Countertenor John Holiday presents Over My Head, a striking and deeply personal debut that reflects both the breadth of his artistry and the clarity of his artistic voice. Praised as one of the finest countertenors of his generation, Holiday brings together a thoughtfully curated programme spanning spirituals, contemporary works, and art song. From intimate moments at the piano to collaborations with pianist Kevin Miller, the album includes works by Hall Johnson, Robert L. Morris, H. Leslie Adams, world premieres by Theo Morrison and Carlos Simon, and arrangements by Holiday himself, highlighting repertoire shaped by curiosity, individuality, and expressive depth. Rooted in themes of resilience, faith, and love, Over My Head offers a heartfelt musical journey that speaks with both intimacy and conviction. Each work has been selected for it's emotional resonance and it's ability to connect across time and experience, forming a narrative that feels both personal and universal.
Original motion picture soundtrack from A Letter From Helga All music is composed by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir except "I'm Not The Loving Kind" is composed by John Cale Arranged by Kristín Anna and Davíð Þór Jónsson Accordion, pianos, marxophone, synthesiser and vocals performed by Kristín Anna Cornett performed by Áki Ásgeirsson Cello arrangement and performance on tracks 1, 2, 7 and 15 by Gyða Valtýsdóttir Tuba, trombone, alto horn and euphonium on tracks 1, 10, 12 performed by Ingi Garðar Erlendsson Hammond organ on "I'm Not The Loving Kind" performed by Davíð Þór Jónsson Additional vocals on "I'm Not The Loving Kind" performed by Davíð Þór, Kristín Anna and Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir Recording engineering by Úlfur Hansson, Kristín Anna, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Gabríel Ólafsson and Reykjavík Orkestra Mixed and produced by Kristín Anna Mastered by Styrmir Hauksson
The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Uitti and Fanous spent 10 minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. Eastern, improvised vs. #through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says:"Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphases. In my case, these were non-western music, as well as chromaticism in both it's contemporary classical and free jazz expressions, all funneled through the techniques of classical and flamenco guitar. In Frances' case, it was a lifelong devotion to and mastery of parallel directions: improvisation, as well as contemporary composition at the highest level. Both were made infinitely more powerful by the deployment of ingenious extended techniques, including her revolutionary two-bow methods. Our backgrounds contained enough shared common experience to allow for a tentacular interdigitation of our improvisational languages, which was effortless and natural." The session began with bouzouki-cello duets, in which drones played a central role, calling up a middle-eastern sound-world. Fanous writes: "As the pieces evolved, they gradually became unmoored and reverted to who they really were, but together. This process of feeling one's way through the darkness was like navigating towards some unknown endpoint, the way the ancients used the astrolabe to navigate using the positions of the stars - Negoum in Arabic."
Pianobasso's low-key and stripped-down arrangements of classical pieces has brought them international success with many listeners all over the world. This time they have chosen to go a little outside their established concept and instead record Christmas music consisting of Christmas carols and art music with a Christmas theme. The album is called Tranquillo - Sacred Christmas and will be released on November 22. Pianobasso is a duo that consists of pianist and arranger Thomas Gustavsson and double bassist Andreas Gustafson. On their previous albums, they perform well-known classical choral and orchestral works with their own arrangements and a personal expression, which means that they do not always follow the usual norms for this genre.
The new Philharmonix VOL 4 album "Baltic" is dedicated in a special way to the music of the Baltic States. Sebastian Gurtler, composer of the entire Philharmonix repertoire alongside Stephan Koncz, was inspired by melodies, folk songs, and children's tune
The Opus Two violin-piano duo presents new arrangements of musical highlights from Stephen Sondheim's brilliant Broadway shows. Arranger Eric Stern reminisces about his work with Sondheim: "I was one of the many lucky ones who got to work with Sondheim and experience close hand his genius, collaborative nature, and inherent kindness." Stern's work with Sondheim included the 1984 revival of Pacific Overtures, conducting Sunday in the Park with George in the second year of it's original run, co-music directing the first production of Into the Woods, conducting productions of Follies, and conducting Merrily We Roll Along at the Kennedy Center. Mr. Stern writes that "My last conversation with him was about the Little Night Music suite which you'll find on this album. We are all extremely grateful for his enthusiastic endorsement of the arrangement and performance, muted only by our sorrow that the rest were written after his passing."
