col legno
www.col-legno.com/de/home
The Vienna-based label col legno is one of the last bastions of contemporary music, and can by now look back on more than 30 years of music history and more than 300 releases, including many benchmark recordings of the great composers of the twentieth century, such as Berio, Cage, Cerha, Crumb, Feldman, Hosokawa, Kurtág, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Maderna, Nono, Pärt, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Ustvolskaya, Varèse, Xenakis and B.A. Zimmermann.
Its exclusive focus on serious contemporary music of the twentieth century - coupled with the CD as a recording medium - led to economic difficulties at the start of the first decade of the 21st century, as a result of which well-funded music lovers took on the label, eventually bringing on board composer and musician Andreas Schett as artistic director in 2006. He has stayed with col legno since then and is responsible for both the creative and programmatic reorientation of the label.
With this newly-won artistic freedom, and the associated, ongoing widening of its range of content, col legno has enjoyed a successful new start. Today col legno is interested in particular in any music which cannot be immediately placed and meanders playfully between genres – without losing sight of the contemporary in the widest sense. After all, col legno means “with the wood.”