This debut album, from Germany-based ensemble Conceptus, features music for tenor and ensemble by Butterworth, Warlock, Holst, and Bridge, in addition to Timothy Collins’ Sea Song. Collins has composed and arranged extensively for the ensemble.
Sea Song – Timothy Collins
Originally composed in 2018 and set to the poignant poetry of Katherine Mansfield, this evocative piece delves into themes of aging, sorrow, and loss. Conceptus has brought Collins' musical narrative to life with an accompanying 10-minute music film available on Apple Music and YouTube.
Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad – George Butterworth
Delving into themes of nostalgia and the tragedy of lost youth, this collection, originally composed in 1911, captures the essence of Alfred Edward Housman's timeless poetry. Collins' arrangements embellish the poignant resonance of Butterworth's work, forever etched in the annals of English song.
The Curlew – Peter Warlock
Peter Warlock's masterwork, "The Curlew," meticulously arranged for Conceptus by Timothy Collins. Woven from the poetry of William Butler Yeats, this haunting composition, originally scored for string quartet, cor anglais, and flute, delves into macabre imagery and desolate landscapes.
Hymns from the Rig Veda Opus 24 – Gustav Holst
"Hymns from the Rig Veda" is transfigured by Conceptus with these arrangements from Timothy Collins. Drawing inspiration from ancient Sanskrit texts dating back to 1500 BCE, Holst's choral triumph offers a reverent exploration of Hindu philosophical thought. Experience the profound resonance of Holst's sacred compositions as Conceptus breathes new life into these timeless hymns.
Three Songs by Frank Bridge
From the reflective tones of "Come To Me In My Dreams" to the mythological allure of "Love Went A-Riding," Conceptus navigates the emotional depths of Bridge's compositions with grace and finesse.
Conceptus is an international, multi-faceted, and multi-disciplinary ensemble with membership drawn from Germany, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Australia. Formed in 2021, the ensemble is dedicated to bringing new life to great works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, with a particular emphasis on Late Romantic British vocal music and song cycles.
Conceptus has also commissioned works by award-winning German composer, organist, and conductor Christoph Ritter, whose Requiem is set for a world premiere and recording in 2024. Conceptus Artistic Director, Scott Robert Shaw, released his acclaimed debut “The English Tenor” on Divine Art in 2023.
The present program presents the kind of music that might have been heard at the Feast of the Swan, an annual banquet held by the Confraternity of Our Illustrious Lady in ’s-Hertogenbosch, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century. The combination of “sacred” and “secular” pieces might come as a surprise. However, the border between what we in the twenty-first century might imagine as two different musical realms was actually quite porous in the sixteenth.
One of the Confraternity’s regular banquets, held each year on the first Monday after Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December), was the Feast of the Swan. The Swan was the Confraternity’s heraldic beast, a symbol of grace and purity, attributes of the Blessed Virgin. In the medieval imagination, the swan had musical associations. The anonymous bestiary Physiologus states that the Latin name for the swan (cygnus) comes from the verb “to sing” (canere), because it produces such a beautiful song from its long and flexible neck. It was thus fitting that the Feast of the Swan should include a rich musical component. Some of the singers also played instruments at the banquets.
Murail: Le partages des eaux & Terre d'ombre / Bloch, Eotvos, Orchestre National de France
Ocora Radio-France
CD
$20.99Feb 16, 2024
Since 1991, Radio France has been organising the Presences festival of contemporary music: several hundred new scores have been heard (a third of them world premieres), and the festival is also characterised by a series of portraits of composers from the late 20th century.
This CD, along with another volume devoted to Kaija Saariaho, marks a new stage of the Presences festival, which is extending its activities to include discs.
Tonal versus atonal, consonant versus dissonant, neo-classical versus serial, reactionary versus avant-garde, those who mourn a dreamed-of golden age versus those who claim to embody the meaning of history, Landowski versus Boulez, the list goes on and on. These binary and caricatured oppositions have fuelled a debate that has dominated the 20th century, and which is still sometimes in turmoil today.
In this context, we are struck by the emergence of spectral music, of which Tristan Murail is one of the initiators and most brilliant exponents. Spectral music proved that history could emerge from this sterile debate, that new territories of sound and harmony existed, that consonances were possible without being part of a backward-looking approach ¬–in short, that composers could move forward, continuing to invent, without having to resort to historically exhausted systems, such as those of tonal music or serial music.
