Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!

Or, Nuclear power? No, thanks! Earthstar formed in the US, but were based in Germany by 1979/80 when this album was recorded. Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!, their third album, was their second for the Hamburg-based Sky Records label, whose roster also included the likes of Cluster and Michael Rother. Main man Craig Wuest was a keyboardist/composer with a fascination for European electronic music, who had been encouraged to relocate from his native Utica, NY, by synth guru Klaus Schulze.

The use of electronics is balanced by piano and electric guitar on the opener 'Golden Rendezvous', a mellow & meandering number with a spaciously pastoral air about it. Synthesizers dominate on several other tracks, however, such as the sprightly 'Sonntagsspaziergang' ('Sunday Walk'). Among the instruments Wuest is credited as playing, is something called a Birotron B-90, a mellotron-like contraption of which only a dozen or so examples were ever made. 'Cafe Exit', the first track on side 2, is apparently where it can be heard to best advantage.

I bought this record from an ebay seller last September, having happened upon Earthstar's previous album French Skyline in the local charity shop, one of a trove of fairly obscure '70s and early '80s electronic music LPs that had presumably all been deposited there as part of a single donation.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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