"First, a general remark on Marco's aesthetics in their historical and critical context must be made. At the end of his programme note to his 'Fifth symphony', there is a meaningful observation about the irrevocable loss of creative innocence (...). This loss means that from now one writes music "about music" using stylistic procedures such as collage and quotations. Gustav Mahler was perhaps the first composer to experience this loss and to suffer from it. He was probably the first to write "second hand" music, and as such, the first post-modernist. Tomás Marco belongs to a generation that defines itself as post modern. Such "critical" work as that of Mauricio Kagel is also typically post-modern and the structuralists have only found salvation in fleeing into an elitist Ivory Tower. L'Art pour l'Art or the loss of innocence? Both trends are equally radical and uncompromising, each in its own way. Marco chose the post-modern position from the very start."

"Arnold Schoenberg claimed he had never set out to be a revolutionary. Yet the song cycle he wrote in 1912 based on proto-expressionist poems and featuring a grotesque harlequin figure, Pierrot Lunaire, still reverberates with its haunting, startling originality. This work introduced the world to a hitherto unthought-of musical landscape; to call it innovative would be an absurd understatement. What's particularly exciting about the undertaking here (Boulez's third recorded take on this music) is how utterly fresh the music sounds, its novelty unblunted and yet strangely beautiful - a far cry from the forbidding Schoenberg of stereotype. Soprano Christine Schäfer negotiates the no-man's land between spoken word and sung pitch - the technique known as Sprechstimme which Schoenberg introduced here -with fascinating nuance. She brings a cabaret-savvy sensibility to bear, along with a gripping sense of pathos, alternately sweet and acrid. Boulez treats the songs as miniatures, offering coloristic and multiperspectival - almost Cubistic - portrayals of Pierrot. For all the score's nebulous atmospherics, Boulez distills a keen, sharp clarity of line and timbre. Also included is the extraordinary song "Herzgewächse" (scored for harmonium, celesta, and harp), in which Schäfer matches her voice like a "crystal sigh" to the instrumentation. The album is filled out with Schoenberg's setting, during his exile from the Nazi horror, of Byron's bitterly ironic "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte" for a baritone reciter."