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ID: MNRCD114
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices and OrchestraRecorded, edited and mixed by Austin Ince December 2007 at Olympic Studio 1, London
Design Russell Mills (shed) www.russellmills.com
Co-design Michael Webster (storm) www.michael-webster.co.uk
Translations by Letizia Panizza
Drawings courtesy of the British Library © British Library Board
All rights reserved
The latest release on mn records is 8 Lust Songs - I sonetti lussuriosi’ released 2nd June 2008. It is a song cycle, commissioned by the 2007 Venice Biennale. It was first performed by Marie Angel with the Orchestra di Santa Cecilia, conducted by the composer, in the Arsenale, Venice, on 4 October 2007.
Nyman’s music is set to the erotic poems of the 16th century poet Pietro Aretino.
The poems were inspired by Marcantonio Raimondi’s engravings of couples in various positions of sexual intercourse. The poems and engravings have been called a Renaissance equivalent of the Kama Sutra. They caused huge outrage at the time of publication, banned by the Papal authorities and nearly all copies destroyed. They are the most important erotic texts of the period and have gone on to inspire writers and artists alike for centuries.
Marie Angel sings the male and female roles. As Nyman composed the music the words came to life for Marie and the characters revealed themselves to her. Her interpretation is thus not only key but unique, colourful and very entertaining. |
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ID: MNRCD108
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices and OrchestraThe MN Records catalogue is significantly enriched with a second set of CDs to add to the 6 released in 2005. Two major albums are released on 24 July featuring Nyman's non-operatic vocal music:
Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter.
Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard.
Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper.
Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'.
The songs, individually and collectively, express both the horror, the emptiness of the writer in exile and are cast in a musical language which attempts to 'reinvent' an imaginary emotional world related to the Romanian background in 1920s Bukovina, where Celan was born.
The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, unlike the Six Celan Songs, deals directly with a war situation - an 18-month- old Kosovan boy left for dead during the Kosovo war, found and re-named by the Serbs and 6 months later reunited with his parents. It is the most recent in Nyman's series of collaborations with visual artists, in this case the American feminist/conceptualist Mary Kelly. Kelly provided the composer with a complex text in a simple ballad form which Nyman brilliantly subverts in his continuous 18-minute piece, written for Sarah Leonard and the Nyman Quartet and first performed surrounded by Kelly's visual representation of the text in the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2001. |
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ID: CDMAN170
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: OpéraKonstatin Pluzhnikov, tenor (7)
Gennady Bezzubenkov, bass (8) |
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ID: NMCD175
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Symphony
Two of Knussen's major works of the 1970s - Symphony No.2, a song cycle on texts of Georg Trakl and Sylvia Plath, and Symphony No. 3, a symphonic poem about Shakespeare's Ophelia - are coupled with Coursing, Ophelia Dances and other works.
This release on the NMC mid-price re-issue label Ancora was previously issued on Unicorn-Kanchana Records.
Composer/conductor Oliver Knussen celebrates his 60th birthday this year.
Knussen's Ophelia Dances will be performed by BCMG at his 60th birthday concert held at the CBSO Centre (Birmingham, UK)
A new release on NMC of works by Knussen is released this autumn, featuring BCMG, Ryan Wigglesworth and soprano Claire Booth.
Knussen started composing at the age of 6 and aged 15 he stepped in to conduct his symphony's première at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 1968 after István Kertész fell ill. After that debut, Daniel Barenboim asked him to conduct the work's first two movements in New York a week later.
This is a substantial sampler of Oliver Knussen's output in the 1970s. The two major works are the luminous Second Symphony, which takes the form of a 17-minute song cycle to texts of Georg Trakl and Sylvia Plath and Symphony No. 3, a symphonic poem about Shakespeare's Ophelia. |
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ID: NMCD173
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Orchestral Works
Brian Elias studied at London’s Royal College of Music with Humphrey Searle and Bernard Stevens and privately with Elisabeth Lutyens.
Brian was born in Bombay (Mumbai) and lived there until the age of thirteen.
His ballet The Judas Tree won an Olivier Award for Best New Dance Work and an International Emmy Award for Performing Arts.
Doubles was awarded the Best Orchestral prize at the 2010 British Composer Awards 2010 ‘Purely as psychodrama, The House is gripping. But what makes it really memorable is the clarity and vigour of Elias's orchestral writing. Humming throughout with perky rhythms, never cluttered, and full of imaginative ideas (including the 21st-century equivalent of the Pizzicato Polka), it struck me as among the best things that the 53-year old composer has penned.’ The Times (2002).
The bold and dazzlingly inventive The House That Jack Built - inspired by the rumbustiousness, games and jeers of the playground - is coupled with the elaborate, intense Doubles (a large orchestral work commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra) and A Talisman, for bass-baritone and small orchestra which is based upon Hebrew text inscribed on a silver 19th century amulet - intended to protect against the Evil Eye - which was given to Elias's mother in 1969 by her uncle, whose family emigrated from Kurdistan to Bombay in the middle of the 19th century. |
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ID: RCO10003
CDs: 1
Type: SACD
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Collection:
World Premiere Recording
Recorded Live at Concertgebouw Amsterdam on 19, 20 March 2009 (Van der Aa); 22, 23 January 2009 (Ketting); 10, 11 October 2008 (Keuris, Gubaidulina, Nas).
