Here is a really exciting issue. And one of the most exciting things about it is its potential to reach beyond an already initiated audience. Not that either composer comes halfway to meet you—it is precisely the absence of compromise, allied to intense inner conviction, which impresses. Anyone who has found inspiration in the fifties avont-garde classics (such as Le marteau or Kontakte) but feels disenchanted with the currently widespread soft-sell approach, should find this record riveting.
Both composers have a distinct niche in the contemporary-music scene, Holler as a specialist in mixed electronic and instrumental ensembles, Ferneyhough as the creator of some of the most complicated scores (and programme notes) known to man. Of the pieces here recorded, Holler's Arcus, for 17 instrumentalists and tape, is the easier to follow. The static opening gives the listener time to follow the train of thought and the fist entry of the tape is a genuinely dramatic event. While the electronics are holding the attention, one hardly notices that the instruments have moved on to a more active state. So this is music which flows, has dramatic coherence and reacts to the passing of evens within it. How much more can be claimed for it I am not sure. Its active sections seem rather closely tied to the scurrying spasmodic and morse-code cliches of the serical tradition, and around the midway point I no longer felt any compelling reason for the piece to go on.
This may well be something to do with the overall concept of the work—Arcus presumably meaning in arc. However, there is no sleeve-note to offer guidance—only an exhortation from Boulez to hear and re-hear the music. Following this advice with Ferneyhough's Funerailles is almost bound to be rewarding, if only because the wealth of detail in the instrumental writing (for seven strings and bionic harpist) is equally bound to be baffling on first acquaintance.
Of course it helps to have a performance so dedicated as that of Boulez and his ensemble, and one's ability to identify with the performers is perhaps the first sign of the message getting across and the re-hearing being worth the trouble. When the score says risoluto, esitando, irato, you can actually hear the music that way—even verginale is not too far-fetched; and this characterization is deployed in such a way as to punctuate the structure more effectively than in some of Ferneyhough's other works on record. To quote from the Preface to the score: ''The final effect should be one of uncertainty, of a dense and complex event of a solemn sort seen from a distance by an observer unfamiliar with the symbolism it embodies.'' This is endlessly fascinating music which places extreme demands on listener and performer alike. The rewards are slow in coming, but they go deep and they last.'