UbuWeb Sound UbuWeb

AGP137 - Charles Chaynes (1925-) | Erzebet (1983) Erzsebet, side A [29:27] [MP3] Erzsebet, side B [29:15] [MP3] Erzsebet, side A [29:27] [FLAC] Erzsebet, side B [29:15] [FLAC] AGP 137 notes [TXT] LP liner notes [PDF] NOTES AGP137 is the third and last featuring the music of Charles Chaynes, a French composer who held executive positions at France-Musique and Radio-France for much of his career, and so has produced a smaller body of work than he might have otherwise. This installment comprises his opera Erzsebet, from 1983, which is my favorite of all of the works by Chaynes I have heard. It tells the story of Ezsebet Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman who was punitively immured in her castle after being convicted of torturing a series of young girls. It is a tour de force performance by Christiane Eda-Pierre, who portrays Erzsebet's increasingly delusional internal dialogue in the years until her death. The theme lends itself nicely to a variety of weird, disturbed musical atmospheres. Chaynes makes extensive use of massed strings and brass, producing aggregate effects that blur the boundary between harmony and timbre. The LP transcribed for this installment is in excellent condition with only occasional tracking distortion during a few especially loud passages. The installment includes a PDF file with scans of the liner notes from all four LPs included in this and the other two Chaynes installments.