Unsuk Chin: new Kairos disc of her ensemble works
(March 2011)
A new Unsuk Chin disc, recorded by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, is released by Kairos to tie in with major performances of her music in London, Paris and Bielefeld.A newly released Kairos disc of music by Unsuk Chin (KAI 0013062) marks a welcome return to the catalogue of four ensemble works performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, originally heard on Deutsche Grammophon's short-lived 20/21 series. The Kairos CD is released to tie in with the Total Immersion day devoted to Chin's music at the Barbican on 9 April, the world premiere by the Ensemble Intercontemporain of Fanfare chimérique in Paris on 15 April, and a new staging of Alice in Wonderland in Bielefeld on 8 May.
The earliest work on the disc is Akrostichon-Wortspiel (Acrostic-Wordplay) (1991) for soprano and ensemble, whose vividly coloured settings of nonsense texts first established her international reputation and revealed her gifts for musical fantasy and wry humour. Piia Komsi is the intrepid soprano soloist on the Kairos disc, drawn from a live Radio France recording, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Kazushi Ono. Since its premiere, the work has gone on to receive over 60 performances in 20 countries.
As Chin's career developed over the next decade the Ensemble Intercontemporain commissioned a sequence of new works. Fantaisie mécanique (1994) was written for five instrumentalists drawn from the ensemble - trumpet, trombone, piano and two percussionists - and sets out to reconcile the seeming opposed qualities of improvisation and pre-determined structure. Xi (pronounced like the English letter C), which followed in 1998, is an ambitious score for ensemble and electronics, premiered and recorded by the EIC under the baton of David Robertson. The title is the Korean word for a seed, nucleus or smallest single particle, from which a larger organism grows, and Chin's score develops similarly from primal cells, while the title provides a further link to the technique of granular synthesis employed in the electronic component of the score.
The most recent work on the disc is the Double Concerto dating from 2002, which the EIC premiered and recorded the following year at the Présences Festival under the baton of Stefan Asbury. The concerto is one of Chin's most kaleidoscopic aural landscapes, drawing upon the piano and percussion sonorities explored in her earlier works. Rather than contrasting the two solo instruments, she focuses on the meeting point between their timbres, with the 'struck' sound of the keyboard emphasised by the employment of prepared piano techniques and the percussion part's ostinatos creating the impression of 'sustained' sounds.
Other recordings of music by Unsuk Chin are a Montreal Symphony Orchestra disc combining the Grawemeyer Award-winning Violin Concerto with the orchestral 'room of light' Rocana conducted by Kent Nagano (Analekta 2 9944), a DVD video of the Munich premiere of her opera Alice in Wonderland in the production by Achim Freyer (Unitel A05016472), and a performance of her amusing exploration of vocal artistry and histrionics Cantatrix Sopranica by MusikFabrik (Wergo WER 6851 2).
> Listen to recordings by Unsuk Chin
> Further information on Work: Akrostichon-Wortspiel
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