Latvian Radio Choir & Kaspars Putnins - Mythes Etoiles - Lasse Thoresen, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage etc.

The Latvian Radio Choir has earned a reputation as one of the premier choral groups on the current musical scene. It is particularly celebrated for its performance of contemporary works. The album 'Mythes �toli�s' contains new music from the Scandinavian/Baltic area alongside modern classics for a cappella choir by Ligeti and Cage.

The project Concrescence was initiated by Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and is focused on new vocal performance techniques. This release is the first to present some of the resulting works on CD. The group featured on the recording is the renowned Latvian Radio Choir.

The main work on the recording is Thoresen's Mythes �toil�s (Myths of the Stars), a large-scale three movement setting of a poem by the composer Giacinto Scelsi. Latvian composer Martins Vilums' choral work Gaw ek-dad kard (On the conflict waged with the primeval ox) was inspired by the cosmological texts of the Bundahish, whilst the minimalist choral piece Mouyayoum by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg has been described as cosmic trance music, and is a wordless exploration of vocal texture. John Cage's Four2 presents a series of sustained, extremely long-held sound-continuums to which voices are added or subtracted, creating vibrant overtones and mysterious inner motion within the music. The works of Estonian composer Toivo Tulev also possess a mystical, incantatory dimension. In Tanto Gentile he strives to balance the expressionistic aspects of contemporary music with the sense of the eternal to be discovered in sacred music. The disc also includes Gyorgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, a work that has gained the reputation of a modern classic since it was used in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey.

Personnel: Latvian Radio Choir, Kaspars Putnins (conductor)