GÉRARD PESSON (b.1958): Rescousse for 13 Instruments, Cassation for String Trio, Clarinet and Piano (Ensemble Modern; Brad Lubman),Vexierbilder II for Piano (Hermann Kretschmar), Aggravations et final for Orchestra, Wunderblock (Nebenstück II) for Accordion and Orchestra.

Description: Like the piano disc we're offering this month, these ensemble works present flickering kaleidoscopic images made up of every imaginable kind of musical material, seeming to be glimpsed by a kind of aural averted vision, gone as soon as detected and before assimilation is possible. Rescousse alone contains a catalogue of gestures, from various ethnic rhythmic devices to noise effects out of Lachenmann or Sciarrino, to suggestions of Bruckner or Ravel, folksong and popular music. Aggravations suggests Lachenmann again, though at his most translucent and ephemeral; its musical gestures, in the composer's words "truncated nuance and extreme fragmentation" - a description that might fit any of the pieces here. Cassation takes this process even further; the strings play almost entirely in pizzicato or scraping, the piano by tapping on the strings, the clarinet in breath sounds; this is musical braille, if conventional music were illuminated text. Wunderblock is a most unusual and fascinating kind of transcription. A bar-for-bar reinterpretation (with a couple of minor interpolations of other material) of the first movement of Bruckner's sixth symphony, erased to the faintest, ghostly outlines with the occasional phrase left more or less intact as though the erasure had taken place through some natural process that unaccountably spared a random element here and there when everything else has atrophied to a barely recognisable skeletal framework. Teodoro Anzellotti (accordion), Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra; Lucas Vis, Johannes Kalitzke.