STARA is Halldór Smárason’s debut album. It was recorded in Halldór’s hometown of Ísafjörður, in the Westfjords region in the northwestern part of Iceland. Featuring works from different stages in the composer’s life, ranging from his student years in New York to this day as a family man and freelance composer, STARA shows Halldór’s development of a characteristic style and unique sense of narrative. All the works on the album are inspired by personal experiences and are often dedicated to people close to the composer himself. STARA features Halldór’s three string quartets: draw + play, Stara, and BLAKTA; the guitar solo piece Skúlptúr 1; and the chamber works _a_at_na and stop breathing. Halldór’s music has been described as atmospheric yet aggressive, characterized by a simmering energy just beneath the surface that erupts from time to time. His compositional voice is highly original and personal. In each composition, Halldór strives for a distinct approach, which is guided by the specifics of the composition (the occasions, the space, the instruments, the performer, etc.). As a result, his sonic repertoire is extremely rich. He often includes extra-musical and music-theatrical aspects, which create highly distinct artistic experiences. Additionally, Halldór has been acknowledged for high attention to detail in regard to sound and notation. STARA is intended to be an insightful portrait of the composer, introducing Halldór’s poetic sonic world.

“Occurrence is the third, and at least for now the last, in a hugely illuminating series devoted to works by contemporary Icelandic composers, as performed by Iceland’s 70-year-old national orchestra. Speaking for myself – and surely for many others, as well – the series has been a milestone project, one that any conscientious collector of symphonic music simply must have on the shelf. Across three albums now, Sono Luminus has capitalized shrewdly on swelling global interest in the music of Daniel Bjarnason and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, using their works as a means by which to introduce seven more composers with original, substantial voices. Three of the composers represented on Occurrence return from previous installments in the series. In addition to Bjarnson – who also has served as an insightful, sympathetic conductor throughout – we hear new works from Þuri´ður Jonsdottir, whose Flow and Fusion opened the initial disc, Recurrence, and from Haukur Tomasson, whose Piano Concerto No. 2 was a highlight of the second release in the series, Concurrence. These repeat engagements prove serendipitous, showing off fresh facets of these newly familiar creators. One, Bjarnason’s own Violin Concerto, scarcely requires introduction, having proved its merits and attractions already on concert platforms around the globe since its 2017 world premiere at the Hollywood Bowl. Pekka Kuusisto, the violinist for whom the piece was written, demonstrates his consummate skill as a technician, a melodist, a collaborator and – not least – a whistler, and the orchestral accompaniment, no surprise, is vivid and alert.

REVIEW:

‘Recurrence’, ‘Concurrence’, and now ‘Occurrence’. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s three-disc survey of new orchestral music from its homeland has reached its end point and it’s easy to conclude that no country on earth has reinvented the language of the symphony orchestra on such distinctive and locally relevant terms as this one. So much so that a Canadian such as Veronique Vaka can fall for Iceland and cook up a piece like Lendh, an extraordinary canvas with an umbilical connection to the landscape of the place. Lendh is a marvel.

Haukur Tómasson’s In Seventh Heaven is full of ear-catching orchestration, as raw and unconventional as Jón Leifs’s, ulterior harmonies tugging while colours shift as rapidly as the Icelandic weather above. The orchestra’s handling of the exposed passages for high strings and characterised woodwind-writing demonstrate technically how far it has come in the past decade alone.

Þuríður Jónsdóttir's Flute Concerto, "Flutter", features sampled insect noises and other electronics, including a promotion of the ubiquitous Nordic pedal note to a general hum. Structurally it feels like a road movie – a journey through textural landscapes more than anything developmental.

Conductor Daníel Bjarnason own Violin Concerto has dedicatee Pekka Kuusisto’s puckish spirit all over it, from the infectious soloist whistling (used to moving effect when it returns late on as the violin’s sole accompanist) to the grunge-improvisatory elements and clear-cut, eyemoistening tune.

As an appendix we hear from a dead composer, Iceland’s great 12-tone pioneer Magnús Blöndal Jóhannsson (1938-2005). His Adagio for strings and percussion of 1980 marked a shift in style following the death of his wife and a battle with the bottle. This is a bleak, translucent elegy that places unison sheets of wannabe-lyrical string melody over held pedal notes and drones, ending with a sudden rush of air as the last pedal falls away. A quizzical gesture to wrap up an outstanding and historic series, one that affects the mind as much as the ears. 