The advent of spectral music was a major turning point in the great history of music, and its scope is such that its concepts, vocabulary (spectrum, fusion, partials, transients, inharmonics, etc.), writing principles and approach to sound and time have spread throughout the world and over several generations.
Few composers today have not been influenced in one way or another by spectral music. From George Benjamin to Kaija Saariaho, from Jonathan Harvey to Fausto Romitelli, via Philippe Hurel, Marc-Andre Dalbavie and Magnus Lindberg, spectral music and its concepts are everywhere.
In this recording, the Wang-Zadra Duo, consisting of saxophone and guitar, explores the versatile tonal possibilities of this special and unusual chamber music instrumentation. All the works on the CD were either composed especially for saxophone and guitar or were carefully arranged for the project. The result is a versatile musical sound experience.
In 2023 Brilliant Classics released a 9CD box of the complete keyboard music by William Byrd, marking the tercentenary of the composer's death. The set was welcomed as a monumental achievement, and a worthy sequel to Davitt Moroney's pioneering achievement on Hyperion: 'Those who enjoyed Belder's forthright and imaginatively ornamented Byrd performances in his complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book survey will know what to expect,' wrote Jed Distler in Classics Today. 'He favors less agogic manipulation and more conservative rhythmic continuity compared to Hyperion's Davitt Moroney. However, a palpable sense of controlled freedom informs Belder's subtle placement of cadences and phrase endings and his flexibly articulated ornaments.' Extracted from that critically acclaimed set, the present album presents all the pieces recorded bv Pieter-Jan Belder on the at the Albert Kiespenning organ of the Grote Kerk in Wijk bij Duurstede. The degree to which any of these pieces was written 'for organ' may remain open to question, when they could be performed, with allowance for some imaginative liberties, on any keyboard instrument, and indeed many contemporary pianists have revived Byrd's music for a new generation of listeners. Whether experienced on a Steinway or a spinet, Byrd is the first great composer for the keyboard, even when producing instrumental versions of choral anthems. Belder includes several such pieces here, which find a natural home 'in church' rather than the domestic setting of the harpsichord. Two versions of Salvator Mundi are effectively forerunners of chorale preludes; likewise three versions of Clarifica me. Several voluntaries lie no less idiomatically on the organ despite their highly florid writing, while the assorted preludes or fantasias and their companion fugues also deserve to be regarded alongside notable pre-Bachian models by Frescobaldi and Buxtehude. According to Early Music Review: 'As for performance, Belder's strength is in allowing Byrd to speak through the music rather than inflicting an interpretative regime upon the music... It remains wholeheartedly to welcome and recommend this fine discographical achievement.'
Johann Joachim Quantz was one of the greatest composers of his time, with a large oeuvre to his name. And while his work for flute has been enjoyed by flautists and audiences alike, it doesn't seem to meet any of the criteria codified at the beginning of the 20th century for what constitutes 'great', 'lasting', 'profound' or 'complex' music. Nor does it meet the requirement set in modern times for the worth of a composer's work to be measured in terms of the influence it has on the next generation. This is because, after having achieved a technical knowledge on par with his contemporaries, Quantz opted for the restrictive life of a court composer in the service of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who, though an educated man and amateur musician, had a conservative taste in music. Quantz's music was therefore never 'fashionable', and his compositions failed to leave a mark on posterity. Quantz's oeuvre for the transverse flute includes around 300 concertos, 200 sonatas and dozens of chamber music works, yet until the middle of the 20th century, none of his sonatas and only one of his concertos had been performed in concert. Like the concertos, the sonatas are among the finest examples of the genre, integrating progressive composing techniques and a versatile form and structure. The chronology of the sonatas can only be ascertained to a point. For this first instalment in the recording of Quantz's complete flute sonatas, the selection is linked neither to chronology nor to catalogue number. It features an early composition from Dresden (in B flat major, QV 1:153) and showcases a variety of keys across the seven sonatas chosen. Despite the ad hoc order, by the end of the series all known original sonatas will have been covered. This recording project aims to reconstruct coeval performance conditions as accurately as possible. These efforts include using a replica of an original flute built by Quantz, played at the original pitch (a whole tone lower than standard) and recording in a hall very similar in size, proportions and acoustics to the music hall in Potsdam where so many of Quantz's famous music evenings took place. The microphone set up reproduces without any manipulation what the listener would hear at a performance in such a hall, from a distance of about five metres. In the endeavour we encountered several dilemmas, one being the choice of accompanying forces. It is known that at Frederick's court the use of a keyboard instrument plus a string bass was considered optimal, but we do not know whether this was always realised in practice. In the end it was decided to record most of the sonatas with keyboards only. Another important question, then, was the choice of keyboard: harpsichord or fortepiano. While from the 1740s onwards Frederick had become acquainted with Gottfried Silbermann's fortepianos and indeed purchased a number of them, the harpsichord remained an important accompanying instrument, and there were many of them at the court.
