Divine Art is delighted to announce a new collaboration with poet Chinwe D. John to produce an album of songs by two English composers written to reflect our turbulent times and to shine a light of hope for the future.
The album, titled “Songs for our Times”, is the result of a unique collaboration between two leading British contemporary classical music composers, Stuart MacRae and Bernard Hughes, and Nigerian-American poet/lyricist, Chinwe D. John. The classical lyrics, which feature themes relevant to our collective present-day lives, are set to music which is accessible, whilst still retaining its depth. Several universal subjects, including the need for wisdom within the halls of power; transcendent love; an immigrant’s homesickness; the search for inner peace; all flow through the album evoking the spirit of our day and age. Despite our current turmoil, the overall tone of the album is a hopeful one, making it a welcome balm during our turbulent times.
Comprised of two song cycles; Kingdoms by Stuart MacRae and Metropolis by Bernard Hughes, the music is influenced by classical music traditions, as well as genres such as folk and highlife.
The songs are brought brilliantly to life by three internationally renowned artists: Grammy award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn (Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival), tenor Nick Pritchard (award-winning regular on the opera and concert stage) and rising star soprano Isabelle Haile.
The album was recorded on November 14th and 15th 2022, at St. Jude’s Hampstead, UK, with sound engineer Patrick Allen of Opera Omnia and is scheduled for release on 13 October 2023.
Composers: Stuart MacRae (Kingdoms) is a renowned composer of opera, orchestral, chamber and vocal music. His awards include the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Opera. He is based in his home country of Scotland, where he is a professor of composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Bernard Hughes (Metropolis) is cited as being one of the leading composers of choral music in Britain. He regularly composes work for the BBC Singers amongst other ensembles. His awards include the William Mathias Prize, the Polyphonos International Prize and the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers Composition Prize.
Pianist: Christopher Glynn (on a Steinway D) is a Grammy award winning classical pianist, and much sought after accompanist, working with most of the world’s renowned classical music artists, on an international scale. He is the artistic director of the Ryedale Festival in North Yorkshire, having taken up the mantle in 2010. Under his leadership, the festival features up to sixty programmes a year.
Tenor: Nick Pritchard is an award-winning versatile tenor, who features frequently with noted ensembles such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, and L’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris. His recording of Bach’s St John Passion under Sir John Eliot Gardiner was nominated in the 2023 Grammy awards for Best Choral performance.
Soprano: Isabelle Haile is an award-winning Ethiopian-Romanian soprano, who has received her vocal training in Moldova, Italy, and the United Kingdom. She has sung in both operatic and solo recital roles internationally. In 2020, she completed a Masters with Distinction, in Vocal Performance, from the Royal Academy of Music.
Lyricist: Chinwe D. John is a Nigerian-American physician and poet, whose previous work includes a book of narrative poetry ‘Tales of Fantasy and Reality’, and a contemporary classical music EP ‘Within a Certain Time and Place’ released under the Voces8 label. In 2020, in response to the particular challenges facing UK classical musicians, and the need for the genre to expand its audience base, she was inspired to take the steps that would lead to this album project.
Baritone Trevor Alexander and pianist Peter Crockford have joined Divine Art Recordings for an album celebrating English Song – art-songs by composers well and not-so-well known, and some of the best examples of what is often called the Parlour Ballad so beloved of audiences in the early years of the 20th century.
The album, to be released in the late summer, is to be titled “Dreams, Desires, Desolation”. The artists say: “Dreams, Desires, Desolation was created out of our love for English Song. The album comprises a real mixture of very familiar songs, along with some relatively unknown ones, and a few which were very popular in their day but have fallen out of fashion. There are also three world premiere recordings. We believe, despite the mixture of styles, each song brings something valid to our concept.”
Since graduating from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Trevor Alexander has worked for numerous companies including Royal Opera, English National Opera, D’Oyly Carte and The Royal Shakespeare Company. He has sung many of the standard baritone operatic roles as well as appearing in musicals and cabaret. He has sung in opera productions and concerts all over the Middle and Far East, and his repertoire is extensive and varied.
Peter Crockford studied at the Birmingham School of Music and The Royal Northern College of Music. In his early career he was an accompanist and repetiteur for various opera companies including Glyndebourne. He has travelled the world widely as accompanist and Musical Director/Conductor. He conducted the European Tour of West Side Story and was Assistant to the Musical Director at the Stadt Theater, Freiburg. He continues to pursue a career of coaching and playing in concert.
Dreams, Desires, Desolation
Label: Divine Art
Catalogue number: DDX 21114
Artists:
Trevor Alexander (baritone)
Peter Crockford (piano)
Works:
Is my Team Ploughing? (George Butterworth)
Come to Me in my Dreams (Frank Bridge)
I Hear You Calling Me (Charles Marshall)
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal (Roger Quilter)
Go Song of Mine (Clive Pollard) – World premiere recording
Do not Go my Love (Richard Hageman)
Silent Noon (Ralph Vaughan Williams)
Remembrance (Howard Keel)
Dream Song (Victor Hely-Hutchinson)
What shall I your True Love Tell? (Frank Bridge)
Love’s Garden of Roses (Haydn Wood)
Autumn (Peter Gellhorn) – World premiere recording
If there were Dreams to sell (John Ireland)
Silver (Cecil Armstrong Gibbs)
The Cloths of Heaven (Clive Pollard) – World premiere recording
James Bowman (6 November 1941 – 27 March 2023), probably the world’s best known countertenor of modern times, passed away on Monday, 27 March 2023 at age 81. Divine Art Recordings is honoured to have featured Bowman on our Remembering Alfred Deller recording of 2014 and our 2016 release of Philip Woods’ Sonnets, Airs and Dances.
Widely acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s greatest singers, James Bowman took the countertenor voice to heights of popularity undreamed of a generation ago. He was one of the pillars of the historically informed early music revival, and made hundreds of recordings of the music of Monteverdi, Purcell, Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, and numerous other early composers, which are heard on radio stations every day throughout the world. His career started as a boy chorister at Ely Cathedral, and later, as a countertenor, as an Academic Clerk at New College Oxford, where he read history. He also sang in the Choir of Christ Church.
His career was launched when, in 1967, he was chosen by Benjamin Britten to sing the part of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was asked to perform at the opening of the new Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. Since that time James was greatly in demand internationally as an opera singer. He made the role of Oberon more or less his own (and Britten wrote later parts for him, both in The Journey of the Magi and his last opera Death in Venice), and appeared at almost every major opera house, including Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, La Scala Milan, Amsterdam, Vienna, Strasbourg, Verona, Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Sydney, Santa Fe, Dallas and San Francisco.
James made whole sequences of recordings (many of them now of classic status) with David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London, Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, and Robert King and The King’s Consort. More, he greatly enlarged the twentieth century repertoire for the counter-tenor voice, with new works from Richard Rodney Bennett, Gordon Crosse, Geoffrey Burgon, Alan Ridout, John Sanders and Peter Hope. He was appointed CBE in the 1997 Queen’s Birthday Honours List. He passed away on 27 March 2023 at the age of 81.