– Gramophone

Caeli is spun out of the idea of skies and dimensions merging into a boarderless being boasting of a rich and vivid texture, at times carrying numerous worlds inside at once. During the recording of Caeli, Bára and Skúli would have long discussions about how the world is opening up and how this would and could affect music as well. They like to look at Caeli as a product of this openness - a crystallisation of freedom, exposure and transparency in sound. Bára Gísladóttir (born 1989) is an Icelandic composer and double bassist based in Copenhagen. She studied composition at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Conservatorio di Musica "Giuseppe Verdi" in Milan and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. Bára´s pieces have been selected for festivals such as Dark Music Days, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, International Rostrum of Composers, KLANG Festival, Nordic Music Days and Ung Nordisk Musik. She has received the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation’s Talent Awards, Léonie Sonning Talent Prize, The Reykjavík Grapevine's Music Awards, and has been nominated to the Carl Prize as 'Composer of the year', the Kraumur Music Awards three times for 'Album of the year' and The Icelandic Music Awards twice for 'Piece of the year'. Bára is an active performer and regularly plays her own music, mostly solo or with her long time collaborator, Skúli Sverrisson. In addition to this, she is the double bassist of Elja Ensemble. She has also performed with Ensemble Adapter, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and S.L.Á.T.U.R.. Skúli Sverrisson (born 23 October 1966) is an Icelandic composer and bass guitarist. He has worked with musicians Wadada Leo Smith, Derek Bailey, Lou Reed, Jon Hassel, David Sylvian, Arto Lindsay, and composers Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Hildur Guðnadóttir.

REVIEW:

While each of the 19 ‘movements’ seem sufficiently distinct from each other their individual arcs seem to follow a course of gradual bending and fragmentation. By that I mean that if each of the movements seems to begin and end in the same place, the excursion one experiences en route is abundant in microscopic timbral variety and largely imperceptible flux.

There can be little doubt that Bára Gísladóttir and Skúli Sverrisson are outstanding musicians in every sense; if their virtuosity as players per se takes ones breath away that’s not even the half of it. What is effectively a 130 minute dual improvisation involving a double bass and an electric bass is, in the end, an experience of profundity, wonder, and indescribable beauty. Caeli is all-encompassing and astonishing in a literal sense; at once it can be monolithic and elastic, dark and luminous, purposeful and daydreaming, bold and terrified, triumphant and sad. It’s all on these discs.

– MusicWeb International

MOONBOW is Gunnar Andreas Kristinsson’s second album, the first to be released on a major label. The music, performed by leading members of the Icelandic contemporary music scene, was recorded in Kaldalo´n and Norðurljo´s, the two recital halls of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall. While Gunnar’s first album, Patterns, contains pieces from his study and freelance years in The Hague, MOONBOW is a selection of more mature works from a fruitful period in the composer’s life after moving back to Iceland in 2009, with all the experience from the Netherlands in his pocket. The album features a trio, a quartet and a quintet, flanked by two larger ensemble pieces. The works are diverse, not only in terms of instrumentation but also in terms of musical subject and give a good insight into Gunnar’s distinctive and personal sound-world.

REVIEW:

Kristinsson’s style blends elements of tonality, atonality, New Simplicity (especially in its obsessive repeated patterns) and postmodernist techniques. Patterns IIb (2016) is a fine example of that, with its louring atmosphere despite its use of an Icelandic folk song and euphonious chiming percussion: it was based on a piece of 2004 scored for quartets of gamelan and Western instruments. Roots (2019), by contrast, takes the overtone series as its abstract inspiration. The evocative titletrack, Moonbow (2017), played with relish here by the excellent Siggi Quartet, is more straightforwardly descriptive, reflecting in sound the lunar rainbow (or ‘moonbow’). As such, it is the most directly communicative, and put me in mind at some removes of Saariaho’s celebrated aurora borealis-inspired Lichtbogen (1986).

Sono Luminus provides sound to match Kristinsson’s often coruscating textures and the performers’ clean, luminous virtuosity. You will not regret investigating this music.

– Gramophone

Harold Samuel (1879–1937) was the first pianist to specialize in the performance of Bach’s original keyboard works in the concert hall and achieved worldwide acclaim in doing so. His pioneering HMV and Columbia recordings of the composer (all the Bach works included here, except for the first Prelude & Fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, were premiers on disc) sound as fresh and inspiring today as they did when new and reveal that great Bach playing is timeless. A unique live 5th Brandenburg Concerto from New York and a studio E major Violin Sonata with Isolde Menges round out his Bach and this landmark release also includes his remaining solo discs, notably some rare repertoire by Clementi and two of Bach’s sons which was recorded for the ambitious Columbia History of Music educational project. These new 2021 transfers by Seth Winner were made using the latest technology and present these historic documents in the best possible sound, revealing more detail of Samuel’s playing than has ever previously been captured.

