![]() For some years, therefore, works for solo piano were absent from Radulescu’s substantial output. This spectral approach calls for an evolution in our thinking about pitch, and necessitates a much richer palette of pitches than a single equal-tempered piano can easily provide: Radulescu’s music is conceived always in the complex, unequal intervallic relationships that characterise the harmonic series. ![]() Credo led Radulescu to conceive of the material of music not as abstract notes to be permuted on the page, but as living matter, as “sound plasma.” He felt, as he wrote in his article “Musique de mes univers” in 1985, that to move forward from the excessively self-referential complexity of much postwar European music “it was necessary to ‘enter into’ the sound, to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras scrutinised two thousand years ago.”* His spectral technique is both new and, simultaneously, reaffirms an ancient value overlooked in the rationalism of much late twentieth-century music: the spirituality of sound. The first work composed in this new manner, Credo for nine celli op.10 (conceived in Bucharest and completed after his move to Paris in 1969), uses the first 45 natural harmonics of the cello’s low C as musical material upon these components of the sound spectrum Radulescu builds 4170 micro-music events and 585 “rhythm implosions,” penetrating inside the cello timbre to reinforce and animate the rich inner life of each sound. This approach he calls the “spectral technique of composition.” Shortly after completing that early sonata Radulescu had a vision of a radically new kind of music, the technical underpinnings of which would utterly transform his compositional language and which – a third of a century later – can be seen as one of the crucial innovations in late twentieth-century music. The three sonatas on this disc are the first solo piano works composed by Horatiu Radulescu for over twenty years – since his first Piano Sonata, “Cradle to Abysses,” op.5, written in Bucharest in 1968. Horatiu Radulescu: Trois Sonates d’après Lao tzu opus 82, 86 et 92 (1991 – 1999) Liner notes for the CPO CD Lao Tzu Sonatas:
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