalm

Track length2:56

$1.30

$1.70

VII Fantasia 3

Track length2:04

$1.30

$1.70

VIII With Letter and Clock

Track length3:18

$1.30

$1.70

IX Frieze 2

Track length3:11

$1.30

$1.70

X An Eye, Open

Track length2:58

$1.30

$1.70

XI Fantasia 4

Track length3:15

$1.30

$1.70

XII Todtnauberg

Track length4:44

$1.30

$1.70

XIII Frieze 3

Track length4:10

$1.30

$1.70

XIV Tenebrae

Track length5:03

$1.30

$1.70

XV Fantasia 5

Track length3:24

$1.30

$1.70

XVI Night

Track length3:35

$1.30

$1.70

XVII Todesfuge - Frieze 4

Track length4:16

$1.30

$1.70

XVIII Give the Word

Track length1:42

$1.30

$1.70

Reviews
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Reviews

2010

From Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire to Boulez's Le marteau sans maître and Kurtág's Messages of the late RV Troussova, modernist composers have used the medium of voice with mixed instrumental ensemble for their most allusive and personal utterances. Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows (1991-6) belongs in this company. While not easy listening, it deals with some of the most elemental and profound topics in contemporary culture, and this recording rises to the score's many challenges, both technically and interpretatively.
Pulse Shadows is subtitled 'Meditations on Paul Celan', acknowledging the poet-author of the texts for the nine vocal movements, and indicating that the nine movements for string quartet with which the vocal movements are interleaved reflect on – shadow – the emotions that setting Celan (mainly in Michael Hamburger's English translations) created in the composer. The poems are oblique rituals, meditations on the state of human consciousness after the Holocaust, and Birtwistle's music links that quality with the kind of innately melancholic, stoical, intensely humane spirit that informs most of his finest works. Claron McFadden proves herself the most mellifluous singer of this music.
Together with the precision and empathy of the Arditti Quartet and Reinbert de Leeuw, not to mention the admirable recorded sound, this is a disc to live with, and be haunted by, for years to come.

Birtwistle: Pulse Shadows

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