Anthony Coleman - You (2015)

Part of what sets Anthony Coleman's (b. 1955) music apart from that of his contemporaries is the intensely focused intellectual force with which he pushes against the sybaritic outward-moving impulse and compresses multiple vocabularies around a core poetic. Though compressed, the vocabularies do not merge or blend, they fray at the edges where the play of opposing forces is most intense, and languages contaminate and confuse each other. However spacious, thin, desultory the texture may sometimes pretend to be, it is this dialectic that gives his music its peculiar density, a gravitas riddled with horror and hilarity, a vertigo of language. The six works on this recording - anchored by two solo piano works, Oogenera (2013) and Metonymies of Pastness (2013), played by the composer himself - evince the complex aesthetic concerns that inform his singular output and offer a rich portrait of one of the most versatile musicians of our time.