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World music CD DVD shop and Classic distribution
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ID: MNRCD203
CDs: 4
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Opera
This box set contains CDs that are also available separately from MN Records.
Man and Boy: Dada - an opera in two acts
Love Counts - an opera in two acts
MNRCD101-2 Man and Boy: Dada - an opera in two acts
MNRCD111-2 Love Counts - an opera in two acts
MAN AND BOY: DADA
An Opera in two acts composed by Michael Nyman
Libretto: Michael Hastings
The generously packaged, slip cased 2-CD set contains a full colour 44-page booklet with complete libretto.
Man and Boy: Dada is the first in a triptych of chamber operas written by Nyman with librettist Michael Hastings. It tells the story of the unlikely friendships between the ageing Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who is exiled in war-torn London; a 12-year-old boy called Michael, who shares the artist's obsession with collecting London Transport bus tickets; and Michael's mother, widowed by the war. The recording reunites the cast from the UK premiere performance at the Almeida Theatre in July 2004 - tenor John Graham Hall as Schwitters, William Sheldon as the boy, and soprano Vivian Tierney as the boy's mother. Paul McGrath conducts the Michael Nyman Band.
LOVE COUNTS
An Opera in two acts composed by Michael Nyman
Libretto: Michael Hastings
The generously packaged, slip cased 2-CD set contains a full colour 44-page booklet with complete libretto.
Love Counts is a love story between the unlikeliest of couples: Avril, a lecturer in mathematics at a major college who has divorced a man who physically abused her, and Patsy, a middle-weight fighter at the end of his career who cannot read or recognise numbers. |
| 41.00 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: MNRCD111_112
CDs: 2
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Opera
The tenth release on MN Records, and the second opera recording for the label, Love Counts is a love story between the unlikeliest of couples: Avril, a lecturer in mathematics at a major college who has divorced a man who physically abused her, and Patsy, a middle-weight fighter at the end of his career who cannot read or recognise numbers.
Michael Nyman uses Riemenschneider's collection of 371 Bach chorale harmonisations to help Patsy find his voice - they are harmonically fragmented, sped up, slowed down, overlaid with themselves. Just as Dr P, the Alzheimer's suffering protagonist of Nyman's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, has 'his' Schumann, so, in Love Counts, Patsy, a parallel sufferer, has 'his' Bach.
Award-winning writer Michael Hastings had previously worked with Nyman on the libretto for the opera Man and Boy: Dada, also available on MN Records.
Love Counts was commissioned by the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlesruhe, Germany and first performed there on 12th March 2005, directed by Robert Tannenbaum. This is a recording of the Almeida Theatre (London) production of Love Counts where it was performed in July 2006 by the Michael Nyman Band, bass baritone Andrew Slater and soprano Helen Williams, designed by Peter McKintosh and directed by Lindsay Posner. |
| 32.00 eur Buy |
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