Passages... À Travers Le Temps

There are many, many reasons to listen to the works of the great Romanian composer Octavian Nemescu, though sadly his compositions have been relatively hard to access outside of Eastern Europe, at least in physical form. Timo van Luijk’s Metaphon imprint has done us all a great service, then, with the Passages… À Travers Le Temps collection, which pulls together archival recordings. This box set is included here predominantly for the appearance of “Concentric” from 1968-9, a composition for tape and six players that’s stately and gorgeous, with a hint of unchecked menace in its timbral undergrowth, and hints at the spectral considerations that Nemescu and colleagues were already exploring, the decade prior to the French spectralists and their experiments. Its composition as a response to Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” hints at other connections, too.