German pianist Burkard Schliessmann has been receiving glowing accolades everywhere for his concert performances and recordings, for his virtuosity and also for his individual and highly thought interpretation of the great music from the late Baroque and Romantic eras particularly. Following five previous albums all of which have been exceptionally well received, he is about to embark on a recording of Fantasies by Robert Schumann, a composer with whom his affinity has been well marked, for example these comments on his album ‘At the Heart of the Piano’ –
“A collection of dynamite recordings… his Schumann recordings call for special recognition. An inspiring triumph of faith and art. For yours truly, a nice revelation.”
– Phil Muse (Audio-Video Club of Atlanta)
“To my sustained delight, Schliessmann reveals himself as a Romantic temperament deeply motivated by both intimacy and intuition, sustained by a wholesome and astonishing technical resource… let me assure possible auditors of the miraculous power of spontaneity that permeates these realizations.”
– Gary Lemco (Fanfare)
“… Schliessmann is the best pianist I know at entering the world and expressing the awareness of the German romantics. …”
As well as exceptional performances we can expect phenomenal sound. The recording is to be made in June at Teldex Studios in Berlin in 5-channel Dolby Atmos high-definition audio and will be offered in a rage of digital formats as well as hybrid multichannel SACD.
Burkard Schliessmann is an official Steinway Artist and is regarded as one of the most influential pianists of the modern era. He has received numerous prizes and awards of merits for his piano interpretations, as well as being an esteemed teacher, with classes all over the world, principally in the USA. He is also a professional scuba diver and an Ambassador for “Protecting our Ocean Planet” – a program of Project AWARE Foundation. Learn more on his website.
British conductor Robin White has brought his hand-picked choral ensemble Alban Voices to the studio to record an album of American Choral Classics including major serious works and iconic folksy ditties! This will be White’s third outing with Divine Art following his album ‘From Russia’ (Divine Art DDA 25223) with clarinettist Ian Scott and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, and the Christmas digital single ‘Light of the World’, which featured both the Sinfonia and Alban Voices.
The new recording, which also spotlights mezzo-soprano Barbara Naylor in Copland’s ‘In the Beginning’, was made in September 2022 and is to be released worldwide in June.
English pianist Jonathan Phillips has recorded a new album of works by Chopin to follow his “J.S. Bach: Tranquillity” (Divine Art DDX 21102, to be released on May 12). Bach was one of Chopin’s principal influences, especially in the chromaticism and harmonic elements of the inner parts – influences which later informed the styles of Mahler and Wagner among so many others. For this album, Phillips presents the four Ballades together with five of the glorious Nocturnes; he explains his choice of repertoire:
So, to the four Ballades. Why? Why play them and why record them? Well, these four unique compositions capture the essence of Chopin’s output for me. Op 23, Op 38, Op 47 and Op 52, span his lifetime and represent a distillation of the evolution of his musical language. Crucially, I have been aware of them since I was a teenager, when as a 13-year-old I bought a wonderful Classics for Pleasure LP recording of all four Ballades played by Valentina Kaminikova (which I still have somewhere!) I think it fair to say that record together with another record of the Chopin Etudes (played by Samson François) lit the blue touch paper and ignited the rocket fuel required to convert my desire to learn, understand, possess, and recreate Chopin’s extraordinary virile, powerful, muscular, and explosive music. Ultimately, they are a huge challenge, as anyone who has tackled them will know. The motivation for preparing them all to create my own recording of them can be traced back to those adolescent years!
Once again, and critically for me, this recording rather like the Bach Tranquillity CD was made in such a way as to replicate a “live“ performance. Two consecutive live performances were given, and that was it! There is no point in endless editing, as for me, the sanitised performance of a highly edited recording no longer communicates that which takes place in live performance.
Chopin: Ballades and Nocturnes (Divine Art DDX 21111)
Jonathan Phillips (piano)
Works
Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23
Ballade No. 2 in F major, Op. 38
Ballade No. 3 in A flat major, Op. 47
Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52
Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9 No. 2
Nocturne in B major, Op. 31 No. 1
Nocturne in F major, Op. 15 no. 1
Nocturne in F minor, Op. 55 No. 1
Nocturne in B major, Op. 61 No. 1
Total duration approx 64 minutes
Ballades: recorded 8 July 2020 at Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, recording engineer Oscar Torres Nocturnes: recorded on 24 September 2021 at St John the Evangelist, Oxford, recording engineer David Wright Release date: autumn 2023, exact date to be confirmed.
The team at Métier Records is delighted to announce a double-disc album of the complete organ works of the luminary British composer Michael Finnissy performed by 23-year-old American organist Forrest Eimold.
Made up entirely of world première recordings, the release will include one of Finnissy’s longest and most ambitious compositional cycles: his nearly 90-minute set of four Organ Symphonies. These fiendishly virtuosic and varied pieces amount to one of the most significant and sustained contributions to the organ repertoire by any living composer.
Alongside the Symphonies, Eimold presents Finnissy’s colourful set of Hymn-Tune Preludes, as well as various shorter pieces, including the recent “Blackburn,” a piece written specifically to mark the 50th birthday of the Blackburn Cathedral Organ.
Representing the sheer diversity of material included in Finnissy’s output, the recording was made on an international array of organs: from several works recorded on the inimitable instrument at Blackburn, with the remainder to be recorded at the Memorial Church of Harvard University in the USA. This album marks one of the organ world’s most ambitious recording projects in recent memory.
Forrest Eimold
Composer-keyboardist Forrest Eimold, 23, has been hailed as “incredible” and “fearless” by The Boston Musical Intelligencer, “extremely impressive” by Harmonie, and having “ably responded to the many virtuosic demands” of today’s compositional vanguard by The Washington Post.
Equally at ease when working at the cutting edge of new music as when seeking newfound insight into older music, Forrest first gained notice for having performed all five hours’ worth of Olivier Messiaen’s post-1945 organ music by age 16. Forrest’s committed engagement with the music of living composers has since led to collaborations with composers like Gerald Barry, Molly Joyce, Paola Prestini, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Judith Weir. Furthermore, as répétiteur, Forrest has helped bring world première projects to life by the likes of Du Yun, Nico Muhly, Emma O’Halloran, Arvo Pärt, and Tyshawn Sorey. A passionate advocate for historically-informed performance practice, too, Forrest regularly plays continuo for the GRAMMY®-nominated Trinity Baroque Orchestra—including for what The New York Times has described as “the best Messiah in New York.”
As a composer, Forrest’s music has been performed by ensembles including the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, National Sawdust Ensemble, and Wet Ink Ensemble. Compositional honors include two National YoungArts Awards, as well as the Boris and Eda Rapoport Prize (from Columbia University) and the Blueprint Fellowship (from National Sawdust and the Juilliard School). Having recently graduated from the dual undergraduate program between Columbia University and the Juilliard School with the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, Forrest currently studies music composition with Martin Bresnick at the Yale School of Music.
Michael Finnissy needs little introduction as he is without doubt among the most pre-eminent of composers, usually linked (not always accurately) to the ‘new complexity’ movement. Michael Finnissy was born on 17th March 1946, at roughly 2 in the morning, at 77 Claverdale Road, Tulse Hill, London SW2. His parents were Rita Isolene(nee Parsonson) and George Norman Finnissy. At that time his father worked for the London County Council, assisting through his photographic documentation the assessment of damage to and re-building of London after the war.
