Following the success of a recent album of music by French-Lebanese composer Naji Hakim for organ and other solo instruments, Métier will produce a new collection of Hakim’s music for cello performed by French Cellist Gwendeline Lumaret. The recording is to be made in Paris on 5^th and 6^th July, and is likely to see release towards the end of this year.

The programme on this recording is devoted to Naji Hakim’s works for cello, comprising four works for the solo instrument and variations for cello and piano, where the composer plays alongside the cellist.  Although Naji Hakim has been composing works for various formations – instrumental, vocal and symphonic – since 1986, it was not until 2020 that he decided to write for the cello, at the invitation of the late Armenian soloist Avetis Gyogchyan (1964-2022), for whom he composed the diptych Prélude et Habanera (2020). This was the starting point for the programme on this album. This was followed by the Missa cum jubilo (2020), inspired by Gregorian melodies, the Levantine Variations (2021) for cello and piano, as well as Arabesque and Variations (2021) for solo cello, dedicated to Gwendeline Lumaret, and finally, Montmartre (2023), initially written for solo viola; a piece inspired by the faith of the composer, who was organist at the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre from 1985 to 1993.

Gwendeline LUMARET is a graduate of the Conservatoire Régional de Lyon, the Conservatoire Régional de Boulogne-Billancourt, the École Normale de Musique de Paris, the Conservatorio Superior de Barcelona, the Schola Cantorum and the CNSM de Paris, in cello, chamber music, analysis, pedagogy and conducting. She is a First Prize winner in cello and chamber music at the Gaetano Braga and at the Union des Femmes Artistes Musiciennes International Competitions. She is member of the Orchestre Hexagone and the Coruscant Chamber Orchestra. Founder of the SAFPEM, she has published recordings with Azerbaijani singer Alim Qaasimov. She is currently employed as professor at the Conservatoire Régional in Besançon.

Naji HAKIM (b.1955) studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and won ten first prizes at international organ and composition competitions. He was the organist of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, succeeded Olivier Messiaen at the Église de la Trinité (Paris), and taught at the Conservatoire de Boulogne and at the Royal Academy of Music (London). He is doctor honoris causa of the Pontifical Holy Spirit University (Kaslik, Lebanon). His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI awarded him the Augustae crucis insigne pro Ecclesia et Pontifice. His works include instrumental, symphonic, and vocal music. www.najihakim.com

Gwendeline Lumaret plays Naji Hakim

Label: Métier
Catalogue number:  MEX 77130

Works:

• Prélude et Habanera  (solo cello)
• Missa cum Jubilo (solo cello)
• Montmartre (solo cello)
• Arabesque Variations (solo cello)
• Levantine Variations (cello/piano)  *
• Performers :

Gwendeline Lumaret (cello)
Naji Hakim (piano) *

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.

Album details:

Michael Finnissy : piano works (album title tbc)

Catalogue number: MEX 77402 (4CDs and digital album for download and streaming)

Works:

• Verdi Transcriptions, Books 1-4
• Beethoven’s Robin Adair
• Brahms-Lieder
• English Country Tunes
• Preambule zu ‘Carnaval’/Erste Symphonische Etude/Zweite Symphonische Etude
• Romeo & Juliet are Drowning
• Rossini
• Strauss-Walzer
• ‘What the Meadow-flowers tell me’
• William Billings
• Yvaroperas

(all composed by Michael Finnissy)

Artist: Ian Pace (piano)

Horaţiu Rădulescu: piano works

Catalogue number: MEX 77210 (2CDs and digital album for download and streaming)

Works:

• Piano Sonata No. 1
• Piano Sonata No. 2
• Piano Sonata No. 3
• Piano Sonata no. 4
• Piano Sonata No. 5
• Piano Sonata No. 6
• Omaggio a Domenico Scarlatti
• The Origin III

(all composed by Horaţiu Rădulescu)

Artist: Ian Pace (piano)

Leading New-Music label Métier Records announces two albums of modern vocal music from husband-and-wife team Clare and David Lesser, featuring the music of John Cage and Michael Finnissy. Both will be scheduled for release in the autumn.

The first album brings together several of John Cage’s lesser-known works for voice, percussion, and radios. Cage explored the possibilities of radio throughout his composing career, from the early Imaginary Landscape 1 (1939), intended as a broadcast work;  Imaginary Landscape 4  (1951) – which involved radios as instruments – to the much later Europeras (1987-1991), exploiting the medium’s inherent possibilities to both provide sonic material and to disrupt ongoing musical processes. In Speech (1955) Cage focuses on ways of decontextualising broadcast news by overlaying live spoken words with multiple radio transmissions to create a sonic collage. Radio Music (1956) continues these ideas, but without the live speech element. All of the works on this album showcase Cage’s enduring fascination with chance and indeterminacy. Sculptures Musicales (1989) blends music with visual art in the production of sonic gestures suspended in time, using a wide variety of resonance producing objects, from gongs and chimes to pebbles, shells and bamboo. One¹² (1992) is one of Cage’s very last works, written in the year of his death. For solo voice, it comprises a series of numbers using the ancient Chinese I-Ching oracle, controlling a complex range of vocal sonorities and responses.

The album devoted to Michael Finnissy showcases works for soprano, clarinet and piano, many of which were dedicated to the performers. Falling into three broad groups, the repertoire consists of substantial works for soprano and piano – Beddoes (2018-24), Dino Campana (2020), Catchpenny Rhymes (1986-89, revised 2018) and Remembrance Day (2014); shorter pieces for the same duo – Oxford in 1814 (1966-67) and John Keats Operatic (1974-76); works for soprano, clarinets and piano, Blessed Be I, III, and IV (1992 – 2002) and Caithness with Descants (2006-07). Echoes of folksong, hymnals and the Romantic Lieder and bel canto operatic traditions can all be heard, while themes encompass loss, love, and the magical realism of folk poetry.  As the title suggests this is a sequel to Clare and David’s 2016 release “Singular Voices” (Métier MSV 28557).  It is also worth noting that this is the fourth all-Finnissy album being launched by Métier in 2024 bringing the long-running series to a current count of 17 titles.

Album Details

Radio With/Out Voice

Catalogue number: MEX 77124
Works:

• Sculptures Musicales
• One¹²
• Speech
• Radio Music

(all composed by John Cage)

Artists:

• Clare Lesser (soprano)
• David Lesser (piano)

Singular Voices II

Catalogue number MEX 77127
Works:

• Beddoes
• Remembrance Day
• Catchpenny Rhymes
• Oxford in 1817
• Campana
• Blessed Be! (versions I, III and IV)
• Caithness with Decants
• John Keats: Operatic

(all composed by Michael Finnissy)

Artists:

• Clare Lesser (soprano)
• Carl Rosman (clarinets, basset horn)
• David Lesser (piano)