I've been an enormous fan of Iannis Xenakis and his colorful and complex music since my college years. Among my favorite Xenakis works is Synaphaï, a concertante work for piano and orchestra.
I first became familiar with the work via the excellent recording by pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge and the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Elgar Howarth, released for all of what seemed fifteen minutes on Decca's Headline label in the late 1970s. I was lucky enough to locate that LP at the late, lamented German News store on East 86th Street some three decades ago and, after giving it a first listen, made an immediate, careful disc-to-cassette transfer of the entire program, having realized that otherwise I'd be playing the LP to premature death. I actually "wore" through two cassette copies of the LP before burning a copy to CD-R well over a decade ago.
The work is representative of Xenakis's early maturity as a composer, with plenty of the interweaving sonorities of rich tone clusters that characterized much of his early style, but also a strong sense of melodic motifs and lines emerging from and often being subsumed by orchestral sonorities, and incessant energized, rhythmically adrenalized sounds from the solo piano, whose daunting, technically demanding music often seems at odds with that of the orchestra.
The Madge/Atherton recording finally saw CD reissue last year on the enterprising Explore Records label, in sound that was a vast improvement over the original LP. There is also a CD recording featuring pianist Hiroaki Ooï with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg conducted by Arturo Tamayo on the French Timpani label, and a DVD (PAL only) with Ooï, Tamayo and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra on Wergo. The latter performances have a less aggressive, more timbrally "pretty" sound.
You can watch a performance from 1996 with Ooï, conductor Michiyoshi Inoue and the Kyoto Symphony on YouTube.
