Xenakis Kottos for Cello Filmed performance by Rohan de Saram

Xenakis Kottos (1977) for solo cello. Rohan de Saram is probably its finest exponent ever of Kottos. I´ve heard him play this several times live and the full story of this piece is gruesome, pitting father against son in extreme rivalry. The music therefore expresses titanic struggle. As de Saram says “it [is as if] Ouranos is pushing Kottos back into the womb“. De Saram does amazing things : long, protracted growls of sound scraping at the lowest possible range of the instrument, manically fast microtonal flourishes executed with great precision. Towards the end, de Saram plays conflicting rhythms with such energy that the music seems to levitate on its own dynamism. .... Kottos is polyphony for a single instrument, and comes alive with a genius like de Saram. Iannis Xenakis was born on May 29, 1922 in Braîla (Romania) as a son of Clearchos Xenakis and Fotini Pavlou. Around the age of five, he settled, with his father, in Greece. From 1947 he started studying at the Polytechnical Institute in Athens, w