Spectral Viola

This is as good a place to start as any if you’re keen to get a sense of what the French spectralist composers were up to — it also helps that Garth Knox knows the music and its ethos intimately and plays with surety and sensitivity. Works from Murail, Radulescu and the prologue to Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques are placed in dialogue with a Georg Friedrich Haas piece from 2000, and two of Scelsi’s Manto compositions from 1957. Throughout, Knox’s attentiveness to the timbral demands of spectral music is always on point, and the performances are uniformly excellent. Closing with Radulescu’s Das Andere is a formidable challenge for Knox, but one he pulls off seemingly effortlessly.