This album pays tribute to the singular world of Valentin Silvestrov, a composer whose music gently reaches out to the past while also resonating with the voices of such contemporaries as Leonid Hrabovsky, Alexander Knaifel, Arvo Part, and Andre Volkonsky. Curated and performed by pianist Alexei Lubimov, the recording unfolds like an intimate uninterrupted journey; a musical dialogue among friends and fellow spirits united by admiration and shared feelings. Silvestrov's Bagatelles form the heart of the album, not miniatures in the traditional sense, but fleeting moments of music. Each piece is open-ended, flowing into the next and forming a delicate chain that gradually reveals a shimmering, larger form. A deeply personal listening experience, this album invites the listener into a space where every sound feels like a whisper across time: thoughtful, luminous, and quietly profound.
Elgar: Violin Concerto; Salut d'Amour; Delius: Suite
Channel Classics
CD
$20.99Feb 21, 2025
'If you want to know who, for me, is the greatest living composer, I'll tell you without hesitation - it's Elgar, whom I place on the same level as my idols Beethoven and Brahms!' So said the great virtuoso Kreisler.' Nicolas Dautricourt continues: 'This Concerto, with it's unbridled lyricism and unique proportions, is an Everest for any violinist.' In this, his first recording for Channel Classics, the French violinist brings together three works by two English composers. In 1888, in the same year Elgar wrote the famous Salut d'amour for his fiancee Caroline Alice Roberts, Frederick Delius composed his Suite for Violin and Orchestra, one of his very first works. The Suite, which only received it's premiere in 1984, is heard here in this insightful arrangement by Frederic Chaslin for violin, piano and string quartet.
Dear to Us, the debut album by violinist sisters Hina & Fiona, captures the rare and radiant bond between two rising stars of the classical music world. Born in New York to French-Vietnamese and Japanese parents, these gifted sisters have already achieved remarkable milestones individually: Hina recently won first prize at the 2023 Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition, while Fiona debuted with the New York Philharmonic at 16, and respectively embark on illustrious solo careers. Together, their playing reveals a profound connection shaped by lifelong collaboration, honest artistic dialogue, and complementary interpretations. Accompanied by the distinguished pianist Rohan de Silva, they present a thoughtfully curated program that balances beloved classics with lesser-known treasures, showcasing works by Halvorsen, Moszkowski, Ysaye, Rozsa, and contemporary composer Anna Clyne. From the fiery virtuosity of Ravel's Tzigane and Sarasate's Navarra to the tender warmth of Ponce's Estrellita, Dear to Us is a compelling journey through technical brilliance and heartfelt expression. The sisters' extraordinary synchronicity, paired with their distinctive voices, creates a musical experience both intimate and exhilarating.
Following on the success of her acclaimed release, Donna Voce, award winning pianist Anna Shelest continues her exploration of works by women composer in Donna Voce Volume 2 - Women of Legend. Featured are Fanny Mendelssohn's monumental feat of imagination and virtuosity Das Jahr (The Year), Melanie "Mel" Bonis' suite of musical portraits Femmes de Legende (Women of Legend), and contemporary Ukrainian composer Olena Ilnytska's evocative Nocturne 1. Hailed by The New York Times as a pianist of a fiery sensibility and warm touch, Anna Shelest is an international award-winning pianist who has thrilled audiences throughout the world.
Jouni Somero's acclaimed survey of Palmgren's complete piano works continues with this eighth volume (of ten) in the series. The album features a diverse range of styles from concert studies to country dances, and all but one of the tracks are world premiere recordings.
