Classical Music

Augusta Read Thomas : !HOPE (2017)For SSSAA ChoirDuration: c. 8 minutesFormat: 16-page Octavo ScoreAlso available for TTTBB Choir (NMP1027)An elegant, musical braid of the E.E. Cummings text between the five equally important vocal parts (either SSSAA or TTTBB) starts very delicately on quiet and poetic perfect fifth. Gradually, across its 8 minute duration, the vocal colours and lyric imagery unfold with passionate energy to a radiant and intense climax. This is followed by a peaceful, optimistic coda which brings !HOPE to a still, meditative culmination. Members of the Wellesley College Chamber Singers described the song with these words: “reflective, grounded, ethereal, reminiscent, purposeful at how it takes its time to express the poem, suspension of time and place with a contrast of contradiction and movement, glassy, fluid and efflorescent.” Augusta Read Thomas

Richard Lester : Masterworks and Miniatures (2015)For keyboard instrumentsDuration: c. 1 hour 18 minutesFormat: 90 page A4 wire-bound sheet musicAlso includes CD, NI5931This contains 17 complete works by Girolamo Diruta, Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabreli, Gioseffo Guami, and Antonio Mortaro. In an extended preface Richard examines the contemporary performance treatise and based on them suggests possibilities for correct period fingering, ornamentation and registration for these works. The publication includes a 48 minute DVD Video, Venetian Reflections in which Richard demonstrates the practical considerations of these and includes several complete performances on both harpsichord and organ. The publication also includes the Nimbus CD recording NI 5931 of works featured in the publication performed by Richard Lester at the organ and harpsichord.Richard Lester has now established an international reputation amongst the great early keyboard players of our time. His many solo engagements have included broadcasts for BBC radio and television, recitals at the Royal Festival Hall South Bank Centre, Wigmore Hall, Bath International Festival, Bruges Festival, concerts abroad - and master classes at Dartington Summer School. In an academic capacity he has contributed articles in leading early music publications including the Hungarian book on early music, Regi Zene and also participated in a Scarlatti symposium with Peter Katin, Andreas Staier, Nikolai Demidenko and Yevgeny Sudbin. In the year 2000, he began a project to record all of Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas for Nimbus Records which received rave reviews on an unprecedented level from recording magazines and international websites. The whole project was completed in 2006 with a personal profile in Gramophone. Since then his contract with Nimbus has included recordings of sonatas by Seixas and Soler, Haydn sonatas on the Schantz fortepiano in the Bath Holbourne Museum and in 2010, a major project to record Frescobaldi's keyboard music on the Giovanni Boni harpsichord (c.1619); an instrument it is thought the composer played.

Klee Musings is a work in three movements taking the names for each movement from the paintings by Paul Klee: I Triple Marionette, II Cathedrals & III Highways and Byways. Movement I evokes a three-headed marionette, the music starts and ends in prime unison, as if all the dancing marionettes are aligned, and throughout each instrument (marionette) asserts it's own musical flair and spirit, which results in contrapuntal, jazzy adventure. Delicate, resonant and mostly quiet, Movement II calls for the piano's damper pedal to be held down for the entire movement and musical modes are woven together in a resounding fabric, each ribbon of sound evoking the life-force of one of the many cathedrals depicted in Klee's painting. Highways and Byways' simultaneous view of time and space is the inspiration for Movement III, which climbs itself through harmonic and registral ladders, and traverses many horizontals, verticals and diagonals. Augusta Read Thomas

Classical Music

Richard Blackford : Goodfellow (2015)For Flute, Oboe and PianoDuration: c. 11 minutesFormat: 32-page A4 saddle stitiched score & 2 A4 saddle stitched parts (flute and oboe)Available on CD, NI6338“Robin Goodfellow (aka ‘Puck’) is traditionally known as the ‘goblin of the hearth’. In addition to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream he appears in Ben Jonson, Milton and Kipling as well as earlier Celtic origins. In Old English pucel is a kind of half-tamed woodland spirit, leading folk astray with echoes and lights in night time woodlands. But it is the ‘shrewd and knavish’ Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that caught my imagination, and the two movements of my trio explore his mischievous, unpredictable personality and interactions with the Athenian lovers and fairy queen Titania.” Richard Blackford

Classical Music

JOHN WALLACE : Quiraing (1971)For unaccompanied Bb clarinetDuration: c. 7 minutesFormat: 16-page A4 saddle stitched sheet musicQuiraing is a complex work that explores the extended techniques of the Bb clarinet, most notably multi-phonics. It is presented here as a counterpart to the 2014 recording by Ewan Zuckert released on the Nimbus Alliance label.John Wallace read music at King’s College, Cambridge, with Sir David Willcocks, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Alan Bush. In 1974 he joined the London Symphony Orchestra and then from 1976 to 1995 he was Principal Trumpet of The Philharmonia where he became vice-Chairman of the Board. Among his performing highlights were as a soloist with Kiri Te Kanawa to a live TV audience of 750,000,000 people, at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. In 1986, he formed The Wallace Collection, a brass ensemble of like minded specialists which toured extensively throughout the world, along with making more than 30 ensemble and solo CDs getting to the top of the Billboard crossover charts in the USA twice. Wallace returned to Scotland in 2002 to become the first Scot to hold the position of Principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. John Wallace retired from RCS in September 2014 to concentrate once again on composing and performing.

Sonorous Earth is conceived as a cultural statement celebrating interdependence and commonality across all cultures; and as a musical statement celebrating the extraordinary beauty and diversity of expression inherent in bell sounds. Scored for four percussionists playing bells from a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, Sonorous Earth can be heard and imagined as a United-Nations-of-Resonances. Probing into bells' rich meanings and characteristics as carriers of history, ethnicity, societal and cultural connotations is a joy and wonder. Bells can be used to celebrate grand occasions, hold sacrificial rites, keep a record of events, give the correct time, celebrate births and weddings, mark funerals, caution a community, enhance any number of religious ceremonies, and are even hung around the necks of animals. As carriers of history and culture, bells, of numerous shapes, sizes, types, decorative patterns, weights, functions, and cultural connotations, enrapture and inspire. Bells are central to Augusta's music; bells permeate her music. For over 25 years, in every work for orchestra, and in many for smaller ensembles, she has been composing music frequently using percussion consisting of bell sounds (pitched metal percussion and all the mallet percussion instruments) many of which have their origins in other than Western musical cultures. As such, her new piece is an extreme extension of work she has been doing for decades.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Augusta Read Thomas : Two Thoughts About the Piano (2017)For solo pianoDuration: c. 5 minutesFormat: 24-page scoreTWO THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PIANO was inspired by - and is a response to - Elliott Carter's Caténaires from his Two Thoughts About the Piano. My work is entirely original and does not quote from or share music in common with Mr. Carter’s work.

Classical Music

Classical Music