San Francisco Symphony & Michael Tilson Thomas - Brant: Ice Field (Binaural Edition) (2019) [Hi-Res]

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony are joined by guest organist Cameron Carpenter for this recording of Henry Brant’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ice Field,

The full title of the piece, Ice Field: Spatial Narratives for Large and Small Orchestral Groups, indicates the nature of Brant’s “spatial” approach to composition. Ice Field was commissioned for the SFS by Other Minds, a San Francisco- based new music organization founded by composer Charles Amirkhanian. For Brant, “space,” created by the location of the instruments in the hall, is a crucial compositional element. Ice Field was devised to use the expressive spatial possibilities of Davies Symphony Hall, dividing the orchestra into various groups and positioning them in the organ loft, second tier, on stage, and in the side boxes, thus creating a multi-directional aspect to the sound for the listener. He also uses elements of improvisation in the composition.

This Binaural Edition fully realizes the immersive and spatial qualities of the music, best listened to in a binaural setting – on headphones or using a transaural speaker set-up.

Of his spatial technique Brant has said, “I had come to feel that single-style music, no matter how experimental or full of variety, could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” In his spatial music he found a solution that he believed would “speak more expressively of the human predicament.”