With this album, Trio Fibonacci takes us on a journey through the meditative and deeply human universe of Ludovico Einaudi, a master of contemporary minimalism. His works, built around repetitive motifs and subtle harmonic variations, open up a space for contemplation and pure emotion. Many of the pieces presented here have been specially adapted by Trio Fibonacci for duo or trio, bringing new vibrancy and emotional depth to the music while remaining true to the spirit of the composer. With a total runtime of 71 minutes, Timeless Horizons guides listeners through Einaudi's most iconic pieces, including: "I Giorni" - a poignant elegy inspired by Malian folklore "Experience" - a powerful meditation on time and memory "Nuvole Bianche" - a serene and soothing classic "Una Mattina" - made famous by The Intouchables "Petricor" - evoking the scent of the earth after rain But there is much more: 13 pieces in total. The album blends Einaudi's signature repetitive motifs and subtle harmonic shifts with the Trio's expressive and fluid playing style. These arrangements offer a rare intimacy, drawing the listener into a world of silence, longing, and awakening. Trio Fibonacci made it's debut in 1998, with the press reporting that "to hear them is to enter into the world of miracles" (Le Devoir, Montreal).
Nico Muhly and The Tallis Scholars present No Resting Place, a collection of world premiere recordings of works that Muhly wrote for The Tallis Scholars over the last 10 years, by invitation of their director Peter Phillips. Phillips says that Muhly "immediately understood our particular sound. A succession of masterpieces followed, each as powerful as the last." The title work, No Resting Place, is a setting of Jeremiah's Lamentations, interspersed with contemporary interviews with people from the Windrush generation. Recordare, Domine also sets texts from Lamentations, while Marrow is a setting of Psalm 63. Rough Notes, using cold textures, austere counterpoint, and unstable harmonies, draws from Captain Scott's diary on his doomed mission to the Antarctic. Prosperitie was written to celebrate Peter Phillips' 70th birthday, and A Glorious Creature praises the glory of the soul. This album marks the start of a new collaboration between The Tallis Scholars and Linn.
Jouni Somero continues his acclaimed survey of Palmgren’s complete piano music with this seventh volume in the series. With a programme featuring many rarities and premiere recordings, these are works by one of the most prominent composer-pianists of his era.
We have wanted to record Bach's violin concertos with Sophie Gent ever since she joined Ensemble Masques in 2003, says Olivier Fortin, harpsichordist and founder of the ensemble that explores Baroque music with such passion. "Sophie is an exceptional musician with an extremely convincing, honest and unpretentious style". Another pillar of the group is Kathleen Kaji, who is the soloist for Telemann's viola concerto. "Telemann is a fantastic storyteller," she says, "who provides a plot, characters, costumes and props - and leaves you to put it all together". Two sinfonie by Albinoni link the concertos and shine a spotlight on each musician in the ensemble.
Una poesia muta: Art in early Cinquecento Venice is the result of a collaboration between SWR radio, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and The Marian Consort. Specially curated by the Stuttgart museum, Germany's first ever exhibition devoted to Vittore Carpaccio and his contemporaries has inspired The Marian Consort to devise an album to accompany this artistic journey. Being one of the most prominent painters of the Early Renaissance in Venice, Carpaccio is likely to have been acquainted with the music and the composers recorded here, since all have strong links to the city at that time. If some of them are well-known today - Josquin, Jean Mouton, Adrian Willaert - others deserve wider recognition. The Marian Consort and it's director Rory McCleery have assembled a typically fascinating programme, matched with superb singing.
Winner of the 2022 York Early Music International Young Artists Competition, Protean Quartet makes it's Linn debut with an eclectic programme that transcends musical eras. Taking polyphony as a starting point, the versatile young quartet ventures into various epochs, ranging from Purcell's Pavan Z. 752, Chacony Z. 730 and Dance from the opera Dioclesian, to Schubert's String Quartets Nos. 4 and 13 ('Rosamunde') by way of Josquin's famed 'Mille regretz'. Although different in style, these works show an equal care in the treatment of every individual voice, each one meticulously played by Protean Quartet's outstanding musicians. A multifaceted album which will delight existing polyphony enthusiasts and create many more!
Following it's first album for Linn - a recording of motets by the English expatriates Philips and Dering - The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, travels a few centuries forward, turning now to the vibrant and engaging choral music by it's Director of Music, Matthew Martin. The album showcases a collection of works written between 2004 and 2022, which includes some world premiere recordings. From simple mass and motet settings to more complex festival anthems and canticles, the music is broadly and unabashedly composed as an extension to a familiar twentieth-century English idiom, his varied style traversing both the Anglican and Catholic traditions with hints of less familiar European chant and polyphony. This is music choirs will wholeheartedly add to their repertoire.
