Though not quite a complete survey of Iannis Xenakis's works involving orchestra — none of the choral pieces are included, nor several of the concertante ones — this is a wonderfully varied collection of superb studio performances by the Luxembourg Philharmonic under Arturo Tamayo recorded over the last seven years. Xenakis's music remains some of the most remarkable of the second half of the 20th century, with a physicality and architectural sense of shape and surface that are unique in our time. I doubt that anyone would want to play all five of these discs in succession — the music is simply too pungent, sometimes too overbearing in its impact to be taken in large quantities. But the range of the effects that Xenakis employs, his spectrum of string effects, the dense-packed dissonant clusters and the micro-polyphony that is moulded into lava-like streams of sounds is spell-binding in its immediacy. Though it was music that always came with a wealth of mathematical theorising to support it, as Xenakis's career went on, it was the uniqueness of its impact as sound that seemed its most important quality; no one else has written music like this.
Source:guardian.co.uk/
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