Andriessen: Anaïs Nin, De Staat – review

Louis Andriessen has never shirked the big subjects, and here are two of the biggest: politics and sex. De Staat (1972-76) is a hard-hitting classic referencing Plato and Brecht in the struggle between "pure" music and its social context. The recent Anaïs Nin is a monodrama for soprano (the superb Cristina Zavalloni ) and ensemble about the composer Joaquín Nin's daughter, who had relationships with him and a raft of lovers. The use of 1930s scoring gives a Kurt Weill feel to the textures; the CD misses the film fragments, but this is an excellent start to the London Sinfonietta 's new series for Signum.