The Symphonic Touch of Benny Andersson / Svarfvar, Berlund, LPO
Ladybird Production
CD
$18.99May 05, 2023
Benny Andersson started out as a keyboard player and composer in a Swedish rock band in the sixties. After meeting Bjorn Ulvaeus in 1966, his writing developed through their creative companionship and a couple of years later, ABBA was born. With Benny’s music, Bjorn’s lyrics and the girls’ voices, the success was unprecedented. Benny has since then explored and developed his composing skills through musicals, music for film and theater, folk music etc. Bjorn Ulvaeus has been a very important and invaluable partner through the years, but this album is focused on the very music composed by Benny. Despite lack of musical education and not reading music he writes like a classical composer. This has been Anders Berglund’s inspiration for these new arrangements and with the beautiful playing of virtuoso Christian Svarfvar and the great London Philharmonic Orchestra, this album wants to shed new light over Benny Andersson’s music.
Danish cellist and composer, Josefine Opsahl, joins the Neue Meister roster with her debut album, "CYTROPIA". This album showcases Opsahl's innovative fusion of acoustic and electronic soundscapes, navigating the delicate balance between tradition and renewal, virtuosity and intuition. "CYTROPIA" features Opsahl's brand new electroacoustic compositions alongside her unique reimaginations of material from J.S. Bach's majestic Six Suites for unaccompanied cello, offering a fresh and compelling listening experience.
D O W L N D R A K E merges the worlds of soprano Annelies Van Gramberen and singer-songwriter Sim Van Thienen to create a bold sonic universe. Together, they weave the melancholic songs of the English troubadours John Dowland (1563-1626) and Nick Drake (1948-1974) into a layered tapestry of loops, electronics, and guitars, with Annelies' voice as a shining guide through the shadowy paths of the human soul.
Chameleon - Chamber Music from Bloch to Rock / Signum Saxophone Quartet
Berlin Classics
CD
$21.99Apr 12, 2024
• SIGNUM saxophone quartet will release their first album on Berlin Classics • Feat. Alexej Gerassimez (Percussion) and Eckart Runge (Cello) • The quartet has made a name for themselves in various exciting projects (e.g. working with Alexej Gerassimez for his solo album on Berlin Classics) • With Chameleon they show how colorful the sound of the saxophone is with a diverse selection of music from classical (Glazunov, Bloch, Haydn, and more) as well as pop and rock
Close your eyes and surrender to Hypnos, god of sleep. Zefiro Torna pours a hallucinatory elixir of dreams, solitude, secret fantasies, and soothing whispers. Baroque masters like Kapsberger, Dowland, Moulinie´, and Huygens drew inspiration from night and sleep. The enchanting voice of Lore Binon pierces the darkness, carried by Jurgen de bruyn's theorbo and lute. Lean back and drift away into... Somnia.
