Ebony-Duo - Scelsi - Complete Works for Flute and Clarinet (1999)

The Complete Works for Flute and Clarinet: In both original works and transcriptions, the Ebony Duo explores Scelsi’s use of special sound colors and his coloring of sound. Transcriptions especially prepared by the clarinetist (and pianist) Michael Raster provide the basis for some of the works on the present album. Yet Scelsi’s original intentions incurred no damage as a result of this recrafting. To the contrary! “The formidable technical demands that playing on two strings with in part opposite dynamics […] places on the solo violinist certainly justify an adaptation for two instrumentalists […] – all the more so as Scelsi himself had already been concerned with the “third dimension”, the depth of sound, in connection wind instruments before, especially in the piece Ko-Lho for flute and clarinet.” (Stefan Fischer) The pieces on this album cover a wide musical terrain: they range from an exclusive focus on a single tone such as in Maknongan to technically demanding dialogues such as in the Piccola Suite. Pieces like Krishna e Radha testify to his art of improvisation. The beat, a special auditory stimulus induced by, e.g., the sounds of two instruments with slightly different tuning, even takes center stage in L’âme ouverte. Today, Scelsi is widely considered one of the most original composers of the recent past – a view amply substantiated by the present recording.