Michael started to write music almost as soon as he could play the piano, aged about four and a half, and was tutored in both by his great aunt, Rose Louise Hopwood (Rosie). He attended Hawes Down Infant and Junior schools, Bromley Technical High, and Beckenham and Penge Grammar schools. Music was not taught in any formal or examinable way, though not discouraged either. His best subjects were graphic art, mathematics and English literature.
He received the William Yeats Hurlstone composition-prize at the Croydon Music Festival, a factor which assisted his parents’ decision to let him apply to music college. He was awarded a Foundation Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music. Michael’s composition teachers at the Royal College were Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Searle. He was subsequently awarded an Octavia travelling scholarship to study in Italy with Roman Vlad.
Michael earned money for his studies by playing the piano for dance-classes: Russian-style classical ballet with Maria Zybina, John O’Brien and Kathleen Crofton; and jazz with Matt Mattox. After his studies in Italy, and with no formal qualifications, he continued to work in dance, freelancing, and at the London School of Contemporary Dance – where, with the encouragement of its course-director Pat Hutchinson, he founded a music department. During these years he worked with the choreographers Jane Dudley and Anna Sokolow from the pioneering era of modern dance, and in more experimental work by Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Jackie Lansley and Fergus Early.
Michael Finnissy’s concert debut as a solo pianist was at the Galerie Schwartzes Kloster in Freiburg, playing a concert mostly of first performances, Howard Skempton and Oliver Knussen as well as his own. In the meantime he had started to appear in Europe, firstly at the Gaudeamus Music Week in 1969 and thereafter until 1973, at Royan Festival (1974-6) and Donaueschingen.In many of these events he was twinned with Brian Ferneyhough, a friend since student days. His initial attempts at serious composition teaching, at Darlington Summer School in the mid-seventies, were also partnered by Ferneyhough.
In England, Michael’s early work had received encouragement from Ian Lake, Colin Mason and Martin Dalby. Two pieces had been published by International Music Publishers (Ascherberg), some others by edition modern in Munich and two by Suvini Zerboni in Milan. With the support of Bill Colleran he signed a contract with Universal Edition (London) in 1978, and subsequently with United Music Publishers and (in 1988) with his principal publisher Oxford University Press. Other works are available from Tre Media Verlag (Friederike Zimmermann) in Karlsruhe.
Michael had been a member of the ensemble Suoraan (founded by James Clarke and Richard Emsley) and then its artistic director since the early 1970s. He joined Ixion (founded and still directed by Andrew Toovey) in 1987 – in both of these groups he not only played the piano but also conducted concerts. In the late 1980s he was invited by Justin Connolly to join the British section of the ISCM, and from 1990 until 1996 he served as its President, travelling widely to Europe, Asia and Latin America. He has since been elected to Honorary Membership of the Society.
Michael has been attached to C.O.M.A. (initially known as the East London Late Starters Orchestra) since its inception, and has been in residence as composer to the Victorian College of the Arts (in Melbourne, Australia) and to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney. His principal teaching has been at the Royal Academy of Music (London), Winchester College, the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven (Belgium), and at the Universities of Sussex and (currently) Southampton.
His work has been recorded for CD by Metier, NMC, and Metronome in the UK, and Etcetera and BVHaast (Holland), CRI (USA), Artifact Music (Canada), and ABC Classics (Australia).
A book on the music of Michael Finnissy – Uncommon Ground – edited by Henrietta Brougham, Christopher Fox and Ian Pace, is published by Ashgate.
Michael Finnissy: The Complete Organ Works (Métier MEX 77208 Double-Disc Album)
Artist: Forrest Eimold
Works:
Organ Symphony No. 1
Organ Symphony No. 2
Organ Symphony No. 3
Organ Symphony No. 4
Hymn-Tune Preludes
Blackburn
Xunthaeresis
…ere the set of sun…
Total duration approx 120 minutes
Part recorded in Blackburn November 2022 Remainder to be recorded at Harvard in July 2023
One of Britain’s most accomplished ensembles specialising in new music, Gemini, return to the studio in July to record a new album of music by Nicola LeFanu for Métier. The album is tentatively titled ‘A Wild Garden’ – it contains vocal and chamber works and will be scheduled for release in the late autumn.
Nicola LeFanu has had a long association with Gemini stretching back to the 1970s when the ensemble recorded The Same Day Dawns with the composer conducting (released by Chandos on LP). These ‘Fragments from a book of songs’ are scored for soprano and five instruments with words from poems in Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Kannada and Akkadian. The work was written in 1974.
Along with this new recording of the work there are three other substantial compositions, all premiere recordings. The composer says of the Sextet Fasach – A Wild Garden, written in 1996: ‘I had in my mind images of some of my favourite wild places in Ireland: Roundstone bog and the Connemara coast, for example. To the outsider they must seem bare and empty, but if you explore them, they are teeming with luxuriant growth. In particular, the wild flowers on the cliffs at Kilbaha in Co. Clare were in my thoughts: my cousin Rachel Burrows spoke of her ‘’wild garden’’ there, and it became the subtitle of the piece’.
The Piano Trio (2003) ‘…is a lyric work written in a single movement. … The music is created through transformations—of melodic and rhythmic shapes, textures, characteristic harmonies. … These transformations are sometimes close, sometimes remote, but the harmonies underlying the piece create a unifying resonance so that the disparate ideas cohere’.
The Moth-Ghost (2020) is a dramatic scena for soprano and piano, setting a poem by James Harpur. It tells the story of Thetis, ‘…a sea-goddess of Greek mythology, who knew that her son Achilles must die. In the poem, she is a grief-stricken mother, mourning his death in the Trojan war. The imagery of the poem and the music is of the sea: the sonority of its turbulence, the rhythm of its tides’.
Nicola LeFanu was born in England in 1947, the daughter of Irish parents: her father William LeFanu was from an Irish literary family, and her mother was the composer Elizabeth Maconchy. LeFanu studied at Oxford, Royal College of Music and, as a Harkness Fellow, at Harvard. She has honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Aberdeen, and The Open University, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College Oxford, and is FRCM and FTCL. She has composed around one hundred works which have been played and broadcast all over the world; her music is published by Novello and by Edition Peters. She has been commissioned by the BBC, by festivals in UK and beyond, and by leading orchestras, ensembles and soloists.
Since its formation in 1974 Gemini has presented a richly varied repertoire, incorporating standard eighteenth and nineteenth century chamber music, twentieth century music, new music, music theatre, music and dance and improvisation, plus much music by women and other neglected composers, and works inspired by, or influenced by, music outside the Western European tradition. Community and school concerts feature music from the eleventh to the twenty-first century; folk music from around the world, music by children and young people as well as more standard fare. An ongoing series of commissions is developing the use of the bass clarinet in small chamber ensembles. The ensemble is directed by clarinettist Ian Mitchell.
Divine Art’s new-music imprint, Métier, signed up American pianist James W. Iman in 2021 for a three-album deal, the first of which, featuring Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and Amy, appeared in the spring of 2022 (MSV 28637) to high praise: “The pianism, is top-notch” (Infodad); “Outstanding and imaginative” (Art Music Lounge). Post-production work on the second recording is well underway and the album is likely to see release in the summer.
The pianist explains the ethos of the disc:
“This album has been nearly four years in the making. The repertoire was chosen in the summer of 2019, with the first performance of the program taking place in January of 2020, with plans to record in April of that year.
