Due to the enormous pressure of work and other matters, we are rescheduling our releases set for the rest of the year. This means that the Artyomov retrospective release dates have changed and will now be:
DDA 25173 Requiem October 19
DDA 25174 Sonata of Meditations November 16
DDA 25175 In Memoriam January 18
DDA 25176 Star Wind February 15
Author Archive for Divine Art Recording Group – Page 3
The new complete catalogue in PDF format is now available to download or view here. While not as detailed as the website information, the PDF is the most useful quick reference guide from which you can spot items of interest!
In 1985 the internationally renowned pianist and composer John McCabe recorded an album of contemporary piano music by Australian and American composers. Made in the EMI Studio in Sydney on a commission from Earle Page College, the recording was put aside when the studio closed and was believed lost. Attempts to trace the master through EMI’s successor, Warner Music, were not replied to. Amazingly, a cassette copy was found among the composer’s papers and has been remastered to produce a wonderfully fine album with superb sound. Works by Peter Sculthorpe, George Rochberg, Wendy Hiscocks, Barney Childs, Don Banks, Graeme Koehne and David Maslanka. Probably the last ‘new’ recording to be released featuring McCabe, who died in 2015, as pianist. The album will be scheduled for release by Métier Records in spring 2019 (catalog number MSV 28585).
We are looking forward to our September releases now – which will be available here soon (mid August). Lots of new music including the premiere recording of an organ work by Naji Hakim – Toccata on the Introit for the Feast of the Epiphany – which is performed by Simon Leach on the new Hakim album ‘Embrace of Fire’ (Metier MSV 28583).
George Gershwin, the boy from Brooklyn, managed the divide between popular and serious music better than anyone else; writing his first hit song ‘Swanee’ in 1919 and ‘An American in Paris’ in 1928, at the age of 30.
Taking their lead from the 1951 film of ‘An American in Paris’, Piano À Deux – Robert and Linda Ang Stoodley – have created their own collage of excerpts from Gershwin’s ‘rhapsodic ballet’, incorporating songs featured in the film, including the ever popular ‘I Got Rhythm’ and the lesser known ‘By Strauss’. The new album, “From Brooklyn to Broadway”, will be released by next spring and is to be recorded in August at St. Peter and Paul Church, Church Hanborough (Steinway model D).
Gershwin’s sketchbooks of 1924 and 1925 show he planned to write solo piano pieces but his efforts left little more than a handful of compositions: the Three Preludes (1926), arrangements of eighteen of his songs and a number of miniatures.
In their new recording, Piano À Deux has coupled some of Gershwin’s solo piano works with his songs in new transcriptions for piano four hands. The Three Preludes each become extended pieces with ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’ seamlessly blending into ‘Prelude No. 2’. The charming, early miniature, ‘Novelette in Fourths’ is combined with ‘Love Walked Right In’, and ‘Our Love is Here to Stay’ is embedded in ‘Rialto Ripples’.
An entertaining new rhapsody by Piano À Deux for piano four hands derived from Gershwin’s opera ‘Porgy and Bess’, forms the recording’s finale.
Piano À Deux’s first album, ‘France Revisited’ (2017) attracted much praise for both the performances and also Linda’s inspired arrangements of Poulenc songs.
Vyacheslav Artyomov is considered by many to be the greatest composer in Russia today and is certainly one of our most incredibly gifted symphonists. Following the release in November 2016 of two of his symphonies, Divine Art has licensed and remastered no less than seven albums containing recordings made by Melodiya and others between about 1988 and 2008 and are currently releasing these in a Retrospective. To round off this series in style, a new recording has just been made of two more major works – the Symphony ‘In Spe’ for violin, cello and orchestra, and ‘Latin Hymns’ for soprano, chorus and strings. Divine Art CEO Stephen Sutton said of the new recording; ‘I’m delighted that we can round off the Artyomov series – at least for now – with this superb new recording. Both works are majestic and display Artyomov’s immense orchestrational skill and his deep spirituality which infuses all his works.”
