Radulescu: The Complete Cello Works

This album collects for the first time four of the most important works from Radulescu’s later period, all composed for cello, and all performed by his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Radulescu and Tunnell began working together almost immediately upon meeting in 1995.By the time they were married in 1997, Radulescu had already composed for her two of the pieces on this disc (the solo Lux Animae and the cello sonata L’Exil Intérieur), and revised and rededicated her a third, older work (Das Andere, first composed in 1984). L’Exil Intérieur was Radulescu’s first and only work in the format of “sonata for instrument and piano.” A magical, otherworldly spectral composition using the combined sounds of cello and piano combined with folkloristic influences from his native Romania. Das Andere is a work that can be played on any stringed instrument tuned in open fifths. It features heavy use of extended techniques. The notes to the score describe the performer’s role in this work as being to “…create a sense of trance, close to a spiritism [sic] séance…” Pre-Existing Soul of Then for 2 cellos, is heard as on this recording as an “ideal version,” formed by meticulously overdubbing the cello parts in two individual layers. This provides a challenge in terms of both timing and tuning, but the results are far closer to the composer’s original intention than any live version that has been performed so far. Lux Animae is a set of 21 “windows” through which the light of the soul may shine. Radulescu utilizes several of his spectral techniques in service of the larger goal of making the theoretical or imaginary concretely manifest in the physical world, as the whole instrument of the cello becomes an emanation of an impossibly low pitch, and the time in which the work exists a sort of “ring-modulation” of time itself.