I first discovered the music of Donald Martino in graduate school through his infamous Pianississimo–a monstrous work expressly requested by Easley Blackwood to be as difficult as possible. As ferocious as it is, Martino still manages to craft a remarkably beautiful work. Indeed, beauty and lyricism are the hallmarks of Martino’s mature compositions, which are as romantic as they are modern. While Pianississimo is something of a spectacle, his masterwork for the piano is his Fantasies and Impromptus from 1981.
The title immediately evokes the work of Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms–composers who were important influences on Martino’s aesthetic ideology, and their fingerprints can be seen throughout the work. The work is not, it should be noted, in a Neo-romantic style. Instead, Martino retains the melody-driven, emotional intensity of Romanticism through his unique approach to twelve-tone composition.
When I first started learning Martino’s Fantasies and Impromptus, I knew immediately that Debussy would be the perfect contrast. I knew I wanted something that would have a similar stature, to balance the intensity and fire of Martino’s work, which naturally led to selecting Debussy’s two books of Images.
Debussy had been absent from my repertoire since 2009, when I performed his Estampes. It was important to me, in taking up these pieces, to rediscover what Debussy means to me and what I wanted to say through his music. My interpretations grew out of a study of Debussy’s letters and his own recordings.
I have played Stand Still Here more times than any other work in my repertoire. Each of the five pieces that comprise the work are brief–the longest is four minutes–but Jenny Beck achieves a depth of introspection and emotional sweep that is absolutely magnetic. How she achieves this is nothing short of miraculous–the pieces are collections of terse motives and static harmonies that hover rather than move. In some ways, these pieces feel like a painting by Mark Rothko–where color alone elicits the emotional response.
This program, and this album, are deeply personal to me, not just because of my connection to the music, but also because it was the last program my mother heard me perform before her passing in 2021.”
Pianist James W. Iman plays the usual and the unusual, by composers known and unknown. As a specialist in music written since 1900—with an emphasis on music written since 1945—his repertoire spans many stylistic developments since Debussy.
Divine Art’s new-music division, Métier, will add to its already strong 2023 release schedule with a fascinating new album featuring works for solo violin by the Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu, performed by Irina Mureşanu. While these pieces are thoroughly new and complex they also have a magical approachability – a sound world in which one can be immersed even with a single sound source.
“These pieces for solo violin are structurally different, yet they have a common denominator, which is highlighted in Irina Mureşanu’s creative interpretation. Each work’s structure is determined by compositional methods and materializes in different types of notation, alongside a rhythmic-melodic precision which allows fluidity and elasticity.
In each piece, it is the initial impulse, the incipit, that triggers a continuous process of ‘becoming’ and transformation. This process lasts as long as the formational material can define the overall musical form.
The violin is a melodic instrument, with the ability to create homophonic and polyphonic textures, elements of musical construction that appear in various contexts and create spatial dramaturgy. The repeated appearance of sounds in different registers is meant to suggest their permanence in space.
The basic elements of a narrative text are thus created, from the simplest form of accompaniment, as the presence of an imaginary “music carpet”, which accompanies the fluidity of a musical discourse with different expressions to the interweaving of coexisting melodic lines.”
—Violeta Dinescu
Violeta Dinescu (b.1953) began music studies at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory in Bucharest, receiving her master’s degree with distinction in 1978. In 1982 she moved to Germany where she has taught at several major music academies. She is a prolific composer of orchestral, chamber vocal and choral music, and several of her operas have been premiered successfully in recent years. She is an executive board member of the International Alliance of Women in Music. This album of solo violin works (all world premieres) marks her debut as a Divine Art group composer.
Irina Mureşanu
Irina Mureşanu, Romanian violinist now living in the USA, has been widely praised for her exciting, elegant, and heartfelt performances of classical, Romantic and modern repertoire. The Boston Globe said “Irresistible… not just a virtuoso but an artist’. A champion of contemporary music, Irina has a substantial discography on several labels including Avie, Albany, BMOP and Centaur. She made her debut as a ‘Divine Artist’ with her Métier album of music by fellow Romanian Dan Dediu (MSV 28621 “Hybrids, Hints & Hooks”)
Album Details
Irina Mureşanu plays Violeta Dinescu (Métier, MEX 77106)
The album Formations will include five of Gwyn Pritchard’s ensemble works (a quintet, two quartets and a trio) and three for solo piano, all performed by the distinguished Swiss contemporary music group Ensemble ö! conducted by Francesc Prat and their pianist Asia Ahmetjanova. All the ensemble works were composed between 2011 and 2018, and the piano pieces between 1999 and 2022. The recording is to be released to coincide with Pritchard’s 75th birthday in 2023.
All the ensemble pieces are all based around strings, with flute, clarinet and piano in differing combinations. Two of the pieces explore the role of a soloist in a chamber music context: a violin in Features and Formations, and clarinet in Realms Apart. The choice of pieces reflects the international focus of Pritchard’s career, having been originally composed for and premiered by performers in Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the UK; most of the pieces have received several performances in many European counties and beyond.
In character, the music ranges between the energetic and rhythmic complex writing of Realms Apart, and the transparent, darkly suppressed quality of the piano trio Res (a title taken from photographer Antonio Biassiucci’s work). In essence, however, all the music on this album reflects Pritchard’s persistent engagement with the relationship between instability and ambiguity on the one hand, and definition and gestural clarity on the other.
Gwyn Pritchard (b.1948) studied cello and composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. His compositions include works for orchestra, ensembles, solo instruments, vocal works and pieces employing electronics. Much of his compositional activity has been based outside the UK, in particular in Germany, Poland, Switzerland and Italy. Other performances have been given in America, Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, S Korea and New Zealand. They have been performed and broadcast on many radio and television networks, often by major orchestras, ensembles and soloists, and at international festivals. In 1982 Pritchard founded Uroboros Ensemble which includes some of Britain‘s leading instrumentalists. He is Professor of Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London, and has given lectures and masterclasses in Europe, America and Asia.
Formations (MSV 28633)
Works
Features and Formations
Nightfall
Evolution
Res
Realms Apart
(Ensemble ö!)
Tide
Calling
From Time to Time
(Aisa Ahmetjanova, piano)
Recorded November/December 2022 Release date summer 2023 (exact date to be confirmed)
Edward Cowie is a composer of immense talent, as evidenced by the constant critical acclaim each of his recordings receives, and for his 80th birthday year, Métier is preparing two new albums which are scheduled for release (subject to final confirmation) around June/July 2023.
The Kreutzer Effect
‘Considered by many to be the greatest living composer directly inspired by the Natural World’, Edward Cowie has turned his inspiration from the natural world in general to the human animal in particular! His collaborative relationship and friendship with the extraordinary Kreutzer String Quartet now stretches back almost a decade. It has seen the quartet record all of his first six quartets; works for violin duo (Particle Partita), and his astounding major solo violin work, GAD. Such has been the flowering of this relationship that Cowie has composed an entire CD devoted to the Kreutzer’s brilliant playing. His seventh string quartet was composed especially for this quartet and as a further symbol of the high esteem he has for the group, he has composed four solo portrait pieces – one for each member of the quartet. From Icarus ascending into incandescent heights on Clifton Harrison’s viola, to the learned and studies songs and habits of owls in his solo cello study for Neil Heyde; on to the almost surrealistic and ‘Beckett-like’ violin portrait of composer/violinist Mihailo Trandafilovski and finally to the incredible explosion of technique and song in his sonic libation to violinist and Leader of the Kreutzer Quartet, Peter Sheppard Skærved. This is literally high-powered music for a group on fire with creative talent!”