With this third release in the Horizon series, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra once again underlines the importance it attaches in its concert programming to performances of contemporary music. The compositions featured on this CD represent a selection of recordings of contemporary works which the orchestra premiered in its 2008-9 season (some of which were commissioned by the orchestra) or of which few or no quality recordings are available. Two Dutch composers of the latest generation (Nas and van der Aa) are brought together here with two members of the older guard (Ketting and Keuris). Sofia Gubaidulina, for her part, represents the international contingent on this CD. In its performance of these works, the orchestra was led by conductors Ed Spanjaard, Markus Stenz and David Robertson. The CD also features soloist mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn, to whom van der Aa dedicated his song cycle. |
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ID: ACDBE067-2
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Voices and Orchestra1 - 3 - East Netherlands Symphony Orchestra - Jeppe Moulijn, conductor / Francien Schatborn, viola
4 - 7 - East Netherlands Symphony Orchestra - Jeppe Moulijn, conductor / Marijje Van Stralen, soprano
8 - The Brabant Orchestra - David Parry, conductor / Peter Gijsbertsen, tenor
9 - 12 - The University of Amsterdam Orchestra - Jeppe Moulijn, conductor / Joris Van Rijn, violin
"I wanted to feel the same excitement, the same itch, with new music as when I discovered a new piece by, say, Ravel in my teens"
After the extremely turbulent 20th century, of which the musical history may be defined as an endless series of "style wars", now, in the 21st century, composers seem to be freer than ever to choose whatever means of expression they want. But Jeppe Moulijn studied composition in an environment where there was little or no understanding for his impassioned embracing of late romanticism and the early 20th century. But Moulijn has not been standing still and now has left all naiveté behind. He is a composer of today.
This CD is a document showing this process, from the neo-romantic violin concerto
of 2005 to Et Fit Lux of 2012.
Moulijn's work can be described as expressive, rich in instrumental colours and details. It is accessible, without consciously aiming for it.
"Composers should think from the standpoint of the musician. And musicians should try to 're-create' like a composer"
Moulijn's work is first and foremost formed by his 20 years of experience as an orchestra conductor, and therefore of a musical tradition reaching from Bach to the present day. |
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ID: SIGCD372
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Opera Collection
Bartók: Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Sz. 48, Op. 11
An unforgettable live-concert recording, selected from the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s season of works by Béla Bartók - „Infernal Dance“.
Sir John Tomlinson Bluebeard
Michelle DeYoung Judith
Juliet Stevenson Narrator
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen conductor
Reviews of the concert from which this recording was taken:
„John Tomlinson and Michelle DeYoung were vocally so commanding as to render „choreography“ entirely superfluous. Tomlinson's cavernous voice seemed to embody the very interior world of his castle - its sadness, darkness, emptiness - his Hungarian so vivid and expressive in itself that it became another sonority in Bartok's aural palette. He was quite extraordinary. Musically stunning ..." The Arts Desk
"The part of Judith was well taken by Michelle DeYoung but it was the portrayal of Tomlinson that stole the show. At first predatory and prowling - no one can prowl like John Tomlinson - he visibly collapsed into himself as his secrets were exposed. And never was that magnificently gnarled tone put to better use." The Evening Standard |
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ID: SIGCD373
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection:
Opera Collection
Subcollection: Voices and OrchestraMozart:
Natus cadit (from Apollo et Hyacinthus)
Amoretti, che ascosi qui siete (from La Finta Semplice)
Diggi, daggi, schurry, murry (from Bastien und Bastienne)
Se viver non degg’io (original version) (from Mitridate, Re di Ponto)
Fra i pensier più funesti (from Lucio Silla)
Geme la tortorella (from La finta giardiniera)
Viva l’invitto Duce (from Il Re Pastore)
Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben (from Zaïde)
Andrò ramingo e solo (from Idomeneo)
Konstanze, Konstanze...O wie ängstlich (from Die Entführung aus dem Serail)
Bravo, signor padrone…Se vuol ballare (from Le nozze di Figaro)
Deh! vieni alla finestra (from Don Giovanni)
Di scrivermi ogni giorno (from Così fan tutte)
Ah perdona al primo affetto (from La Clemenza di Tito)
Hm! hm! hm! hm! (from Die Zauberflöte)
Rebecca Bottone, Klara Ek, Martene Grimson, Susan Gritton, Anna Leese (soprano), Cora Burggraaf (mezzo), Allan Clayton, Andrew Staples (tenor), Mark Stone (baritone), Matthew Rose (bass)
Classical Opera Company, Ian Page
Featuring Rebecca Bottone, Cora Burggraaf, Allan Clayton, Klara Ek, Martene Grimson, Jennifer Johnston, Susan Gritton, Anna Leese, Matthew Rose, Andrew Staples & Mark Stone
Signum are proud to reissue Classical Opera’s debut CD, ‘The A-Z of Mozart Opera’, selected for Gramophone magazine’s annual Critic’s Choice in 2007. Based on the coincidence that Mozart’s first opera (Apollo et Hyacinthus) begins with ‘A’ and his last (Die Zauberflo?te) with ‘Z’, this disc takes the listener on a chronological journey through Mozart’s operatic canon, featuring an aria or ensemble from fifteen of his operas.
“My personal pick for giving this year is the Classical Opera Company’s glorious The A-Z of Mozart Opera, which is fresh, diverse, insightful and illuminating (everything that such recital anthologies usually fail to be). ... “... uniformly superb interpretations... an auspicious de?but recording of intelligence, finesse and quality.” Gramophone |
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