LAMENT

The 1st collaboration between The Hilliard Ensemble & Jan Garbarek, Officium, was hailed as an artistic triumph, storming onto classical, jazz and pop charts worldwide (and subsequently selling over a million copies). Over the last 5 years, they have played hundreds of concerts and recently documented the 2nd chapter of their musical journey. The double album, Mnemosyne (pronounced neh-MOSS-in-ee), is broader in scope than it's predecessor, including expanded improvisation.

WIDOW IN THE WINDOW

The focus here is on symphonic music, yet the term seems inadequate for Silvestrov's delicately realized compositions played with extraordinary restraint and fluidity by Alexei Lubimov with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies.

ARC

LATER THAT EVENING

SOLO

ROSENSFOLE

LYRIC SUITE FOR SEXTET

IN WINDS IN LIGHT

FLUID RUSTLE

SEA

SEA 2

Norwegian-Danish author Lars Saabye Christensen is one of Scandinavia most widely-praised and prolific contemporary writers. For many years now, in the course of his travels around the globe, he has been sending "hotel poems" to his friend Ketil Bj�rnstad, inviting him to make music out of them. These literary postcards explore a range of moods. Bj�rnstad says: "I feel very connected to the lonely, existential perspective of these poems, made in different hotel rooms." For this recording, Ketil worked closely with singer and actress Anneli Drecker, former lead vocalist of pop group Bel Canto. Settings of poetry form a special category in Norwegian pianist-composer Bj�rnstad's discography and A Suite of Poems is a song cycle to put alongside such projects as A Passion for John Donne, Sunrise, and The Light.

Pianist Alexander Lonquich, alongside the Muncih Chamber Orchestra, rises to the challenge of performing the entirety of Beethoven’s piano concertos, programmed in chronological order.