Where the Woodthrush Forever Sings (Bird Portraits No. 3)
Composer, visual artist, natural scientist and polymath, Edward Cowie offers us the third epic cycle of ‘bird portraits’ in a 24-movement work for clarinet(s) and piano. His first, Bird Portraits – composed for violin and piano, together with Where Song was Born for flute(s) and piano were recorded on this label and received universal and international acclaim. These are already set to become established as major duo chamber works on the world performance-platforms.
The first two cycles were dedicated to Birds of Britain and Australia in succession. Now, in his third cycle, the composer is inspired by 24 birds of the United States of America. In all three cases, it is not only the splendid and stunning songs of the birds themselves that emerge through and in the music. Habitat, atmosphere(s), seasons, times of day and night, flight-patterns and ritual displays are sonically stitched into an ever-unfolding tapestry of avian ‘dramas’. And just as the natural sounds and music(s) of Britain and Australia can be heard threaded into the first two cycles, this one resounds to the music of the aboriginal Indian cultures of the USA and to the music of and from jazz!The superb performers here are Anna Hashimoto (various clarinets), and the regular Bird Portrait series pianist, Roderick Chadwick.
Album Details
The Kreutzer Effect (MSV 28638)
Recording dates: during 2022 (in progress) in Yorkshire
String Quartet No. 7 (Western Australia)
The Kreutzer Quartet
Menurida Variants (Solo violin)
Peter Sheppard Skærved
One Second Fiddle (solo violin)
Mihailo Trandafilovski
Whatever Happened to Icarus? (solo viola)
Clifton Harrison
Glaukopis (solo cello)
Neil Heyde
Where the Woodthrush Forever Sings (MSV 28639)
To be recorded in early 2023 in Hertfordshire
Where the Woodthrush Forever Sings (cycle of 24 pieces devoted to birds of the USA)
Anna Hashimoto (clarinets)
Roderick Chadwick (piano)
Press for Edward Cowie
“His imaginative gift is unparalleled” (British Music Society)
“First-rate music… fascinating and creative” (The Art Music Lounge)
Following four previous and highly praised albums for Jonathan Östlund, Divine Art is now preparing his fifth, to be titled ‘Elysían’. The double album, like the previous ones, contains a wealth of impressionist works ranging from pieces for chamber orchestra, to instrumental and vocal compositions, performed by a large group of hand-picked performers from around Europe. Jonathan Östlund’s primary inspiration is nature which is brought out fully in beautiful Impressionist works; acclaimed for his imaginative and accessible music, he has been championed by some of Europe’s best musicians. Among the plaudits for his previous albums, he was described as ‘the 21st Century’s Debussy’ (Jan Hocek, His Voice); “this is music of filigree beauty” (Colin Clarke, Fanfare). The new album will be no less magical and will be scheduled for release in the summer of 2023.
Artists include: Patrik Jablonski (piano), Edward Cohen (piano), Serene Yu (piano), Alexander Zagorinsky (cello), Evgeny Brakhman (piano), Peter Sheppard Skærved (violin), Myriam Hidber-Dickinson (flute), Natalie Anston-Vermorel (soprano), Inga Feter (piano), Martina Bortolottivon Haderburg (soprano), Luca Schinai (piano), Laura Kimmel (mezzo-soprano), Nikita Stepanenko (piano), Nizhny Novgorod Soloists, Maria Zagorinskaya (soprano), and more to be confirmed.
Album Details
Title: Elysían Label: Divine Art Catalogue number: DDA 21242 Composer: Jonathan Östlund
Works
Elysían Dreamscape I | Elysían Theme | Along a Sun-ray | Aeolus |Air on the Heart-strings | Hey – Dance as Long as We Live! | Yonderlands | Azure Ablaze | Symphonie à Cordes | La Lune Blanche | Poesís | Danse Fantastique | The Fairy-flute | Nuages Fatigués |Elysían Dreamscape II |Titania | Elegie | The Humblebee | Ghost Waltz | Trold Halla | Suite Singulière | Star-eye
The album has been recorded in various locations around Europe, and is being mastered by Paul Baily (ReSound UK).
Jonathan Östlund received his BA and MA in Composition at LTU, in Sweden, and has so far completed more than 150 works, including several orchestral works, and two concertos for violin. His achievements include CD-releases, publications and performances with the London Schubert Players in the U.K., France and Romania throughout 2010 and 2011, as part of the ‘Invitation to Composers’ project. In 2012 he won the Public Choice Award for his Cello Sonata, premiered by A. Zagorinsky and E. Steen-Nokleberg, and was awarded 1st Prize in the Leicester Symphony Orchestra’s Composers’ Composition for his ‘Celebration Fanfare’, which was premiered during the Orchestra’s 90th Season Gala. Various premieres followed in 2013, in the U.K. and France.
The year 2014 brought Jonathan’s music to the Cadogan Hall stage with ‘Lumières’, a programme presenting ten of his chamber works, in various constellations, performed by E. Pameijer, B. Waldmann and the Cellini Quartet. That same year, his Cello Sonata received a Russian premiere, and he was a Winner in the 2015 IBLA Grand Prize, with one of his orchestral works [the extended version of which became ‘Nocturnia’, and is featured on his third album, ‘Mistral’].
His first double CD, ‘Lunaris’, was released in 2016 to critical acclaim, a year in which further premieres took place in the U.K. and in Switzerland. In 2017 Östlund’s Piano Concertino was premiered in Athens, Greece, and Y. Revich together with M. Esnult premiered a violin and piano piece in Vienna, Austria. His second double CD, ‘Voyages’, was released in 2019, featuring (among others) Walter Gatti, Evgeny Brakhman, Sasha Grynyuk, and Alicja Smietana.
His third album release, ‘Mistral’, released in 2020, includes the recording of his Concerto No. 1 for Violin & Symphony Orchestra among other mesmerising works in varied instrumentation, and was followed by the release of his fourth album, ‘Imago’, a tour-de-force double album, in February 2022.
Divine Art Recordings will be releasing a new album by the accomplished virtuoso pianist Alfonso Soldano, containing a program of piano works by Alexander Scriabin. The collection includes one sonata and many of the composer’s more popular Études and other shorter works and is intended to be the first instalment in a Complete Piano Works edition. Scriabin (1872-1915) was in his early career highly influenced by Chopin, composing in a late Romantic idiom but later developed his own very distinctive advanced tonality, becoming one of the most controversial composers of the early 20th century, inspired by synesthesia (association of colours with sound), sensualism and theosophy. Since the 1970s his works have become very well-established and appreciated.
Alfonso Soldano (b, 1986) was one of the most favoured pupils of Aldo Ciccolini. He has won many piano competitions, sits as juror in others and gives masterclasses throughout Italy. He is recognised for his breathtaking virtuosity coupled with a deep sense of the musical spirit of each piece he performs. He is currently Professor of Piano Performance at the Conservatorio U. Giordano in Foggia, Italy and Artistic Director of the Aldo Ciccolini European Arts Academy Foundation in Trani, Italy. (A more extensive biography can be supplied). His previous recordings for Divine Art – of Rachmaninoff, Bortkiewicz and Castlnuovo-Tedesco – have been met with much acclaim.