Shorena Tsintsabadze: For me, there is no more beautiful place in the world than Georgia. Everything in it is beautiful and unique. I owe the development of my personality and character to my roots, my family and my motherland, which I am always proud of. With this project, I would like to present the music of Georgian composers from different eras, from the 19th century to the present, in order to give an impression of how the compositional traditions changed and how Georgian classical music developed. Despite the extraordinary musicality of our people, cultural traditions, folklore and Orthodox singing date back to the 4th century BC. Classical music emerged quite late (the first opera and ballet theatre in Georgia was founded in 1851 and the first opera "?" - "Twilight" was not written until 1923 by Zakhari Paliashvili). The reason for such a late development of classical music is the constant struggle for survival and the endless wars from all sides. Georgia is a state with more than 3,000 years of history and during this time there has not been a single generation, including myself and the younger ones, that has not experienced the horrors of war. Despite all this, we not only survived the fighting, but also preserved our culture, the Georgian language and script. Today, when Georgia has received the status of a candidate country and we have never been so close to Europe, the fate of my country is once again in danger. We are forced to fight for our rights and defend the constitution of our country, which is attacked from time to time by certain forces both inside and outside the country's borders. I really hope and want to believe that we will defend the interests of our country and give it the opportunity to continue on it's path towards European integration in order to become a worthy member of the EU family. I think that this album is relevant in the context of recent events and trends in the world. I believe that more people want to get to know our culture, art and music, which my album will definitely contribute to.
Clarinettist Peter Cigleris is adding another gem to the SOMM catalogue less than a year after the release of his Clarinet Concertos (with symphonic band) [SOMMCD 0705, October 2025], which featured two world-premiere recordings and was roundly praised by Gramophone's Guy Rickards: "Cigleris is possessed of a beautifully mellifluous tone. A hugely varied, enjoyable programme, then, superbly played and recorded; enjoy!" For this release, Cigleris again offers concertante works, and again two first-ever recordings, but here the tutti forces, rather than winds, are the luminous strings of the London Mozart Players led by John Andrews. The trio of composers is British, and along with Gerald Finzi, whose Clarinet Concerto is justly beloved, come two others keenly deserving of the light this recording sheds on their music. The three works, all composed in the late 40s, are bound together by the common thread of the eminent English clarinettist Frederick Thurston (1901-1953). Denis ApIvor (1916-2004), born in Ireland to Welsh parents, was a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford and then at Hereford Cathedral, where he also studied clarinet, piano and organ. As a teenaged medical student he heard the English premiere of Wozzeck under Sir Adrian Boult and his musical inspiration was renewed, leading to private composition lessons with Patrick Hadley and Alan Rawsthorne. While there is a later version of his Concertante for clarinet orchestrated for an ensemble featuring full strings, harp and celesta, Peter Cigleris opens this album with ApIvor's original chamber version for piano and two percussionists (one on timpani). This early work was conceived during the composer's wartime posting to India, and the premiere (with Frederick Thurston) was given in London after two years of peace, a repeat performance going out live on the BBC Third Programme on 27 January 1948. This recording, the work's first, shows an already impressive thread of musical argument and masterly writing from a 30-year old ApIvor, who would reach the peak of his success some eight years later with his score for the Royal Ballet's Lorca-inspired Blood Wedding. Many who know the name Freda Swain (1902-1985) will think of pedagogical piano solos and be surprised to learn of the Portsmouth native's catalogue of 450 or so serious works including large-scale operatic, orchestral and concertante music as well as varied chamber pieces, all regrettably neglected for too long. Presented here in it's premiere recording, Swain's "Lumine naturi" Concertino for Clarinet is an expressive work in language that draws on tonality yet is highly individual and sweepingly melodic. The genre-title's Italian diminutive belies concerto-worthy length (24 mins) and thematic substance. Each movement bears an epigraph by Algernon Blackwood evoking an ultra-vivid natural scene, hence the Latin epithet: "By the Light of Nature". Though Swain never published the work, it is likely that the tutti of string orchestra anchored by a lone horn accompanies a clarinet part intended for Frederick Thurston, a frequent collaborator and the dedicatee of her Rhapsody for clarinet and piano. Thurston did play the premiere of Gerald Finzi's (1901-1956) Concerto for Clarinet and Strings at the Hereford Three Choirs Festival on 9 September 1949, and the masterpiece has deservedly become the composer's most frequently heard concert work.
