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World music CD DVD shop and Classic distribution
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ID: MNRCD202
CDs: 3
Type: CD
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Collection: Instrumental
Subcollection: Piano
MNRCD107 - The Piano
MNRCD106 - Nyman and Greenaway Revisited
MNRCD104 - The Libertine
Michael Nyman's score for Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano is one of the most successful film soundtracks of all time. The film itself won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 1993 and went on to win several Oscars at the 1994 Academy Awards. The soundtrack of the film went on to become a multi-million seller. Perhaps surprisingly for music with such strong ties to its original source many of the pieces from The Piano were subsequently used in a variety of other settings in film, television and advertising making it some of the most performed/frequently heard orchestral music of the last twenty years.
Nyman/Greenaway revisited is a collection of the most popular music from the five soundtracks provided by the composer for Peter Greenaway's feature films from 1982 - 1991. Music from The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts, Drowning By Numbers, The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover, & Prospero's Books is included.
Working alongside director Laurence Dunmore, Nyman has composed the music for his latest film - The Libertine. The film is a version of the celebrated Stephen Jeffreys play and stars Johnny Depp, John Malkovich and Samantha Morton. It tells the story of the 17th century Earl of Rochester (Depp), his friendship with King of England Charles II (Malkovich) and his affair with actress Elizabeth Barry (Morton). |
| 36.00 eur Buy |
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ID: MNRCD201
CDs: 3
Type: CD
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Collection: Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices and Orchestra
Six Celan Songs, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi
Acts of Beauty, Exit no Exit
8 Lust Songs, I Sonetti Lussuriosi
MNRCD108 - Six Celan Songs, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi
MNRCD109 - Acts of Beauty, Exit no Exit
MNRCD114 - 8 Lust Songs, I Sonetti Lussuriosi
Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are new recordings that present compelling examples of Michael Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter.
Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper and, together with The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard.
8 Lust Songs is a song cycle in which 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. |
| 36.00 eur Buy |
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ID: MNRCD121_122
CDs: 2
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Opera
Track Listing:
Act 1
Prelude/Dogs drowning in sand
How do I know you know?
Lavater
Leonardo says
The size of the brain
Weigh the brain
Act 2
The theory of proportions
Stand up and be counted
Measure my body
Galton
Goya’s snub nose
Lombroso
And Goya cried
Act 3
Where is Goya?
The sequence of the gene
A man impaled
The risky gene
Mutation
Brilliant body
Take its DNA
Give me Goya’s skull
Tortured prisoner
Act 4
That day decided
We’ve cracked the genome
I wanted rid of it
And cloning is here to stay
How can you be so stupid?
Forgive me
Box Set includes Full Libretto and extensive booklet notes.
This three cd digipack and booklet box set includes a free bonus cd containing selections from Michael’s two other operas available on MN Records, Man and Boy: Dada and Love Counts
Facing Goya puts science on the cultural stage through the music of Michael Nyman and the inspiration of one of the world’s greatest painters.
Facing Goya is a taut thriller that follows one woman’s passionate search for the 18th Century Spanish artist Goya’s missing skull. Her journey takes us into the dangerous world of racial stereotyping, gene therapy, cloning and humankind’s follies as seen through Goya’s paintings, etchings and captions. The idea for the opera arose from Michael Nyman’s fascination with the insidious study of craniometry that developed in the 1870s. Goya was regarded as one of the greatest painters of his time. Buried in Bordeaux, legend has it that he asked friends to ensure his head was removed prior to burial to prevent the early craniometrists and researchers of eugenics from getting hold of his brain.
“Facing Goya asks the question ‘if Goya’s skull was found, and if indeed, Goya was cloned, what would happen?’” |
| 32.00 eur Buy |
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ID: MNRCD113
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices
This album was designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart in 2006, but it seemed more appropriate to miss the boat, by two years - hence the 252. It could equally have been Mozart 30, since it is 30 years since In Re Don Giovanni originally saw the light of day in 1977 in the very first Campiello Band concert, in the National Theatre foyer. The Campiello Band was born out of the onstage band used for my arrangements of 18th century gondoliers’ songs for Bill Bryden's production of Goldoni's ‘Il Campiell’, which opened the Olivier Theatre in October 1976 and was thus the father of the current Michael Nyman Band.
Two main bodies of Mozart-derived works are presented on Mozart 252; the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway's ‘Drowning by Numbers’ (1988), and songs and duets from ‘Letters. Riddles and Writs’, a TV film developed in 1991 with the director Jeremy Newson as part of BBC2's Not Mozart series, which marked the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death.
My “Mozart music” is best understood by reading Pwyll ap Sion's impressive analyses in his book The Music of Michael Nyman:Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (Ashgate, 2007). But, briefly the first Nyman/Mozart collaboration, In Re Don Giovanni effectively samples and remixes the first 16 bars the Catalogue Song from ‘Don Giovanni’, and Revising the Don (a Radio 3 commission for the 250th anniversary) is a lyrical and literal revisiting of In Re.
The ‘Drowning by Numbers’ score is derived, in accordance with Greenaway's strict instructions, entirely from the slow movement of the ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ for violin and viola: Trysting Fields simply 'lists', in order of occurrence and each repeated three times, all the “unprepared” dissonances, (appoggiaturas) from the Mozart piece, and at the end introduces the 8-chord E flat/C minor/A flat/B flat/C min/E flat/A flat/B flat 'rock 'n' roll' sequence which ends the exposition of the movement, and which, along with a kind of retrograde version, is heard throughout Sheep 'n' Tides, Wheelbarrow Walk, Fish Beach and Not Knowing the Ropes (so called because on the ‘Drowning’ soundtrack album it is erroneously called Knowing the Ropes!).
Wedding Tango is built out of a chord-by-chord alternation of both the minor key version (from the very end of the movement) and more familiar major key versions of the 8-chord sequence. Knowing the Ropes, like Trysting Fields is a musical list (though with more conscious structural organization) - this time of a wiggly semiquaver motif, which is threaded through the movement and ends with a grand statement of the theme that is accompanied by the 8-chord sequence in the Mozart original.
‘Letters, Riddles and Writs’ deals in general, through texts taken from Mozart’s letters and riddles (the writs have to do with my frequent theft of Mozart's music) with his relationship with his father (O my dear Papa, a remake of O Isis und Osiris from The Magic Flute), with his own mortality (I am an Unusual Thing, which uses the texts from one of the riddles that Mozart wrote and distributed in Vienna during the 1787 Carnival and is based entirely on extract from two of his Haydn quartets) and with his business acumen [Profit and Loss, modeled on In Re Don Giovanni) |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
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ID:
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| eur Temporarily out of stock |
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ID: MNRCD108
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices and Orchestra
The 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. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
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