The new recording is likely to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2019. Both works are of course new to the catalog and were recorded (in studio) after a hugely successful concert performance. The very fine Russian National Orchestra and Yurlov State Capella Choir are joined by young graduate soloists who are very likely to make a big impact in the music world.
The Complete Artyomov Retrospective:
DDA 25143: Symphony “From the Threshold of a New World”; Ave Atque Vale; Ave Crux Alba (11/2016)
National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia cond. Vlaimir Ashkenazy
DDA 25144: Symphony “Gentle Emanation”; Tristia II (11/2016)
Soloists, Russian National Orchestra, cond. Teodor Currentzis /Vladimir Ponkin
DDA 25164: Scenes from the ballet “Sola Fide”; Tempo Costante, Concerto for Orchestra (4/18)
Soloists/Kaunas State Choir/ Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Dmitri Kitaenko/Moscow Chamber Orchestra ’Musica Viva’, cond. Murad Annamamedov
DDA 25171: Symphony “The Way to Olympus”; Gurian Hymn; Preludes to Sonnets; Concert of the Thirteen (6/18)
Soloists, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Dmitri Kitaenko/USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra, cond. Gennady Rozhdestvensky
DDA 25172: A Symphony of Elegies; Awakening; Incantations (9/18)
DDA 25173: Requiem (10/18)
DDA 25174: A Sonata of Mediations; A Garland of Recitations; Totem (10/18)
DDA 25175: In Memoriam; Lamentations; Pietà; Tristia I (11/18)
DDA 25176: Star Wind; Romantic Capriccio; Moonlight Dreams; Mattinate; Scenes; Nestling Antsali (11/18)
DDA 25184: Symphony “In Spe”; Latin Hymns (Spring 2019)
Ivan Pochekin (violin); Aleksandr Buzlov (cello); Russian National Orchestra; Valentin Uriupin (conductor)
Nadezhda Pavlova (soprano); Yurlov State Capella; Strings of the Russian National Orchestra; Valentin Uriupin (conductor)
Our late friend Anthony Goldstone was, aside from his skill as a pianist, a fine arranger, and was especially adept at completing works left unfinished by major composers, especially Schubert. But his completion and realisation of the fragmentary B flat Sonata for Two Pianos by Mozart drew particular praise from several eminent musicians and musicologists: “bravissimo!” (Brian Newbould), “Mozart would not have been displeased” (Anthony Payne), “An excellent example of the genre and a most welcome addition” (Julian Rushton), “brilliant” (Philip Wilby), “very cleverly done” (H.C. Robbins Landon), “Extremely successful” (John McCabe). This and several more fascinating rarities appear on Divine Art DDA 25046 ‘Mozart on Reflection’ by Goldstone and Clemmow. Check out also Tony’s pioneering work with Mozart’s solo piano works in ‘The Unheard Mozart’ (DDA 25051).
Regarded by many as Russia’s greatest living composer, Vyacheslav Artyomov is a natural successor, but with a totally distinctive style, to the work of Scriabin, Messiaen, Mahler and the other great Impressionist-Romantics with large scale works of power and intensity. Currently we are producing a retrospective series of recordings originally issued by Melodiya and other companies in Russia, following the success of our first two Artyomov symphony albums. Following ‘Sola Fide’ and ‘The Way to Olympus’ now out, we have the Symphony of Elegies in September and four more albums to complete the retrospective in October and November. This includes his critically acclaimed Requiem. Now we are overjoyed that to round off this series we will release in early 2019 a new recording made this July of the stunning Symphony ‘In Spe’ and also the ‘Latin Hymns’ – featuring the awesome voice of soprano Nadezhda Pavlova. The Russian National Orchestra is conducted by Valentin Uriupin.
