|
|
|
ID: MNRCD109
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Subcollection: Piano
The album Acts of Beauty / Exit no Exit couples two world premiere recordings.
Acts of Beauty is a song cycle based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Scwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial's Epigrams on another kind of sexual measurement: the weighing of penis. It presents an entirely different Nyman approach to vocal writing than is found in Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi.
Exit no Exit began life as Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, a 'homage' to the England football team as part of an extended documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 3 to celebrate the end of the World Cup finals in Japan / Korea in 2002. Nyman decided to take extracts from John Motson's commentary to the England v Argentina match and sample, loop and 'instrumentalise' them in the manner of Steve Reich's Different Trains: translating the loops repeating rhythmic and melodic patterns played without variation.
Rewritten for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company in 2006, John Motson's voice is now replaced with a bass clarinet which not only imitates the commentator's highly idiosyncratic speech patterns, but also takes off from these with a concertante part of some virtuosity. A completely new, multi-section closing 10 minutes sequence was written specially for Exit no Exit, premiered on 7 February 2006 at Brighton's Gardner Arts Centre.
Cristina Zavalloni soprano
Sentieri Selvaggi
Carlo Boccadoro conductor
EXIT no EXIT - Premiere recording
Andrew Sparling bass clarinet
Nyman Quartet
Music composed by Michael Nyman |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: MNRCD113
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
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 |
|
ID: MNRCD115
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Subcollection: Piano
1- 6 Michael Nyman Band and Orchestra
6 - 9 Kathryn Stott, solo piano / Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Michael Nyman
MGV (Musique à Grand Vitesse)
was commissioned by the Lille Festival, France. It was first performed on 26th September 1993 for the inauguration of the TGV North-European line. The rhythm, melody, harmony, motives and texture are constantly changing and is therefore one of the most exciting and inspiring pieces Michael Nyman has written.
Leading international choreographer Christopher Wheeldon was gripped by MGV’s energy, dynamism and emotion. He was so inspired that he made new choreography to the music of MGV for The Royal Ballet in 2006. Due to popular demand, the resultant work, DGV (Dance a Grande Vitesse), will be revived by The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, London, on the following dates: 31st January, 6th, 9th, 20th and 21st February 2009.
The Piano Concerto
is based entirely on material selected from the soundtrack for Jane Campion’s film The Piano. It is a single movement work in four phases. 3 of them feature 18th and 19th century popular Scottish song tunes, which formed the basis of Ada’s music in the film. It is a wonderfully powerful and evocative score and there are planned performances of the Piano Concerto in the UK in 2009. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: MNRCD118
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Subcollection: Film Music
Michael Nyman has now completed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s. To ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ he has added ‘The Eleventh Year’ and ‘A Sixth Part of the World’ and as a unique experiment for MN Records he has created a new Michael Nyman Band work - by making a montage of material from both of the soundtracks into a single, continuous piece which runs for 77 minutes.
I wrote the score for Man with a Movie Camera in 2002 and now, with A Sixth Part of the World and The Eleventh Year, I am in the privileged position of having written soundtracks for the three major films that Dziga Vertov made at the end of the 1920s and on which his reputation is based in the west. In the same way as I avoided reading Vertov’s background notes to the music he designated for Man with a Movie Camera when I wrote my score, so with A Sixth Part and The Eleventh Year research was deliberately limited and most of my interest seemed to focus on the similarities and differences between those two films and Man with a Movie Camera (and had me musing on an interesting trio of self-borrowers -Handel, Laurence Sterne and Vertov, with whom I have a strong affinity!) My reaction was to Vertov’s images and the process of their organisation - to the two interrelated, but dissimilar worlds that he presented and promoted in these two films.
Subsequent research, with the help of Barbara Wurm and other archivists from the Austrian Film Institute (which has released a DVD of the two films with the new soundtracks), has allowed me to appreciate differently the content and the context (both cinematic and political) of these two films. And my discovery of the book ? Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, edited by Yuri Tsivian (2004) has thrown up some wonderful supplementary texts like the critic Izmail Urazov's appraisal of A Sixth Part of the World. He writes very powerfully about the musicality of Vertov’s film, which instinctively had influenced my score:
‘Vertov edits sequences like a composer’
That is the cause of the emotion which the film arouses. You cannot relate it; there is no plot, no intensification of the action, but there is an intensification of emotion. Like in music. That is where the emotion comes from. Vertov leads the 'melody', returning to it, playing with dissonances, using the exoticism of the polar snows and the burning hot sands, almost like something beyond sense, almost like a composer using the texture of the sounds.
And within Vertov’s sequences there is a rhythm, with which he infects the viewer: 'a Negress with a child on her back, hammering into your consciousness the tempo and rhythm of the montage of dancing legs, linked to the rhythm of a dance, of the movement of machines...' (Tsivian, p 187)
VERTOV SOUNDS represents a very different approach to the way of processing a soundtrack album: since the music for both films is sectional but continuous and, like Vertov, constantly refers back on itself, there are no ?named tracks' that can be separated out in the way that, say, ?Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' from The Draughtsman's Contract has become an independent concert work. So the music for the films is presented as a non-stop montage of alternating sequences (sometimes quite complex in themselves) from each film. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: MNRCD121_122
CDs: 2
Type: CD
|
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 |
|
ID: MNRCD201
CDs: 3
Type: CD
|
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 |
|
|
