Quattro Illustrazioni

I had been bowled over by hearing a piano Suite and the Third String Quartet of Scelsi on BBC Radio 3, bought all the music I could find, and went on to write one of the first articles about his piano music for Piano Journal. Over the next years I studied all Scelsi's piano music at the keyboard, and visited him in Rome, where I found him friendly but disconcertingly unwilling to discuss details of the music and its notation. That remains open to question and a minefield for music writers; col legno's commentator writes about the 'great rhythmic precision' of the notation, but it is probably the case that some of that is apparent, resulting from attempts to notate taped recordings of the composer's improvisations.

Here is a well chosen selection of Scelsi's later piano music, which belongs to the early 1950s, and listeners will be surprised at its originality for that time. The performances are scrupulous and the recording quality superb; Scelsi is a composer who has come into his own with digital recording. The major work Bot - Ba is a half-hour ritualistic sequence of major statements inspired by monasteries and mountains of Tibet, depicted with spacious solemnity, several of the movements culminating in dizzying dances which demand transcendental pianistic virtuosity, well served by Markus Hinterhauser. " Peter Graham Woolf