For those who can read German, here’s a super interview from Sudwestpresse with American organist Carson Cooman, now a mainstay of the Divine Art catalog both as composer and performer: I’m posting this on June 8 and not sure how long the interview article will be available….
https://www.swp.de/unterhaltung/kultur/carson-cooman_-_aufnahmen-sind-sehr-wichtig_-26940786.html
Following the critical praise and popularity enjoyed by her 2-CD set of the piano music of Galina Ustvolskaya, Russian pianist Natalia Andreeva is joining forces with the exceptionally talented violinist Evgeny Sorkin, to record Ustvolskaya’s two major works for violin and piano, which they performed in concert to great acclaim in March.
Natalia started her ‘Ustvolskaya project’ in 2006 in Chicago, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Since then she has regularly included Ustvolskaya’s solo piano and chamber works in her recitals and remains in touch with Ustvolskaya’s widower, Mr Konstantin Bagrenin, who is a great help and encouragement for her works. Natalia currently holds the position of the Lecturer in Piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia, where she completed her PhD in Piano Performance.
Evgeny Sorkin attended the Moscow State Conservatorium and went on to study at the Australian National Academy of Music and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where he is currently a staff member while he balances his teaching with a busy recital schedule. Most notable is Evgeny’s performance of the complete Beethoven sonata cycle with the renowned Dutch-Australian pianist Gerard Willems.
The recording is to be made at the ABC Studios in Sydney, Australia in September, and will be scheduled for release in the spring of 2019.
We are pleased to announce a new album of chamber works from Robin Walker. The album will include a range of works, including his magical double concerto for violin, recorder and string orchestra (A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits). Robin is already known to us. His tribute to the late John McCabe And Will you Walk Beside Me Down the Lane was featured on the highly praised recent album ‘A Garland for John McCabe’ released in February.
The album will be recorded over two sessions in the coming months. The first, at St. Thomas’s Church, Stockport, is on 5th July, with the Manchester Sinfonia conducted by Richard Howarth, who will record the double concerto for violin and recorder, A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits, with Emma McGrath (violin) and John Turner (recorder). At this session Emma will also record the solo violin piece She took me down to Cayton Bay specially commissioned for the disc by The Ida Carroll Trust. Robin is a native Yorkshireman, and Cayton Bay is a modest seaside resort on the Yorkshire coast. In the piece he has taken the opportunity to blend the ecstasy of the romantic violin with the grounded timelessness of folk-song. Being an exponent of folk-violin as well as a master performer of the concertos of the Romantic repertoire, Robin anticipates Emma’s complete understanding of the piece.
Emma will fly in especially for the recording session from Tasmania where she is Concert master of The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. She is a former associate leader of The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and was a string finalist in The BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002.
While in Stockport, John Turner will record Walker’s solo recorder piece A Rune for St Mary’s. St. Mary’s is the parish church of Stockport and the ‘rune’ the piece is based on is a thousand-year-old stone cross in a field above the farm where the composer lives in the Pennine Hills of Northern England. From some angles it looks like a cross – from other angles it seems to be a primitive stone face presiding over the hillside.
The second recording session will be in late September, during which two pieces for double bass will be recorded by the virtuoso player Leon Bosch. The more recent of the two pieces involved Robin taking lessons on the instrument. He remembers that in the course of the lessons “it was like getting to know a large and unusual person, several centuries older than myself.” The solo piece is called The Song of Bone on Stone and it sings of human fragility (‘bone’) in contact with the implacable permanence of Nature (‘stone’). The recording session will also include a solo cello piece called His Spirit Over The Waters, performed by Jennifer Langridge, and is a memorial for a university colleague of Robin’s in Manchester.
In addition to the works to be recorded this summer, the album will contain one older recording, the miniature string quartet I Thirst performed by Manchester Camerata Ensemble.
