Ian Pace To Release Two Major Albums on Métier Records

New-music specialist label Métier Records is announcing two substantial sets of seminally important contemporary works for piano: a 2-CD set of music by Horaţiu Rădulescu and a four-disc omnibus of music by Michael Finnissy, performed by premier Métier artist Ian Pace. Both sets have been recorded over the last two years and the label team hope to schedule release of both in mid Autumn of 2024.

Horaţiu Rădulescu was the leading figure in the field of Romanian spectral music, that music which derives massive, overwhelming sound masses from the very basics of harmonic spectra. In the second half of his career he would combine this with Romanian folk music and Byzantine chant, often in startling contrapuntal combinations employing techniques developed during the European Renaissance. Ian Pace worked extensively with Rădulescu for two decades, and the composer wrote his last completed work, the Piano Sonata No. 6, for him. These discs feature authoritative recordings of Rădulescu’s complete piano works, exhibiting a mixture of plasmatic sound and virtuosic combinations of folk songs and dances.

Michael Finnissy is one of the most renowned of all living British composers, and especially known for vast output for piano, an output marked by an almost demented level of virtuosity as well as dense and intricate collages of material alluding to music from many centuries and many genres. Ian Pace is the leading interpreter of his work, having performed Finnissy’s complete oeuvre for piano in two major cycles in 1996 and 2016. He has recorded a range of earlier discs of Finnissy for Divine Art, most notably the five-and-a-half-hour cycle The History of Photography in Sound, his recording of which won widespread critical acclaim. For this new set, he presents a brand new recording of Finnissy’s second largest piano cycle, the four book Verdi Transcriptions (available earlier in a two-book version, but here in the much-expanded version on disc for the first time), a kaleidoscopic set of 36 pieces of greatly varying length, working chronologically through Verdi’s output, but with a monumentalism to the cycle as a whole which resembles an extended symphony of Bruckner or Mahler. Also in the set is Finnissy’s most notorious work, English Country-Tunes, a unique combination of reckless virtuosity and ravaging piano textures with intense nostalgia for an imaginary English idyll expressed through timeless melodies akin to folk tunes. The set also features a range of other works relating to music of Beethoven, Rossini, Schumann, Brahms, Johann Strauss II, Mahler and William Billings, and Finnissy’s further ‘operatic’ cycle, the Yvaroperas.

Ian Pace is a world-renowned interpreter of new music for the piano. He has played in many countries, recorded over 40 CDs, including a series for Divine Art, given well over 300 world premieres, and worked with many of the leading composers of today. He is strongly associated with the music of Michael Finnissy, whose complete piano works he performed in two landmark series in 1996 and 2016, and whose five-and-a-half-hour The History of Photography in Sound he premiered complete in 2001 and subsequently recorded for Divine Art’s Métier label, as well as publishing a monograph on the work. He is also a leading performer of the works of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, Pascal Dusapin, Horatiu Radulescu, Christopher Fox and many others. He is also a scholar, whose research and teaching exists at the interactions of musicology, cultural sociology, history, practice-research, critical theory, and the study of education. He is Professor of Music, Culture and Society at City, University of London, where he has worked since 2010, and where he was made Professor in 2021. He has also written regularly for wider publications including the London Review of Books, Times Higher Education, The Critic, The Spectator and The Telegraph.