Do we like him? First came across him as an oboist (playing Isang Yun's sonata for oboe, viola and harp) and it ws only later that I became more concious about his compositions, which are numerous and recorded widely on ECM, a label I tend to mistakenly distrust at times -- some Kurtag that I haven't checked out, for example.
His String Quartet (1973) has some phenomenal passages. "Beiseit/Alb-Chehr" is a setting of texts, but like I said on the listening thread a while back, I don't feel that you need to know these well as there is enough in the way he weaves the folk ensemble in-and-out of the spoken word passages with a great sense of timing and agility of interplay...(and this might need some more stretching out) by making something novel sounding out of it, it's easy to end up with a feeling of that these settings get to the heart of some of its traditional sources.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 8 March 2007 11:49 (eighteen years ago)