Andriessen: The only one

• CD edition available now from the LA Phil Store

Recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May 2019, conducted by LA Phil Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen with solo vocalist Nora Fischer, The only one was influenced by two artistic discoveries made by composer Louis Andriessen.

The first discovery was a collection of poems by the Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte from her The animals in me. “These witty, intelligent, experimental, and sometimes scabrous poems immediately fascinated me,” Andriessen says. “My focus turned to faraway America, with its great tradition of song writing.”

His second discovery was the work of Nora Fischer, an Amsterdam–based singer known for developing dynamic creative projects that fuse classical and pop music. “The depth of her versatility has strongly influenced the musical language of the piece,” Andriessen says, further explaining that “the piece flirts a bit with certain kinds of pop songs and light music, and starts out with a beautiful song.”

Featured Artists:

Los Angeles Philharmonic
Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Nora Fischer, soprano

Critical Acclaim

“Andriessen used bits of old music, an allusion to the Dies Irae motif and some Minimalism, a jazz riff here and a Mexican brass allusion there, as he often has. But he always remakes it into a complex and powerfully blatant new thing, and here edge-of-your-seat operatically so.”

—Los Angeles Times

Commissioned by the LA Phil with generous support from the MaddocksBrown Fund for New Music as part of its centennial celebrations. Additional commissioners include NTR ZaterdagMatinee and BBC Radio 3.

The only one is available for purchase, streaming, and download at these destinations:

About the Composer

Louis Andriessen, according to London’s Guardian newspaper is “not only the leading Dutch composer of our time, but one of the most important figures in European music in the last half century, whose influence has spread far beyond that of his own works.” His music has explored politics, time, velocity, matter, and mortality in five works for large ensemble: De Staat (Nonesuch, 1991), De Tijd (Nonesuch, 1993), De Snelheid, De Materie (Nonesuch, 1996), and Trilogy of the Last Day. His stage works include the Theatre of the World (Nonesuch, 2017  – also an LA Phil commission), La Commedia (Nonesuch, 2014), Writing to Vermeer (Nonesuch, 2006), and Rosa: The Death of a Composer (Nonesuch, 2000), as well as the monodrama Anaïs Nin. Nonesuch also released an album with his De Stijl and M is for Man, Music, Mozart in 1994. Andriessen’s recent awards include the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, the Caecilia Prize, and the Grawemeyer Award.