R-O-R refers to the chemical compound ether, when two elements come together to create entirely different matter. This ethereal compound also gives it's name to the collaboration between Icelandic musicians Gyða Valtýsdottir and Úlfur Hansson, whose new album AUGA brings together the two musicians in a unique new work of cosmic alchemy. On AUGA the two musicians combine like electrons to create an expansive sound-world that feels like entering the landscape of a dream. The elements here are both earthly and alchemical: evocations of rain, geology, wind entangle with the oneiric and celestial. Úlfur's self-made synthesiser soars and segues with sparkling harmonic threads of Gyða's cello, creating a tapestry in which matter entwines with a luminous sense of the spectral. AUGA is a new direction borne from a long history of collaboration between the two. Both have worked on each other's previous solo projects, with Gyða playing cello on Úlfur´s album Arborescens, and Úlfur working on arrangements and production for Gyða's albums Evolution and Ox. A deeper collaboration began, however, when Gyða and Úlfur created the Icelandic Music Award nominated track 'Morphogenesis' for Gyða's album Epicycle II. Partly created out of improvisation and partly composed in writing, and appropriately named 'Morphogenesis' for the biological process that causes an organism to develop it's shape, this explorative collaborative process set the path for the deeply symbiotic creation of AUGA. The resulting album is an elemental dreamscape of long-form music informed by the astral and eternal. The music made between the two has the quality of a kind of primordial plasma, with contours of melodies arising from thin air and swiftly shapeshifting into whorls of formlessness. On 'Petrichor', a track named for the scent of falling rain, a dew-drop string melody merges with the geological bedrock drones of Úlfur's synthesizer. Elsewhere, the chemical evocations of tracks like 'Esters' and 'Onium Ion' take us on a spectral atomic journey through hydrogen and halogen, and the deep tremors of 'Vacuum' transport us through a sense of expansive geological deep-time. Speaking about the collaboration, Gyða says; ROR is a realm which I love entering. When me and Úlfur improvised for the first time together many years ago, we immediately went to this place, which was so clear, strong and familiar; like it had always been there, right behind the veil, and we were simply finding it again. I could never go there by myself, but when our tones met, we went there instantly. I love this realm, it is timeless, colourful and textural - a poetry of pure vibration. The music of R-O-R is a hologram made from two different beams of expression, forming a whole where sometimes neither instrument can be differentiated from the other. Carbon, silicon, horse hair and wood melt into one projection; a wormhole where both image and form, emptiness and void emerge in a dance of opposites. Gestures echoing into one another. AUGA is an ever evolving nebula of sound.
What happens when a soundtrack is taken from a film and given a life on its own? When two Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson finished scoring Quake, a psychological family drama, they were not ready to stop just there. What followed was a voyage of musical discoveries as they allowed for new ideas to enter the creative space. Just as a plant spread itself over the whole garden, cues from the movie scenes become independent, mature songs. The soundscape dwells on the border of acoustic and electronic and drifts from song-based to textural, from atmospheric to cinematic with lustrous cello in the foreground.
The term Popsongs is a blend of the two English words popular (meaning both "popular" and "celebrated") and songs, emphasizing the intention to combine accessibility with the elegance of refined compositional forms. This collection of sixteen instrumental pieces, composed by Marcello Panni between 2013 and 2015 during his tenure as conductor of the "Tito Schipa" Symphony Orchestra in Lecce for the group of soloists Ensemble del Sud, represents a passionate and playful homage to the most celebrated melodies of Italian musical tradition, both operatic and folk. This project stands out not only for the exceptional artistic quality of it's orchestration but also for it's ability to pay tribute to and draw inspiration from the illustrious precedents of 20th-century mu- sical history. An essential reference is Luciano Berio's (1925-2003) Folk Songs, composed in 1964, with whom Panni was a close friend and collaborator for many years. This cycle of pieces, created for the singer Cathy Berberian (1925-1983), Berio's muse and spouse, was accompanied by a group of seven instruments, the "Juilliard En- semble" from New York, with which Panni himself collaborated in the 1970s. Another point of reference for the Popsongs is Igor Stravinsky's (1882-1971) famous Histoire du Soldat. This composition, also written for a septet (violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, and percussion, the same ensemble used by Panni), represents an extraordinary example of chamber music that combines storytelling, theatricality, and a remark- able fusion of musical styles.
