Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Exclusive vinyl edition: "My main goal is to create a specific identity for each album I make. This time I chose to involve Anders Jormin and Audun Kleive, two of Scandinavia's finest jazz artists. The result is Polarity, an album based on both new and older compositions of mine, recorded in a unique acoustic setting" - Jan Gunnar Hoff 2018

MOTHER - a word that evokes associations - memories - emotions. Which mother do you think of? A loving mother with a newborn baby in her arms. Intimacy. A despairing mother in deep grief over a lost life. Emptiness. Through words and music our lives are woven together with Mary's life and perhaps we sense that a mother's pain and sorrow, a mother's strength and endurance, a mother's warmth and love are the same now as they were two thousand years ago. Petra Bjorkhaug and Ragnhild Jepsen's S�RMERKT interleaved with Domenico Scarlatti's STABAT MATER. Disc 1 Hybrid SACD MCH 5.0DSD Stereo DSD RedBook PCM: MQA CD Disc 2 Pure Audio Blu-ray 2.0 LPCM 192/24 5.0 DTS HDMA 192/24 7.0.4 Auro-3D 96kHz 7.0.4 Dolby Atmos 48kHz mShuttle: MQA + FLAC + MP3 Region: ABC - worldwide

PAX is a concept in which music, lyrics and the sacred space of the cathedral energize each other in these performances of new works by Norwegian composers who all approach the theme of peace with their own individual reflections and interpretations. The music is composed specifically to be performed and recorded as an immersive experience.

Using a deep time perspective composer Henning Sommerro chooses themes from myths and from European history. Three works for soloist and orchestra and three visions encounter resistance before they struggle forward to possible redemption and resolution. The first work is Solkverv. The skald Sigvat Tordsson is on his way to the eternal city. It is just before the summer solstice, and the skald has time to reflect about important issues in his life and times – and to think about who to include in his visions. We are enticed further to Ostara, and the mysterious spring goddess of the same name.

A lot is at stake as the vernal equinox approaches. A matter of one step forward and two back. Under the ground bilateral lines of communication are busy signalling spring ... or are they? The sense of seriousness is heightened, and the last work gives the album’s title extra gravity. In Borders we move to our own time. The year is 2016, and our world picture is shaken by a stream of refugees the like of which Europe has not seen since the Second World War. Accusations across countries’ borders proliferate. It is the others who are responsible for taking in refugees, and hopes for a united response are collapsing. Who dares acknowledge and respond to the alarming roar of the work’s opening?

As the eighteenth century progressed, Trondheim experienced strong economic growth. The Great Nordic War was over, and merchants set about exporting timber, stockfish, and copper from the mines of Trøndelag. They maintained close contact with their networks in the main cities of Northern Europe, and Trondheim's luxury and extravagance characterised its social milieu. Thus, the latest fashions, literature and music from the Continent found their way to Trondheim. This recording portrays a selection of contemporaneous music that is preserved in Trondheim. The manuscripts may be found in the Gunnerus Library's special collections and probably belonged to the town musician and polymath Johan Daniel Berlin (1714–87) and his circle of musicians. They provide a unique insight into how European instrumental music found fertile ground in one of Denmark–Norway's largest provincial towns in the decades preceding the union's dissolution in 1814.

The exquisitely decorated 15th century choir book known as the Old Hall manuscript was lost to history for the best part of 400 years until its reappearance in a Catholic seminary at the end of the 19th century. The largest surviving collection of medieval motets and mass movements, it immediately became the most celebrated source of English music of the period. It was written in the first instance by a single scribe to ensure that the music of his fellow singers was not forgotten. Many of them are known only from this manuscript, and on this album they find their voices again after more than half a millennium of silence, transformed by the singing of Trio Mediæval in the company of Catalina Vicens, alongside new music by David Lang and Marianne Reidarsdatter Eriksen. Hailed as a "fascinating journey with music of timeless beauty", Trio Mediæval’s highly acclaimed first album Words of the Angel in 2001 launched the group into the elite circles of early music ensembles and introduced them to a broad international audience. Formed in 1997, the Grammy nominated vocal ensemble consists of founder members Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Anna Maria Friman, and Jorunn Lovise Husan who joined the group in 2018. Trio Mediæval has recorded eight albums for ECM Records. An Old Hall Ladymass is their second release, following Solacium, with the Norwegian label 2L. Produced by Morten Lindberg.

The Yggdrasil is the world tree in Norse mythology, and our Yggdrasil musical project started as the idea of reaching out to composers from near and far, as if travelling along the branches of the tree, and it embraced the concept of gathering around the tree as a common theme. We envisioned the richness and complexity of Yggdrasil as giving these composers the freedom to fill their compositions with ideas, reflections, stories and references connected to "world trees" – however they might interpret this – from their own lives. We hoped this would generate wide diversity in musical expression and content. We spread this process over several years. That way, it would constantly provide us with new musical challenges and new inspiration, and give us new timbres, sounds and chords – we then had the task of figuring out how to make them our own. We were also fortunate to meet and collaborate with most of the composers along the way, receiving a greater understanding of their music and the stories behind it.

Music by Henning Sommerro, Anders Edenroth, Marianne Reidarsdatter Eriksen, Ellrun Ystad, Idunn Vindspoll, Christine Donkin, Eric William Barnum, Ragnar Rasmussen, Trygve Brøske, Ko Matsushita and Mia Makaroff. Cantus's performances, innovative productions and development of new music have been groundbreaking for other ensembles with similar ambitions. Contributing in both of Disney’s Frozen movies made Cantus more widely known, also outside the world of choral music. With SPES released in 2015 and FRYD in 2019, both albums GRAMMY Nominees in the Best SS Album category, YGGDRASIL is Cantus's third album produced by Morten Lindberg on the 2L label.

Note: this is a Blu-ray Audio disc, playable only on players with Blu-ray read capability.

The Sound of the Arctic is an acoustic atlas: a musical expedition that reaches as far into the Earth’s interior as it does into our minds and souls. It stands both as a multi-dimensional cultural and historical fable and as an environmental statement — with a breadth that envelops hope, beauty and nature’s untamed forces, beginning with the Arctic wind’s warning whisper, and ending with humankind’s inevitable apocalypse. This work makes one hopeful, anxious, fascinated, frightened and humble, and grateful for the Earth — irrespective of where one might live or be.

Our world is wounded. All around us we see the cracks. And yet the world is beautiful and blessed in so many ways. This extraordinary work begins from the Beatitudes and responds with new poetry that sheds light on who among us might be in need of blessing. These texts, ancient and new, are woven into a colorful tapestry of music inspired by a variety of traditions, highlighting the universality of the human experience. TUVAYHUN creates an opportunity for performers and listeners alike to inspire and be inspired, to be blessed, and be a blessing.