Robin Walker was born in York, England in 1953 and attended schools attached to York Minster – where he was Head Chorister – for ten years. He studied at Durham University with the Australian composer David Lumsdaine, and subsequently at the Royal College of Music in London with the late Anthony Milner. He taught at various universities for a decade before withdrawing from academic and city life. He moved to the Pennine Hills of the West Riding of Yorkshire in order to concentrate on composition, and has lived on or next to a farm for the last thirty years. His current preoccupation is with the instinctual basis of musical tradition, and its expression in opera.
Besides producing high quality and award-winning classical music albums, we also have a growing collection of video albums, and they are readily available on Amazon! These include the recently released new music for silent films from Ed Hughes, called ‘Symphonic Visions’. In this fascinating collection, Hughes writes new scores for classic silent films like “A Voyage to the Moon” (1902) and the surrealist “The Nose” (1963), in addition to teaming up with filmmaker Lizzie Thynne to produce “Brighton: Symphony of a City”, a portrait of everyday life (today and yesterday) in Brighton, England.
‘Quartet Choreography’ is a demonstration that music very often should be seen as well as heard. This superb film is not only the record of brilliant performances of major modern quartets performed by the Kreutzer Quartet, but is also a valuable and rewarding tool for observing how the members of an ensemble communicate and interact.
Percussion masterworks meet art cinema in ‘Solo’, a state-of-the-art production. Multiple award-winning Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert sets a new standard with the performances of contemporary percussion music, beautifully captured and transformed into short films by director Christian Holten Bonke.
With ‘When the Flame Dies’, viewers will see another side of composer Ed Hughes, as he presents a new opera with libretto based on the Orpheus legend, a main character alluding to Jean Cocteau.
We’re excited to welcome harp and flute duo ‘The Juniper Project’, comprising Greek flutist Anna Rosa Mari and Welsh harpist Eira Lynn Jones, who have recorded an album of Romantic works both popular and less well known including a couple of surprises.
Eira Lynn Jones is currently Head of Harp at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England and is a regular performer both in solo recitals and in orchestral and chamber settings, and for a time was a member of the Manhattan Contemporary Music Ensemble, playing around the USA from New York to the Hollywood Bowl; she has also made appearances on British TV and has taught in several countries. Her debut solo CD including a mix of classical and folk pieces played on harp and clarsach met with notable success.
Anna Rosa Mari graduated from the Royal Northern and while still a student, was appointed solo flute of the Greek National Opera Chamber Orchestra. She has performed with leading orchestras including the BBC Philharmonic, Hallé, European Union Chamber Orchestra and Malta Philharmonic and gives solo and chamber recitals regularly. Like her duo partner she has a keen interest in contemporary music. She is also very active in community and outreach work, and has presented music in refugee camps as part of the Greek El Sistema program and worked in India for children in extreme poverty.
The Juniper Project’s album is scheduled for release in September (Divine Art Records DDA 25179).
Spectral music fits right in with the Métier label’s focus of contemporary music, leaning more towards the adventurous side. Marilyn Nonken is one of the most celebrated champions of modern piano music in the USA and Joshua Fineberg is a leading light in the younger generation of spectral composers. Their album, ‘Voix Voilées’, (which also includes a major work from Hugues Dufourt) received much praise from Fanfare with four reviews from the magazine and equal praise from International Piano.
“There is not a pianist playing today who can bring more subtlety and energy to the music of Fineberg and Dufourt than does Marilyn Nonken. This is an absolutely essential piano disc…” – Marc Medwin (Fanfare)
“Dense, mercilessly virtuosic writing … Nonken handles the incremental tension superbly.” – Graham Lock (International Piano)
Marilyn’s previous album of spectal music by Tristan Murail also received commendations. Peter Burwasser (Fanfare) called it “a spectacular introduction to this tantalizing world.” It’s also Métier’s best selling title worldwide.
For those interested in spectral music, and especially if you are a fan of Joshua Fineberg, his most recent album ‘Sonic Fictions’ is his new compositional philosophy and technique arising out of the spectral compositional style and it too is already being recognized by critics.
