Țăranu / Bentoiu / Nicolescu - Romanian Contemporary Music (1991 compi)

Last week's foray into the Romanian avant-garde seemed to go down well, so here's another from the same series of UK-produced CDs that gave wider exposure to some essential Electrecord (and Melodiya) recordings.  No Daniel Kientzy this time I'm afraid, but definitely more of the same gloriously weird, hallucinogenic-sounding writing for orchestra.

Three symphonies make up this collection, averaging about 20 minutes each.  Cornel Țăranu's enjoyably strange 'Aulodica' is up first, and shares with the Niculescu work from last week an electric guitar part, albeit briefly.  Pascal Bentoiu's 5th Symphony follows, and is the most mellow, lush and romantic of the three until some swelling organ chords knock it up a few notches in its last few minutes.  Lastly, Stefan Niculescu is represented by his 'Opus Dacicum'.  There's some choppy staccato writing reminiscent of early Xenakis, and a great droning middle section in the very low registers with the ominous melody line being taken by a bass clarinet or possibly saxophone.

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Daniel Kientzy - Kientzy à Cluj (1999)

This post is a shout-out to the always great Spook City USA, for introducing me to today's main performer via a truly essential Octavian Nemescu disc.  Sax virtuoso Daniel Kientzy is French, but has become most closely associated with the Romanian avant-garde.  Since getting into Iancu Dumitrescu, I wondered if he'd ever called on Kientzy, and he has - on a 2005 piece called Nadir Latent - doesn't seem to have been released on album yet though.  So for today, we're heading north west of Bucharest to Cluj-Napoca, the creative hub for the four composers featured on this Kientzy release.

Unlike Dumitrescu, where you're spoiled for choice in readily available releases, Doina Rotaru, Călin Ioachimescu, Cornel Ţăranu and Stefan Niculescu all have slim discographies, let alone findable CDs, making a compilation like this all the more valuable if Romanian spectralism takes a hold on you like it has with me.  These three concertos and one choral work were all written with Kientzy in mind, and make for brilliantly mind-bending listening; the fact that such richly-textured music is led by an instrument more readily associated with jazz sometimes gives the impression of listening to Gershwin's orchestral work on some extremely strong hallucinogens.

Kienty's hardly a typical sax player in any genre, coaxing unearthly skronks from his battery of saxes; one possible comparison might be VDGG's David Jackson, and that still doesn't do Kientzy justice.  The long, low-register lines at the start of the Rotaru piece could bore through solid rock, and her concerto, along with the Ioachimescu one that follows, both feature stabbing, staccato bursts at times that are particularly memorable.  Stay around for the most atypical piece at the end of the disc - Stefan Niculescu's Axion features Kientzy flitting over the top of a Ligeti-esque female choir like some wonderful extraterrestrial version of Hilliard/Garbarek's Officium being beamed across the galaxy.

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