The album is due to be recorded in Trani soon and is likely to be scheduled for release in the late summer of 2023.
Album details
Title: ‘Enigma’ – Scriabin Piano Works (vol. 1) Label: Divine Art Catalog number: DDA 25243 Artist: Alfonso Soldano Composer: Alexander Scriabin
Métier, the new-music division of Divine Art Recordings Group, will release in April a new album of works by Paul Whitty, titled The Morning featuring leading new-music ensembles [rout] and Icebreaker. The composer writes:
The Morning is an anthology of three works. Nature is a language – can’t you read? written for Icebreaker is a reorganisation or reconstruction of materials from Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare, a classic of visceral, driving rhythmic patterns from Icebreaker’s repertoire. The reorganisation here is by turns sparsely then densely populated with points of sound and fragments of grit and noise generated by overheard field recordings, that lurch into life then vanish. I was bored before I even began is an exploration of the sounding surfaces of instruments wielded by members of [rout] and each fitted with a contact microphone and routed to guitar pedals while The Morning is a reconstructed, reorganised, reconstituted misreading of Thomas Arne’s Cantata No.5 developed as part of Vauxhall Pleasure, a project developed with Anna Best, and investigating the sonic archaeology of the Vauxhall Cross Gyratory, former site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens where, for a time, Arne was composer in residence.
Paul Whitty was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1970 and is currently Professor of Composition at Oxford Brookes University. He is a founder and director of the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU). He studied with Roger Marsh, Magnus Lindberg, Colin Matthews, Vinko Globokar and Michael Finnissy and has been a visiting tutor in collaborative practice at Dartington College of Arts and the Laban Centre, London. He is a Director of audiograft, Oxford’s Festival of experimental music and sound art, with Stephen Cornford.
His work has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Expose, IXION, Michael Finnissy, [rout], Philip Howard, and Mieko Kanno amongst others, and his music has featured at festivals including Brighton, Ultima in Oslo, the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the 54th Venice Biennale and at State Of The Nation in London. He has received awards, including from the Arts Council of England, AHRC, the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the British Council. Pianist Philip Howard titled his first album, Decoding Skin (Divine Art, 2003), after one of his compositions.
Paul Whitty is a founder, along with the composers Sam Hayden and Paul Newland, of the ensemble [rout], which has made concert tours in the UK, appearing on BBC Radio 3’s contemporary music programme Hear and Now, on a BMIC Cutting Edge concert tour, at the ICA and at the Huddersfield Festival.
Whitty has been a valued member of Divine Art’s composer roster for almost 20 years and his works have appeared on four previous albums:
Title: ‘The Morning” Composer: Paul Whitty Label: Métier Catalogue number: MSV 28636 Recorded 2017; release date April 14, 2023 tbc
Works and Artists
The Morning Cheryl Enever, soprano; Angharad Davies & Emma Welton, violins; Bridget Carey, viola; Audrey Riley, cello; Catherine Laws, harpsichord. I was bored before I even began [rout]: Christian Forshaw, saxophones; David Arrowsmith & Paul Newland, electric guitars; Catherine Laws, Hammond organ; Emma Welton, violin; Paul Whitty, signal processing Nature is a language, can’t you hear? Icebreaker: James Poke & Rowland Sutherland, flute, piccolo and pan pipes; Christian Forshaw & Bradley Grant, saxophones; Emma Welton, violin; Audrey Riley, cello; James Woodrow, guitar; Pete Wilson, bass; Sam Wilson, marimba; Dominic Saunders, Andrew Zolinsky & Walter Fabeck, keys.
Divine Art Records is to issue in the spring of 2023 the first recording of the African-inspired 75-movement, 3-hour Afrikosmos by long-established South African composer Michael Blake. The recording was made in June 2021 at the Menuhin Hall, Cobham, Surrey by pianist Antony Gray, whose recent Divine Art albums of piano works by Saint-Saëns have met with great success and glowing reviews.
The composer writes:
“The idea of writing an African response to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos has a long genesis. I first approached it in 2003 with a tiny piece for young players called iKos’tina, commissioned by the ABRSM for Thalia Myers’ Spectrum series. Béla Bartók composed his Mikrokosmos initially to teach the piano to his son Peter, and so it includes pieces for beginners through to more advanced students and concert pianists, with most of the pieces drawing on Eastern European folk music. I followed his format of six volumes, each one roughly following a similar format, with one or two pieces that fall into each of the following genres: studies, pieces focusing on rhythm and texture, character pieces, dances, pieces exploring a mode or scale, folksong arrangements and variations, transcriptions and homages. Just as Bartók wanted to represent a small world, or the “world of the little ones, the children”, so I wanted to represent as broad a picture as possible of African music and my own heritage.
I wanted to explore in as comprehensive a way possible the vast range of traditional music from sub-Saharan Africa. While a few pieces are piano transcriptions of existing music, most pieces are written in a neo-African style, reflecting my own compositional aesthetic which has drawn on African musical material and aesthetics since the mid-1970s. Throughout I tried to write music which doesn’t patronise or ‘write down’ to young players, however simple the music may be. The pieces use African five and six note scales, harmonies based on the overtone series, polyrhythm, interlocking, cyclic form, etc. And there are also pieces which are cutups or collages of existing music, some which use graphic notation, or are played directly on the strings, and some in which the pianist has to whistle or click their fingers as percussive accompaniment.
The support of the Rockefeller Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. A residency at the Rockefeller Writers Centre, Bellagio, in June 2015, provided the initial impetus for this project and I completed the project five years later in June 2020. In August 2021 Antony Gray premiered most of the pieces in a three-part soirée in Le Genesteix in the salon of Stephen Pettitt, near my home in France. The scores were published in 2022 by Bardic Edition. The pieces are dedicated to friends, colleagues, former students, and some who have passed.”
Michael Blake, South African born composer and pianist, was based in London from 1977, returning to the ‘New South Africa’ twenty years later. Apart from teaching composition at several universities, he was responsible for a number of post-apartheid New Music initiatives – including joining the ISCM, and setting up a new music festival and composers meeting – which aimed to improve the status of composition after the divisive years of apartheid. His musical language is partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music, but also drawing on virtually any found material, and is influenced by both experimental film and African weaving techniques. His works have been widely played, in Toronto, New York, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, and throughout Europe and Africa, and now appears on some 15 CDs. Since 2015 he has lived in rural France with his wife, musicologist and writer Christine Lucia, and their Breton spaniel Dollie, but spends part of each year in Cape Town, where he is honorary professor of experimental composition in the Africa Open Institute at Stellenbosch University.
The Australian pianist, Antony Gray was educated in Victoria, Australia. He graduated from the Victorian College of Arts where he studied with Roy Shepherd and Stephen McIntyre, winning several awards and prizes, including the Allans Keyboard Award two years running. In 1982 he received a scholarship from the Astra foundation to continue his studies in London with Joyce Rathbone and Geoffrey Parsons.
Based now in London, he has long been regarded as one of the most interesting and communicative performers of his generation. His career to date has encompassed solo and chamber music performances around the world, as well as regular recordings for CD and radio. He has been a (selective) champion of contemporary music and has premiered many pieces written for him. He has also championed many neglected composers such as George Enescu, Dussek and Martinu. From his time at College he has been a champion of many living composers, and his work with Australian composers Malcolm Williamson and John Carmichael has been particularly productive.
