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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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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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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: MNRCD114
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Vocal Collection
Subcollection: Voices and Orchestra
Recorded, 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. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
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ID: MNRCD115
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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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 |
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ID: MNRCD116
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: World Music
Subcollection: Vocal and Piano
For 'The Glare', McAlmont selected various Nyman compositions and turned to world news for inspiration. These new songs, written in the first person, draw on a variety of subjects from 21st century piracy (Going to America), lothario world leaders (In Rai Don Giovanni) drug mules (In Laos) and banking errors (Take the money and Run). David McAlmont's exquisite voice has enthralled soul and jazz fans both as a solo artist and as one half of the hit-making duo McAlmont and Butler ''One day he will open his mouth and a cathedral will fall out'' Melody Maker. Michael Nyman is one of the UK's most prestigious and innovative composers whose work reached its widest audience through his film scores for The Piano, Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and The Draughtsman's Contract (available on MN Records)
Michael Nyman and David McAlmont first met at the Freud Museum in London in the summer of 2000. They had both been invited to the launch of Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts by the author Victoria De Rijke. David had been a student of Victoria’s at Middlesex Polytechnic and the score of Michael's Nose-List Song (1985) was included in the book.
Michael and David talked and discovered that they were signed to the same record label, Virgin, at the time. Years before, David had become 'utterly entranced' by Nyman's soundtrack to Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and soon after he acquired the box set of Nyman's soundtracks became a huge fan.
In the years following the Nose/ Freud meeting it was often mentioned on the grapevine that Michael might be interested in working with David but this was all hearsay until 2007 when David, in a state of creative frustration, decided to join Facebook. Nyman contacted him within a week. They recollected their first encounter and quickly began plotting a collaboration.
Michael mentioned that he was totally unable to write his own song texts and David realised that he had become bored with 'the navel-gazing futility of writing love songs about his own feelings' and at 40 wanted to create something more worthwhile with his lyric writing
At this point Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa emerged as a subject of interest to both musicians as David indicated that he had become fascinated with the life of the 19th century French painter - especially his determination to create documentary canvases based on contemporary life: battle-field injury, asylum inmates and shipwreck memoirs.
But this project was soon replaced by the current project where David wrote new songs based on contemporary news stories over pre-existing Nyman compositions. McAlmont's subject matter explores pertinent subjects as varied as 21st century piracy (Going to America), trafficked prostitution in Europe (City of Turin), sexually-charged world leaders (In Rai Don Giovanni), assisted suicide (Friendly Fire), reality television (The Glare), African orphan migration (Fever Sticks and Bones), banking errors (Take the Money and Run)and drug mules (In Laos).
David felt strongly that the songs were most effective if written from the first person point of view of the individual characters discovered in the researched reports to create an emotional engagement with the subjects that is lost by the time their stories emerge in the glare of the 24 hour news media. This process of course caused initial concern for McAlmont because he was taking already brilliant compositions, adding to and adjusting them. But fortunately, Michael Nyman was delighted with the result. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
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ID: MNRCD118
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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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 |
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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: MNRCD123
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Ensemble
The first Michael Nyman Band Album originally released in 1981
Includes first recording of In Re Don Giovanni
Beautifully packaged in a 6 panel digipack and including two limited edition posters of the the original UK and Japanese LP artwork.
Critically acclaimed as Nyman’s groundbreaking record that combined minimalist, experimentalist music and jazz improvisation for the first time, this album has only ever been available on the rarest of long-since deleted vinyl.
Most of the music on Michael Nyman was material from the early films by Peter Greenaway such as "Bird Anthem" (Act Of God) and "Bird List Song" (The Falls). The album also includes his first concert work for the band, "In Re Don Giovanni" which was released as a single on Les Disques du Crepuscule (home of Cabaret Voltaire, Durutti Column and Josef K amongst others) under the title Mozart. The most groundbreaking track on Michael Nyman, however, is "Waltz in F", a piece Nyman wrote for art students whilst teaching at Trent Polytechnic in 1977, Nyman subsequently commandeering two modern jazz improvisers, Evan Parker and Peter Brotzman, to "destroy" this piece. Ultimately, Parker and Brotzman ended up playing over and around ten separate tracks whilst Nyman and Cunningham mixed in their Waltz.
With the Falling Songbirds (Bird Anthem and M-Work)
Evan Parker, soprano saxophone and Peter Brötzmann, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone (Waltz)
Lucy Skeaping, voice (Bird List Song)
Performed by the Michael Nyman Band
Rory Allam clarinet and bass clarinet
Alexander Balanescu violin
Anne Barnard french horn
Ben Grove guitar and bass guitar
John Harle soprano saxophone
Nick Hayley rebec and violin
Ian Mitchell clarinets and bass clarinet
Michael Nyman keyboards
Elisabeth Perry violin and viola
Steve Saunders bass trombone, tuba and euphonium
Roderick Skeaping rebec and violins
Keith Thompson flutes, piccolo, recorders and saxophones
Doug Wootton banjo and bass guitar |
| 18.00 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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