With his new ‘Sonic Fictions’ recording out this month, Joshua Fineberg has become a leader in new music. Josh recently spoke with ’15 Questions’, a music magazine that interviews the most iconic and interesting artists of our time.
Read the full interview here.
Phew… it may have taken 26 years but then for the first 15 of those we ran the label as a part time hobby to support musicians – now it’s a full time occupation to support musicians. But May sees the 500th release from Divine Art group labels (see ‘future releases’ for details – MJD 72405 Nina’s Clock) which I suppose is some sort of achievement especially as the industry demands more and more data and administration time. There are over 20 new albums scheduled for the second half of the year: busy times!
Congratulations to pianist Peter Seivewright! His ‘American Piano Sonatas’ recording is a finalist in the Ernst Bacon Award for the Performance of American Music, professional division.
The award is among many contests of The American Prize and “recognizes and rewards the best performances of American music by ensembles and individual artists worldwide, based on submitted recordings.” The album includes works by Edward MacDowell, Elliott Carer and Miklós Rózsa.
To learn more about the prestigious national competition visit their website.
Japanese Pianist Tomono Kawamura studied in the UK and has performed to acclaim in many parts of the world. Her debut album, ‘Reminiscence’, reflects repertoire found in her concerts with a program of popular masterwork which Tomono believes can trigger emotions and memories – taking the listener back to magical moments associated with that piece of music.
‘Reminiscence’ will be issued on the Divine Art label (DDA 25170) , probably in spring 2019.
Tomono was awarded a scholarship by the Yamaha Music Foundation, after studying at the Yamaha Music School starting at the age of 3, to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There she studied with Christopher Elton and the late Maria Curcio. She has appeared as a soloist throughout Asia, Europe and the UK in such venues as the Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh, St. Martin in the Fields and the Wigmore Hall, London.
Divine Art Records continues its series of recordings with American organist Carson Cooman, who is organist at the Memorial Church at Harvard, as well as being a teacher, writer, speaker, music critic and incredibly prolific composer. Following three recordings including organ works by German composers Andreas Willscher and Raimund Schächer, Cooman has recorded an album of music by the Italian composer Carlotta Ferrari (b.1975). Ferrari’s compositions have been performed frequently around the word and appear on many recordings including six all-Ferrari CDs. She is currently professor of music composition at the European School of Economics in Florence, Italy.
Ferrari has written many works based on historical figures, and the five works on this album are all inspired by the lives and works of famous women, lending to the album’s title, ‘Women of History’. She writes in a distinctive modal style, utilising the modal harmonic system of ‘Restarting Pitch Space’ which was actually developed by Cooman in 2005.
The recording will be issued this July on CD and many digital formats (Divine Art dda 25178). Cooman’s own compositions continue to appear, performed by Erik Simmons, in the ongoing series from Divine Art, with three more volumes scheduled for 2018.
The release is also timely as 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein which is the inspiration for the first piece.
Tracks
Lady Frankenstein
Maria Restituta
Historia Gullielmae
Viva la vida
Esctasy (La transverberazione di Teresa d’Avila)
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![19 September brings Gerard McChrystal & Richard Shaw's recording of Edward Cowie: Because They Have Songs! Listen to the first track today on #AppleMusicClassical and more: listn.fm/becausetheyhavesongs [in bio]](https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-15/538972555_18288426868283342_5911419903410525110_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_e35_tt6&_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=ClaN-8cyw04Q7kNvwFosaqb&_nc_oc=Adn5un0A940IBezHJoJINSPsc0TT-6vE0E5TKe4zZ2w1Ku3VO-fXpaqOoJDbwU-r1T0&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&_nc_gid=sT_zGylU4oKLDGy4DWm_aQ&oh=00_AfYVb8-v12T6u9-88K2ZbHvn5gqGO5mWYMxh0uyoapp4GA&oe=68C1467F)