Antony Gray was one of ABC Classics’ most prolific recording artists, having recorded fourteen discs of solo piano music for the label, as well as featuring on a recital disc for KNS Classical and a number of other recording projects. Recordings already released are the complete solo piano works of Eugene Goossens, Malcolm Williamson (this recording has been included in a recent survey of 1001 recordings to hear before you die) and John Carmichael, as well as the late piano pieces of Johannes Brahms, a 3 disc set of Bach transcriptions, including several written specially for the recording, and a 5 disc set of the complete piano works of Francis Poulenc, including a number of works recorded for the first time, all on ABC Classics.
Album Details
Title: Afrikosmos Composer: Michael Blake Performer: Antony Gray (piano) Label: Divine Art Catalogue number: DDA 21374 (3 CD set/triple digital album)
Track List:
Lullaby to Comfort a Child / Stickfighting Song / Interlocking Hands / Sefapanosaurus / Distant Cowbells / Herding Song/ Geyser off! Hat on! / Fifths/ You are a real rascal/ Slow Dance / In the Hexatonic Mode / Wedding Song/ Ntsikana’s Bell / Reflection (Homage to Erik Satie) / Stroll to the Spaza Shop (Homage to Stanley Glasser) / Canon at the Octave / Five Finger Patterns / Ostinato with Cross-rhythms / Call and Response/ Four-note Patterns / Threshing Song / Lusikiski / Variations on 4ths and 5ths / In Goema Style / Latshon’ilang / There Cried a Hippo / Song for the Evening / Haiku / March (Homage to Stefan Wolpe) / Spotted Dikkop and Black Cuckoo / Smoke and Mirrors / Supermoon (Homage to Henry Cowell) / Lebombo Bone / iKos’tina / Stay on path / Thirds / Tickey-draai / Two Modes Interlocking / Variations on a Flute Tune / John Knox Bokwe’s ‘Plea for Africa’ / Postcards from South Africa / African Doves (Homage to Messiaen) / Keep left, pass right / If I had wings I could fly / High Fives / Emerging Melody / Scents of Childhood 1 (Homage to Schumann) / Self Delectative Song / Seventh must Fall / Chaconne in Mbaqanga Style / Patterns in a Heptatonic Field / Weave / Da kom die Alibama / Message from the Nduna (Homage to György Kurtág) / The Seven Steps / Linong tsa lesiba / Une Sonnerie pour G.D. / Chorale (Homage to MMM) / Scents of Childhood 2 (Homage to Schumann) / Walking Song (Homage to Percy Grainger) / Changing Times with Repeating Patterns / Reedpipe Dance / Major-Minor / Unevensong / Ituri Rain Forest (Homage to JSB) / The music flows jolly as it won’t stop forever / Heaven’s Bow / Night Music / Giyani / Scents of Childhood 3 (Homage to Schumann and Puccini) / Diary of a Dung Beetle / Freedom Day Variation / Lyric Piece (Homage to Grieg) / Broken Line / Dance in Seakhi Rhythm (Homage to Bartók and JP Mohapeloa)
The latest addition to the Métier Records roster is the virtuoso saxophonist Anthony Brown, whose debut commercial recording, ‘Anthology’ will be released in the first quarter of 2023. The album includes seven world première recordings of brand new commissioned works for the saxophone. Each work has its own unique sound world, offering different, exciting new duo and solo works. The performers and composers on this disc represent some of the major influences that have impacted Anthony’s career to date, including teachers, colleagues and friends.
These virtuosic works explore the range and characters that the 4 main saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor and baritone) have to offer. The sound world of the contemporary saxophone is explored in great depth, with influences ranging from jazz, film, poetry, electronic music, and theatre. Each work was commissioned especially for this project and has taken 5 years to complete. The disc was recorded between Nov 2021-Jan 2022 at Halle St. Michael’s, Ancoats, by Joe Riser.
The artist provides the following extra detail:
Delicate sonorities of two soprano saxophones intertwine in a dance-like Sonata for Two Saxophones by Julian Arguelles. The title track of the album, Anthology by Andy Scott, is a homage to Charlie Parker. It contains virtuosic angular phrases of bebop language interspersed with quarter tones, and explores the extended range of the saxophone. Graham Ross, Director of Clare College Cambridge, has produced an intimate work for alto saxophone and piano based on Maya Angelou’s poem, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The Caged Bird here, is used as a metaphor for the struggle and fight against the racism she was subjected to as a young woman. Larry Goves makes use of electronics and multiphonics on two alto saxophones to evoke the brutish images and text of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist in The Two From Rastibon Could Start A Hailstorm. Anthony was involved in Steve Jackson’s III, during the composition process, recording the manipulated samples that provide the electronic backdrop to this rocky work for alto saxophone and electric guitar. Gary Carpenter’s work, Everything is Connected for tenor saxophone and double bass, uses playful time signature changes combined with floating melodies and walking bass lines. Finally, Meriel Price has composed a humorous work for saxophone which asks the performer and audience to consider, Where The Mind Goes.
Anthony Brown
Described by The Times on his debut Purcell Room performance as an ‘outstanding young saxophonist’, multi-award winning, Manchester based saxophonist Anthony Brown graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music with an International Artist Diploma in chamber music and a First Class Honours degree, attaining full marks in his final recital. He has won awards from The Worshipful Company of Musicians, the Tillett Trust, Park Lane Group, Making Music and the Hattori Foundation, as well as first prize in the Haverhill Sinfonia Soloist Competition and the Bromsgrove International Young Musicians’ Platform.
Anthony has performed extensively throughout the UK, including solo recitals at the Wigmore Hall and the Southbank Centre. He has performed with orchestras including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Hallé, Opera North, Royal Northern Sinfonia and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He features on a CD with the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and has performed live and recorded broadcasts as a soloist at the BBC Proms and also with Beats and Pieces Big Band on BBC Radio 3. Anthony is a member of the Ferio Saxophone Quartet. They have recorded two albums together, one with pianist Timothy End, and another with the Corvus Consort (Revoiced – music for saxophones and voices), two exciting projects that explore a varied range of repertoire and styles.
Album Details
Catalogue number: MSV 28634
Title: ‘Anthology’
Style: contemporary music for saxophones
Recording dates: November 2021 – January 2022
Venue: Halle St Michaels, Ancoats
Engineer: Joe Riser
Release formats: CD/ HD digital download /streaming
Works:
Sonata for Two Saxophones (Julian Argüelles)
Anthology (Andy Scott)
Caged Bird (Graham Ross)
The Two from Ratisbon Could Stat a Hailstorm (Larry Goves)
The long-standing relationship between Métier and Michael Finnissy continues with a forthcoming album featuring the superb Marsyas Trio in collaboration with award-winning mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. The album is to be titled ‘Alternative Readings’ and will showcase solo vocal music by Michael Finnissy with diverse instrumental ensembles.
Throughout his life and music, Finnissy has thought to bring apparently dissimilar things and people together, confronting the problems of social-discourse, power, mysteries and beauty. The common thread that runs through the album is the notion of ‘alternative readings’ in its broadest sense, which culminates in Finnissy’s substantial new work ‘Wisdom’, commissioned by the Marsyas Trio during the lockdown of 2020. This piece explores isolation and ways of dealing decisively and sensibly with solitude and abandonment, while transcending the boundaries and seeking connectivity between continents and cultures. It draws on a multitude of texts ranging from Australian Aboriginal (Nunggubuyu) Dreamtime myths to Shakespeare’s poetry to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’.
