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Featured Release
Louis Andriessen
Writing to Vermeer
Gramophone calls this 1998 collaboration between Andriessen and librettist Peter Greenaway about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer "altogether absorbing." Time Out New York exclaims: "Nonesuch has gone out of its way to make this recording a striking sonic document."
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Louis Andriessen
Writing to Vermeer
Gramophone calls this 1998 collaboration between Andriessen and librettist Peter Greenaway about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer "altogether absorbing." Time Out New York exclaims: "Nonesuch has gone out of its way to make this recording a striking sonic document."
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Louis Andriessen
Rosa: The Death of a Composer
Based upon a 1993 book by the controversial filmmaker Peter Greenaway, Rosa: The Death of a Composer premiered at Amsterdam’s Muziektheater in 1994, with libretto and direction by Greenaway and a score by the leading Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. The Sunday Times (UK), in a review of the premiere, said: “[I]t is clear from the maturity of the Rosa score that [Andriessen] has developed an idiom in which minimalism, a distinct sort of rhythmic Stravinsky-anism and mainstream modernism are blended with masterful, totally personal ease; an idiom in which it is triumphantly impossible to distinguish between pop, jazz and classical styles.”
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Louis Andriessen
De Materie
Consisting of four distinct musical essays, De Materie is and was inspired by the concept of "matter." The musical style is a synthesis of extremes, incorporating both “high” and “low” arts, a feature characteristic of Andriessen’s work. This double album features the piece in its entirety, performed by Asko|Schönberg, with members of the Netherlands Chamber Choir, and conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.
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Louis Andriessen
De Stijl / M Is for Man, Music, Mozart
Written in 1984, "De Stijl is a snarling, clotted, brilliant piece of work," says the Globe and Mail. "[A]ll musical lines are warped, twisting continually between the pure geometries of conceptual music and the abrupt graffiti of jazz." M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991), written for jazz singer and ensemble for a video film by Peter Greenaway, contains "a riveting minimalist score," wrote the Wall Street Journal, "with driving saxophones and bold brass band."
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Louis Andriessen
De Tijd
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is represented on his second Nonesuch recording by De Tijd (Time), which was inspired by writings by St. Augustine. The work seeks to evoke the sound of a continuous present, an awareness of time standing still. Composed in 1981, it contains constant changes of time signature and rhythms with their own metric and instrumental identity. The layers of sounds are represented by choir; violins/flutes/organ; and pianos/vibraphones/crotales.
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Louis Andriessen
De Staat
With its multi-layered structures, highly dramatic forms, and sheer volume, De Staat (text from Plato’s The Republic) suggests the bright, clangorous Balinese gamelan and the polyphonies of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Andriessen considers this loud and aggressive work, dubbed "a Minimalist classic" by the New York Times, his “essay” on the concept of music, democracy and the state.