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.

link

Daniel Kientzy / various orchestras - The Romanian Saxophone (1990 compi, rec '84/'86)

French avant-garde saxophone player Daniel Kientzy has been featured on these pages once before - and here's another phenomenal disc highlighting his close ties to some of Romania's most out-there composers of the 20th century.

Ștefan Niculescu, who was featured last on the Kluj disc, comes first this time, with his enjoyably mind-bending Cantos symphony, which also has variants for clarinet and orchestra, and for oboe, horn and clarinets.  Naturally, this is the sax one, giving Kientzy plenty of room to drone and skronk over the hallucinatory backdrop.  In the opening moments, which brought Vangelis to mind, I genuinely wondered if there were synthesisers involved, but nope, it's all orchestral.  A highly memorable and wonderfully weird trip through Byzantine-inspired melodies and musical forms.

We've also heard from Myriam Marbe before on SGTG, and her half-hour Concerto For Daniel Kientzy And Saxophones here is a good counterpoint to the brilliantly oddball works on that collection.  Kientzy starts solo, giving a great display of the range of his genius, before the ominous, fractured orchestral writing starts to fill out.  Plenty of long sax drones here too, intended to imitate bagpipes at one point and featuring Kientzy on two saxes simultaneously (eat your heart out, Beefheart/VDGG!).
 
The disc is rounded off by Anatol Vieru's Narration II, another nicely bonkers piece of orchestral surrealism that subjects "Frère Jacques", of all things, to a series of chromatic mutations.  Meanwhile, what sounds like a sozzled surf guitarist starts to stagger through the orchestra.  The remainder of the work is nicely trippy and off-beam - Vieru sounds like he's mildly spiked the whole ensemble.  Unique stuff, even in 20th century classical music, and really enjoyable.

link

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.

link