Métier is the new-music imprint of Divine Art Recordings Group and this will be the fourteenth album in the label’s Finnissy series. Stephen Sutton, CEO of Divine Art, is delighted with this news: “It’s been a few years since our last album devoted to Michael’s music, so we are really pleased about this new project, as Michael is without doubt one of the most outstandingly talented composers of today and we are also excited to welcome the Marsyas Trio to our roster of artists.”
The news of this release is also welcomed by Judith Weir (CBE, Master of the King’s Music) who says: A new release of Michael Finnissy’s work is always welcome news; this is important repertoire. Yet another generation of new, front-rank performers are now championing Finnissy’s music, and this is especially true of Marsyas Trio and the remarkable vocalist, Lotte Betts-Dean.
The London-based Marsyas Trio, formed in 2009 by graduates of the Royal Academy of Music, is the UK’s only permanent flute-cello-piano ensemble. Showcasing a hugely diverse repertoire from the Classical and Romantic eras to the present day, the Marsyas Trio’s programming illuminates forgotten masterpieces, whilst inspiring a generation of new works through commissioning initiatives and recording projects.
The Trio’s concert highlights include performances at Conway Hall and Kettle’s Yard, tours in Europe, China, the USA & Canada. UK festival highlights include the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, St David’s Cathedral Festival, Vale of Glamorgan, Three Choirs Festivals and Spitalfields Music in the City.
The Trio’s last CD In the Theatre of Air (NMC Recordings 2018), debuted at No. 7 on the classical charts and was one of NMC’s highest selling CDs in 2018/19.
In June 2022, the Marsyas Trio were announced as recipients of an Artist By-Fellowship at Churchill College, at the University of Cambridge.
Album Details
Label: Métier
Catalogue number: MSV 28635
Release date: March 2024
Recording venue: Goldsmiths Music Studios, London, UK
A new album of chamber works by Sergei Rachmaninov is in preparation by Divine Art for release in the late spring of 2023. The recording is taking place at two venues in Poland: the Łódź Academy of Music, and the Czestochowa Philharmony, and is due to be completed in early November 2022. The principal performer is pianist Barbara Karaśkiewicz who has made several highly praised recordings for Divine Art (and before that the esteemed Polish label Acte Preable). She performs two piano duos with her musical partner Michał Rot. The chamber works are played by the Huberman Piano Trio whose Divine Art recording of 20th Century Chamber music was also acclaimed by critics.
The Huberman Trio was formed at the initiative of Barbara Karaśkiewicz, named in honour of the great Polish artist Bronislav Huberman, famed for his performances and transcriptions of works by Chopin and others. The current line-up includes Polish pianist and violinist and a Ukrainian cellist.
Album details
Recording made in September and November 2022 in Poland, Engineer/producer: Wojciech Marzec
Release date Spring 2023 (to be confirmed)
Label: Divine Art
Catalogue number: DDA 25242
Artists:
Barbara Karaśkiewicz and Michał Rot (piano duet)
Huberman Piano Trio:
Barbara Karaśkiewicz (piano)
Dagmara Swystun (violin)
Sergei Rysanov (cello)
Works (all by Sergei Rachmaninov)
Piano Suite No. 1, Op. 5 (piano duet)
Piano Suite No. 2, Op. 17 (piano duet)
Trio Elégiaque No, 1 (piano trio)
Elegy, Op. 3 no. 1 (arranged for piano trio)
Vocalise, Op. 34 No. 14 (arranged for piano trio)
Album duration: c. 71:00
Barbara Karaśkiewicz was born in Krynica, where at the age of 5 she began learning to play the piano, and continued her studies at music schools in Łódź and Katowice. She went on to study piano at The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice under Prof. Monika Sikorska-Wojtacha, where she received a diploma with distinction in 1999; at the same university she partook of post-graduate studies under the guidance of the outstanding Polish pianist, Prof. Wojciech Świtała. In 2013, she obtained a doctoral degree, and in June 2018 a Postdoctorate honours, both awarded by The Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.
As an artist Barbara has been honoured with awards in prestigious competitions in her own country and abroad. She has performed widely in Europe as well as in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and of course in her native Poland, performing as soloist in symphonic concerts, in piano recitals and in chamber music; she is the founder of the Huberman Duo, Huberman Piano Trio, and the piano quartet 4Tpianos. Barbara has recorded the entire repertoire of piano compositions by Roman Statkowski, across three albums (the third was published by Divine Art: DDA 25129). She has also recorded the piano works of English contemporary composer Michael Garrett. Her fifth solo album, with music by Karol Szymanowski (Divine Art DDA 25151) was nominated for the Fryderyk 2018 Music Award in the category of Best Polish Album Abroad. Barbara is associated with The Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław. She actively participates in teaching activities and numbered among her pupils are international piano competition prizewinners. She is regularly invited to participate as a member of the jury in piano competitions, and she also conducts piano and chamber workshops.
The Métier New-Music label of Divine Art Recordings Group is to issue an album of music for a unique and amazing instrument! Basque accordionist Lore Amenabar Larrañaga has signed to the label for her debut album which will comprise eight works for the Quarter-Tone Accordion. She explains the concept:
“I am engaged in a detailed investigation of a self-designed quarter-tone accordion as well as exploring its technical and sonic boundaries through the commissioning of a new body of collaborative works. These works have been written between 2020 and 2022, during my PhD studies at the Royal Academy of Music.
The design of my instrument allows the production of quarter tones in both the right and left-hand manuals. The range and timbral possibilities of this instrument are expanded through the use of fifteen registers on the right manual and seven on the left manual, resulting in a sounding range of E-2 to B-quarter-sharp-6 in the right hand and E-1 to D-quarter-sharp-6 in the left. From Electra Perivolaris to Christopher Fox, Michael Finnissy to Mioko Yokoyama, this album will accommodate diverse textures, voices, and ideas; all gravitating around the Quarter-Tone Accordion”.
Lore Amenabar Larrañaga completed both her Bachelor’s and Master’s studies at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, with Prof Matti Rantanen, Dr Mika Väyrynen and Dr Veli Kujala, having graduated with first-class honours. At present, she is pursuing a PhD at the Royal Academy of Music in London and is generously supported by ‘La Caixa Foundation’. An accomplished performer across styles – from folk music to the classical canon – Lore is especially passionate about artistic collaboration and performing new music. In addition to the premières of the featured works in this album, she has recently given the first performances of ‘She Keeps Walking Over Paper’ by Claudia Molitor (London 2020) and ‘Unbroken’ by Howard Skempton (London 2021), and while studying in Helsinki premièred ‘Finnish Suite’ by Matti Murto (Ikaalinen 2017). Having won the 2018 edition of ‘Juventudes Musicales de España’, she gave a series of nine solo concerts as part of a Spanish tour.
Recording dates: Autumn 2022 – Spring 2023 (London) Release date: Summer 2023 (exact date to be confirmed)
Album details:
Label: Métier Title: to be decided Catalogue number: MSV 28631 Artist: Lore Amenabar Larrañaga
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