Performers: Frank Gratkowski (clarinet), Hayden Chisholm (alto saxophone), Matt Davis (trumpet), Hilary Jeffery (trombone), Reinhold Friedl (piano), Maurice de Martin (percussion), Burkhard Schlothauer (violin), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Uli Phillipp (double bass)
Playing time: 48'
Recording date: October 2009 (Luxembourg); released: 2010
This album is included for the piece Critical Band, which is among Tenney's most distinctive from the 1980s.
The group Zeitkratzer performs & records a variety of contemporary music across genres, but often from a sort of post-rock perspective. Their rendition of Critical Band is clear, precise & powerful, without any sort of "classical fussiness." (Note also that Tenney's score does call for sixteen or more instruments, so these performers are doubling up on parts.)
Another group of ten musicians (with two performers in common, as it happens), has more recently put out a very similar program (that's also the first new Tenney album to appear since writing my survey, I believe!) featuring a more ethereal (or even almost rhetorical?) Critical Band — versus the more directly potent version from Zeitkratzer:
I still feel as though the more direct version here is more evocative of Tenney, but this more recent rendition (recorded in 2019) has its merits — although in a program strangely reprising Harmonium #2 (while adding a short piece by Schlothauer) as well....
To purchasing information for this disc.
To Tenney page.
Todd M. McComb