The rich variety of colors and rhythms in South American culture and music are an essential feature of this program for concert flute and piano, which focuses largely on music by composers from the Ecuadorian Andes. Opening with Durán’s popular and crowd-pleasing Leyenda incásica, the theme of Ecuadorian dances continues in Jacinto Freire’s Suite, which also celebrates the flight of the condor. Virtuosity, evocations of landscape and expressive traditional songs can all be found here, concluding with Mexican composer Samuel Zyman’s internationally acclaimed Flute Sonata No. 1, which ranges from lyrical introspection to intensely contrapuntal dialogue.

These composers were all affected by the carnage of World War I, and their elegiac music expresses regret and lost innocence, love won and lost, sacrifice and death. George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, conceived as an epilogue to his Housman song cycles, encapsulates the poet’s sense of life’s transience. Ivor Gurney was both shot and gassed in 1917, and The Trumpet pleads with mankind to set aside the folly of war. Heard here in a new completion, Gerald Finzi’s Requiem da Camera mourns the death of his mentor Ernest Farrar and those of other fallen artists, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy recalls lost friends with an intense and magical nostalgia.

From its origins as one of the oldest musical instruments known to man to the sophisticated mechanics and elegant design today, the flute has been highly significant for every culture and historical period. Prized for the vocal character in its sound, composers such as Bach and Mozart used it for some of their most beautiful, aria-like melodies. Spectacular virtuosity later became part of the flute’s nature as can be heard in Doppler’s Rigoletto-fantaisie, while impressionist composers such as Debussy saw its timeless qualities as a window into nature or the sensual mysteries of a distant and mythological past.

The French composer Ange Flégier (1846-1927) enjoyed considerable frame in his own time but has now been completely lost from view. The extraordinary reception of his song Le Cor points to the predominant place held by the Melodie in his catalogue of more than 350 works. Flégier's songs, composed for his colleagues at the Opera de Paris, are large-scale and orchestrally conceived, sitting stylistically close to Faure in their unassertive dignity and to Duparc in their sense of scale. Many of them receive their first recordings or first modern recordings here.

China’s rich and diverse musical heritage has been recorded and documented in a stunning, original collection. With nineteen albums in the pipeline, this is a highly specialized series with the appeal of perhaps being the closest thing to the ‘complete works’ of traditional Chinese music. Each album features a different region of the vast territory; an historical snapshot of China’s heritage. Due to the cultural privacy China mandates, these are in fact rare, musical gems. This series explores China’s rich and diverse musical heritage. The songs featured in these recordings are folk songs from the Dai and Hani peoples of Yunnan province. As with Chinese traditional visual arts, the song titles explain their mood and origin.

China's rich and diverse musical heritage has been recorded and documented in a stunning, original collection. With nineteen albums in the pipeline, this is a highly specialized series with the appeal of perhaps being the closest thing to the 'complete works' of traditional Chinese music. Each album features a different region of the vast territory; an historical snapshot of China's heritage. Due to the cultural privacy China mandates, these are in fact rare, musical gems. This series explores China's rich and diverse musical heritage. The songs featured in these recordings are folk songs from the Bai, Nu and Derung peoples of Yunnan province. As with Chinese traditional visual arts, the song titles explain their mood and origin.

China’s rich and diverse musical heritage has been recorded and documented in a stunning, original collection. With twenty albums in the pipeline, this is a highly specialized series with the appeal of perhaps being the closest thing to the ‘complete works’ of traditional Chinese music. Each album features a different region of the vast territory; an historical snapshot of China’s heritage. Due to the cultural privacy China mandates, these are in fact rare, musical gems. Folk songs from the Tujia and Sui peoples of Hubei and Guizhou Province. This album features ‘inserting chant’ songs and south songs of Changyang by the Tujia peoples, and various ancient songs of the Sui. All played on traditional instruments such as mouth organs, bronze drums, gongs and suona, as well as the popular dongdong kui (bamboo clarinet), that dates back thousands of years. This is volume seventeen of a twenty album series, exploring China’s rich and diverse musical heritage.