Marina Baranova creates several tracks following the steps of the Cosmic Calendar, starting with the Big Bang - Ending with the final creation of the earth Baranova presents her own compositions on the piano, additional tracks with strings, electronic elements and more
On the occasion of the 2025 Kreisler anniversary year, the exceptional violinist Benjamin Schmid posed the question: What happens for the violin in Vienna roughly 100 years after Fritz Kreisler? The result is this phenomenal recording with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna under Lorenz Aichner, featuring orchestrated works by Kreisler and the world premiere recording of the Concerto for Beni for Solo Violin and String Orchestra (2023) by Georg Breinschmid, born in Vienna in 1973. To quote the dedicatee, it is a "magnificent violin concerto that, from my perspective, shares much with the musical understanding of Fritz Kreisler: music with unadulterated joy of playing, which devotes itself immediately and as artfully as possible to the parameters of melody, harmonic experience, and dance-like (or groovy) rhythm. There is always a close relationship to instrumental virtuosity and sonority - something very strongly pronounced in both composers." The album includes Fritz Kreisler's Preludium and Allegro "in the Style of Pugnani" and the Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta in arrangements for (string) orchestra. Kreisler's Concerto in One Movement, based on the first movement of Paganini's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 6, is presented here in an arrangement for wind orchestra, recorded with the Salzburg Wind Philharmonic under Hansjörg Angerer.
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary classical music, composer Henning Fuchs emerges as a trailblazer with his latest release, Cocoon. This musical odyssey composed by Henning Fuchs, beckons listeners to transcend the conventional and embark on a reflective journey through a unique blend of neo-classical and world music. Fuchs, once the assistant to the renowned Max Richter, brings his cinematic expertise to the forefront, crafting compositions that invite introspection and meditation. The core of this auditory adventure lies in Fuchs' ability to marry neo-classical elements with world music nuances. Drawing inspiration from his contemporary Irish abode, the album introduces rare traditional instruments, resonating with the sounds of a place that has become a muse for the composer. The result is a rich tapestry of tones and textures that transport the listener to an otherworldly realm where time seems to stand still. Collaborating with a talented ensemble of musicians, Fuchs enlists the skills of Katie O'Connor (Violin), Aoife NíDhornáir on (Violin/Viola), Paula Hughes on (Cello), Kieran Moynhihan (Flute), Aisling Ennis (Harp), and Martin Schärer on percussion. Each instrument becomes a storyteller, contributing to the album's narrative and enhancing its emotive depth.
Adding another layer to this sonic journey are the guest vocals of Uzo Nwanaga and Lisa Lambe. Their voices intertwine seamlessly with the instrumental arrangements, creating moments of sublime beauty and emotional resonance. Cocoon becomes a collaborative effort, an immersive experience that transcends the boundaries of conventional genres. As you delve into the tracks, there's an undeniable sense of being cocooned in the intricate melodies and thoughtful compositions. Fuchs' creation becomes a sanctuary, encouraging contemplation and reflection. It's an invitation to explore the uncharted territories where classical and world music intersect, challenging preconceived notions and offering a haven for those seeking a deeper connection with the music. The album is an auditory tapestry that encourages listeners to let go of expectations, immerse themselves in the soundscape, and emerge on the other side with a renewed perspective on the boundless possibilities of musical expression.
26 Little Deaths - the new album from composer, singer and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and the contemporary ensemble Present Music - celebrates the macabre wit of iconic writer and illustrator Edward Gorey (1925-2000), whose 100th birthday fell on February 22, 2025. The album is an hour-long set of 26 miniatures for singing violinist and chamber orchestra, inspired by Gorey's macabre children's book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Following in the footsteps of Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, who moved seamlessly between art song, pop song and cabaret, Kihlstedt has created a work that captures the pathos, humor and wit of Gorey's indelible images.
Following their acclaimed mix-tape series on Signum Classics, Earthcycle is the fifth album from Orchestra of the Swan and David Le Page. Earthcycle is an innovative and timely project which finds a compelling way to engage with humanity’s most urgent threat. Through three initial performances, a recording and a film, Earthcycle contem- plates our impact on Earth’s environment and the disruption of its natural rhythms. To celebrate the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons they have commissioned a new version from our Associate Artist, baroque/jazz musician and composer David Gordon which is interspersed with traditional folk songs related to the theme of the seasons and performed by singer Jackie Oates. Earthcycle highlights the 21st century’s greatest concern whilst celebrating nature and our place within it.
