MusikFabrik/Etienne Siebens, Peter Rundel, Stefen Asbury, Diego Masson Wergo WER 6855 2 ****

The title of this finely performed disc of music for large ensemble, Krönung (Coronation), is intended to link four diverse works because the music "sends up its shoots and produces blossoms like crowns". I'm not sure I quite hear it that way. Vykintas Baltakas's (co)ro(na)and Rebecca Saunders's cinnabar both have a kind of obsessive quality, the former examining material that is already fractured, the latter focusing more precisely, on a pitch that can spray out strange effects in sometimes surprising directions.

Magnus Lindberg was influenced by the spectral school, and his Joyis full of those special glows that do for chordal resonance what monosodium glutamate does for flavour. Joyalso has a sense of a large shape being slowly revealed. Iannis Xenakis's Thalleinpulls off the composer's trademark achievement of sounding at once cohesive and chaotic.

See wergo.de