This series explores China’s rich and diverse musical heritage. The songs featured in this recording are folk songs of four of the minority ethnic groups of Guangxi province – Zhuang, Bouyei, Mulao, Maonan. As with Chinese traditional visual arts, the song titles explain their mood and origin. It is noteworthy that the music of the Dong-Tai language speakers presents a common feature of incorporating polyphonic or heterophonic songs. Although this feature is present in the music of more than 20 minorities in China, it is rare that the speakers of a whole language family all incorporate multi-voice songs in their music. The performance forms of these multi-voice songs include nearly all the types found in folk music. The number of harmonic intervals is limited because the songs usually employ only one octave. Aside from pentatonic scales, the folk music of the Dong-Tai language speakers also incorporates the scales of three or four notes.

This album features folk songs from the Tajik and Russian ethnic minority groups living in the western and northwestern areas of Xinjiang, China. These folk songs have an earthy beauty that is theirs alone. Many of the Tajik songs featured here are accompanied by the Rewap – an ancient stringed instrument made from mulberry trunks. The sound is similar to that of an acoustic guitar, but the tone is brighter and more elastic. Many of the Russian songs feature the Bayan (a type of accordion) and the Balalaika.

This album features songs from the Qiang and the Yi tribes, who both mainly live in the mountainous regions of southwestern China, specifically in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Many of the Yi folk songs make reference to the mountains in this region, especially in love songs and group dance songs, as heard in tracks 19 and 23. The music of both of these two minority groups includes lively short dance songs in duple metre and long melodious labor or love songs that employ a free rhythm. At first, you may not be able to distinguish between the music of these two minority groups; in fact, the two tribes are closely related and the Yi are thought to be descendants of ancient Qiang tribes. The languages of the Qiang and Yi both belong to the Sino-Tibetan language phylum. Yet the music of each tribe has its own distinct characteristics. Although both of them often prefer high pitches, the songs of the Yi tribe use a broader vocal range. The dance songs of the Qiang have lively rhythms and are structured with repetitions of a few musical phrases. The dance songs of the Yi incorporate more melodic and rhythmic variations and long, resounding cries. The cries also appear in other types of Yi songs, for example, the middle of track 23, and the beginning and end of track 24. It is noteworthy that the songs featured here have distinct local characteristics, which may differentiate them from the songs of the Qiang and Yi minority groups living in other parts of China. The Qiang songs in this album come from Xin Beichuan County, the only Qiang autonomous county in China.

China’s rich and diverse musical heritage has been recorded and documented in a stunning, original collection. With fifteen albums in the pipeline, this is a highly specialized series with the appeal of perhaps being the closest thing to the ‘complete works’ of traditional Chinese music. Each album features a different region of the vast territory; an historical snapshot of China’s heritage. Due to the cultural privacy China mandates, these are in fact rare, musical gems. The Kazakhs pass on their pastoral lifestyle from generation to generation, their music is delicate and their dance mellow and enchanting. There is a saying that ‘music and horses are the two wings of the Kazakhs’. Kyrgyz music however draws influence from Persian-Arabia, with brighter tones and sharper playing. For the audience who are not familiar with the music from Xinjiang, it is also easy to distinguish the songs between the two minorities in this album by their accompanying instruments. The tunes of Kazakh and Kyrgyz are accompanied by dombra and komuz respectively. As representative instruments for the minorities under discussion, the two are very popular among their peoples.

China’s rich and diverse musical heritage has been recorded and documented in a stunning, original collection. With fifteen albums in the pipeline, this is a highly specialized series with the appeal of perhaps being the closest thing to the ‘complete works’ of traditional Chinese music. Each album features a different region of the vast territory; an historical snapshot of China’s heritage. Due to the cultural privacy China mandates, these are in fact rare, musical gems. The Uzbek and Tatar peoples both live in Xinjiang province and speak Turkic languages. The population of Chinese Uzbeks is around ten thousand, which is approximately three times that of the Tatars. The majority of these two peoples live in the northern and western regions of Xinjiang province. The Uzbek music displays its artistic charm with complex melodic variations and gorgeous ornaments. Their instrumental music mainly includes interludes of Shashmaqam and dutars accompany all the Uzbek musical pieces. The music of the Tatars is the gemstone in Xinjiang’s musical crown, with many of their songs being popular among different ethnic groups. In this album, the accordion accompanies all the Tatar songs. The kubyz, the brass jew’s harp, is another popular instrument among them and they also perform on an instrument similar to a long end-blown flute, the qurai.