Varese: Complete Works (Decca, two discs)

Edgard Varese (1883-1965), one of the century's great original minds, left but a tiny musical legacy. His early work was lost in a fire in 1913 and, burdened by resistance to his ideas, he completed little in later life. The works of his peak in the 1920s - Ameriques, Arcana, Ionisation - still take one's breath away. His was a music not so much ahead of as outside of its time. However familiar the nature of fragments of his material may be - and he suffered jibes about borrowing from Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring - the slant, not to mention the turmoil of Varese's treatment can render everything as strange and startling as the threatening atmosphere of some alien planet or the streets of a technologically mystifying future city. With orchestral works picturing massive sonic landscapes, Varese brought the enormous resources of the post-romantic symphony orchestra into a new expressive domain. Decca's project for Riccardo Chailly to record Varese's entire output afresh was prompted by his acclaimed 1992 recording of Arcana with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The spaciousness of the acoustic in the orchestra's home hall has been caught in spectacular recordings, and the ese's writing. The performances are vital and challenging. Ameriques is heard in its original version (newly-edited by Varese acolyte and scholar, Chou Wenchung), and the smaller ensemble pieces are in the expertly persuasive hands of Amsterdam's ASKO Ensemble. This is the best recorded survey of a key figure in the music of our century. Michael Dervan