This disc includes all the music for string quartet written by Louis Andriessen, recorded by the Schoenberg Quartet in the years before the group dissolved in 2009. Even in the early Quartet in two movements, written when Andriessen was 18, the composer's inventiveness and quirky sense of humor peek through. It's an affable piece, entirely professional and assured, with enough individuality to be recognizably the work of a composer who has something to say and the wherewithal to say it.

Wergo's admirable series, Edition musikFabrik, consists of seven thematically arranged discs including works by 25 European (and one American) composers performed by the exciting Cologne-based ensemble musikFabrik. The third volume, Vom Himmel zur Hölle (From Heaven to Hell), has, for the most part, in spite of the seriousness of its title, a surprisingly whimsical and sometimes even goofy tone.

This outstanding two-CD survey of the piano music of Christian Wolff comes courtesy of the composer's longtime friend, pianist John Tilbury, with a little help from Matchless label boss (and fellow AMM mainstay) Eddie Prévost and the composer himself. Wolff's studies with John Cage began at the tender of age of 16, and "For Prepared Piano" (1951) is an affectionate nod toward the rhythmic procedures of his teacher, who sent his student off to the hotbed of avant-garde Europe that same year to meet Pierre Boulez.

In an era where many feel that classical music may ultimately be at its scariest "standstill", Mr. Eggert commits himself to writing high quality art-music that not only satisfies some sort of asoteric aesthetic code with which we evaluate "classical music", but his music also exemplifies his personality.

One of Constellation’s most pivotal contributors, Canadian violinist Jessica Moss, takes the solo spotlight to afford a stunning glimpse of her personal sonic weltanschauung in a rare, captivating away day from the GY!BE, Vic Chesnutt, Black Ox Orkestar, A Silver Mt. Zion and Carl Bozulich ensembles that she frequents.

A reissue of the two-record set, featuring four pieces for computer electronics and voices that amplify to an extreme degree the components and expressive qualities of the voice. "Still," with a text from Samuel Coleridge's The Wanderings of Cain (1798), moves extremely slowly in a "vocal fry" across the aspirate clicks and wind of the performer; "A Merciful Coincidence," on a text from Samuel Beckett's Watt (1953), uses the aggressive-passive inflections of the frog performers croaking, which seems to have intent, if not syntactical "meaning".

Collecting five CDs for about the price of three, this set of Boulez recordings is without parallel among the conductor's new-music releases. Imagine getting Boulez's celebrated single CD of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke and his equally impressive single CD of Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and Variations for Orchestra, bundled with four pivotal Elliott Carter works, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's electrifying …AGM…, Gérard Grisey's Modulations, Iannis Xenakis's Jalons, Hugues Dufourt's Antiphysis, and Brian Ferneyhough's Funerailles, and you have an idea how far this set stretches.

George Antheil's avant-garde signature piece, the Ballet Méchanique, created riots in Paris at the Theatre Champs Elysees in June of 1926, and the following April in New York's Carnegie Hall. Even though it was the focus of one of the most written about events in 20th century American music history, it was not to be heard again for 62 years, until American conductor and musicologist Maurice Peress searched out the original score and restaged the 1927 concert in the very same Carnegie Hall on July 12, 1989. This world premiere recording now makes it possible to hear the original which contained Antheil's most advanced ideas; a futurist, machine-age, ragtime inspired music, of a complexity beyond human playing capabilities and a conception beyond most music composed in 1925.

Known for drawing unusual sonorities from conventional instruments, Xenakis strangely left the piano's potential for novel sounds unexplored. In these works, Xenakis stays on the keyboard without so much as a plucked string or any use of gadgetry to alter the instrument's sound. Although that might make these pieces appear less radical, even "safe," Xenakis exploits every other option available.

Tenney has often characterized himself as a kind of “tone scientist”, that is, one working on an almost microscopic level with the primary materials of sound in order to expand our knowledge of its properties (what makes it what it is) and perceptual identity (how we respond to it). To do so, he has composed music that isolates the components of sound production into their most basic acoustic phenomena; music that explores and illuminates the subatomic pitch relationships within the harmonic series; music that combines these pitches into complexes motivated by systematic patterns or chance procedures.

'Lift' is an album in which Young Japanese pianist/composer Koki Nakano constructs his own musical world. Piano and cello combine in a selection of beautiful pieces, where Nakano draws on his classical background whilst weaving in other influences, using repetitive and rhythmic elements of jazz and creating layers of sound inspired by pop and electronic music.

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.

Pioneer of techno-pop, Academy Award winning film composer, touring performer - Ryuichi Sakamoto enjoys a diverse career as an artist whose music continually challenges traditional categories. Pianist Chitose Okashiro, taking risks that not a single "classical pianist" has been willing to take, recognizing the greatness of the classically trained Sakamoto's piano works, and imbuing them with her own brand of explosively talented genius has herewith set the standard for "independent classical label crossover" achievement. Already a HUGE success in Japan, with sales in excess of 30,000 units, Miss Okashiro herewith reveals the complete arsenal of Sakamoto's prowess… a prowess that lands him in the position (arguably) of the world's most important composer. Included on this CD are the hugely impressionistic and French like pieces that ONLY a trained classical pianist can play with the simplicity and grace required to foster their most sublime effects.

John Cage: Early Piano Music comes from Herbert Henck, an experienced hand with the work of Cage, having previously recorded Music for Piano, Music of Changes, and Sonatas and Interludes in addition to a mighty swath of first-tier twentieth-century literature for piano for various labels, most notably Wergo and ECM New Series. These are early works for standard, not prepared, piano, and some of these pieces will be as familiar to dyed-in-the-wool Cageans as "Happy Birthday." This puts the pressure on Henck to excel, and he does so spectacularly well here. The disc includes the two sets entitled Two Pieces for Piano, the piano version of The Seasons, Metamorphosis, In a Landscape, Ophelia, and the fragmentary Quest. The pieces date from 1935 to 1948, the same range covered by pianist Jeanne Kirstein in her pioneering 1967 survey of Cage's piano music for CBS Masterworks.

German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus was making his own rather idiosyncratic version of world music years before it became fashionable to do so. Micus specializes in taking ethnic instruments from all over the planet and using them, in ways that transcend their traditional contexts, to play his own moody and somewhat austere compositions. On Darkness and Light Micus makes extensive use of the dilruba, a four-stringed bowed Indian instrument that sounds somewhat like a nasal cello which has 24 sympathetic strings that set up a hypnotic drone effect behind the haunting melodies. Also featured are the classical Spanish guitar, the Balinese suling flute, an Irish tin whistle, the sho (a Japanese bamboo mouth-organ), the kortholt (a German renaissance reed instrument), various gongs, and the remarkable ki un ki, a six-foot-long Siberian cane trumpet (pictured on the cover), whose spirited blasts are created by inhaling rather than exhaling.