An unobtrusive figure in the British music scene and despite her self-stated lack of ambition, KATHLEEN LONG (1896–1968) was a musician of the highest order. She taught for 44 years at the Royal College of Music and was a major Decca artist for two decades, having recorded for several other labels before that. Her first recording was made in 1928, and her first Decca recordings (of Mozart’s Piano Concertos K449 and K450) were made in 1935. Her first Decca solo recordings are those on this release. On disc, she made premiere recordings of several Mozart concertos and sonatas and was renowned for her Scarlatti and Fauré. For her service to French music, she was made Honorary Member of the Académie de France.

Promise of Peace is the audio recording of the full-length 2022 St. Olaf Christmas Festival, held in Minneapolis on December 2-3; 2022. Recorded live in Orchestra Hall, this album features performances from the St. Olaf Choir; St. Olaf Orchestra; St. Olaf Chapel Choir; St. Olaf Cantorei; Manitou Singers; and Viking Chorus.

Classical Music

Surging sounds of the sea, over them the whistling or even the calling of birds - or so it might seem. An instant later, we only hear the ebb and flow of choral sounds, with individual male voices whistling rubato glissando tones over them. These sounds are typical of Martin Smolka's style. He evokes magically realistic sounds with his compositions.

Peter Hope is an English composer whose name is not well known to the public, but some of his music certainly is. A veteran of the light music genre, he has been a fulltime composer and arranger for fifty years, working for many years with the BBC Concert Orchestra- many of his arrangements becoming classics in their genre, also writing music for the marriage of the Crown Prince of Spain and many other public events. His theme tune for BBC TV news ran for over a decade, known to practically every person in the UK. Since 2000 he has concentrated on more serious and extended compositions, though retaining a commercial sense of approachable style. This album features four wind sonatas and two other works, performed by instrumentalists of high caliber and renown. All the works are receiving the premiere recording and one is being considered as the music for an animated film based on the music itself.

The works of Thierry Pécou have brought something back into contemporary European music that had almost been forgotten: the sound of Latin America. Thierry Pécou is French, and his Latin America is the product of a creative fantasy that grew out of a desire to explore the nearly extinct Pre-Colombian cultures of Central and South America. Any assumption, however, that these are simply the exotic longings of a European culture tourist would be false. Pécou, who grew up in a Paris suburb and graduated from the Paris Conservatory, has Caribbean ancestors, and so his musical search for roots is also a personal journey of discovery. He is at home in two cultures. One is the culture of career and daily life; the other continues to exist only as a projection arising from the depths of the individual personality – a world which, not only for Pécou himself, has become impossibly distant in a cultural and historical sense. Thierry Pécou’s dreamed landscapes of sound can also be seen as an expression of this search for the ruins of a lost culture. With ritualistic repetitive structures, mysterious depths, and strongly physical sounds, his music conjures up an archaic past, but the colors he uses are those of a symphony orchestra, even though these colors are often placed in unusual or exotic constellations. “My position is somewhat ambiguous, because I am a European, even though I have certain roots in these places (Central America). At the same time, I also want to better understand the Mexican people and their history, for example, and hopefully contribute to the search for their own truth and their own roots.” - Thierry Pécou

What happens if the composer and the listener are the same person? This is exactly what Jo Kondo’s way of composing implies. If the composer is to be nothing but a curious listener, he must be able to surprise himself. He must rid himself of all prior knowledge or intention. Born in Tokyo in 1947, Jo Kondo was influenced throughout his entire education almost exclusively by traditional Western art music. Like so many of his Western colleagues, he feels this to be both a limitation and the greatest challenge to the creative process. “The music one grows up with is like a cage one has to break out of.” The type of improvisation that Jo Kondo employs is only loosely related to improvisation as it is commonly understood. Kondo does not improvise using an instrument, but with music paper, note by note. “I write down the first note, which can be anything, and then I try to listen to it again and again in my head until the second note appears. Then I write it down, and then I listen to these two notes again and again until the third note comes up. And then, repeating this process, I always go back to the top of the music to find the next note. That means that when I have 150 notes already in succession on my paper, I find number 151 by going back to the top of the piece and listening through from the top to the 150th note to find the next note. That’s what I mean by improvisation.” - Jo Kondo All of Jo Kondo’s pieces have been written using this method. The result is a completely linear music that avoids any kind of obvious phrasing, melody, or motivic development, permitting the individual note to retain “its own entity of life”. Since even a musical line can endanger this fragile autonomy, Kondo distributes the notes among the various instrumental parts. This “hocket” technique, which has been used since the thirteenth century, demands enormous rhythmic virtuosity from the performers to avoid disrupting the organic unity of the extremely fragmented line. Thus, there is space left for the listener to create his own phrasing out of it.

All life originated out of primeval mud. And all life dissolves back into it again at the end. This release in the Edition Musikfabrik series leans its ear towards sewage sludge as well as “the ocean of yes and no.” It cringes at the end of the world before the sublimity of nature, seeking to surpass her with composed conglomerates, it allows itself to be buried alive, only to eat itself free from the earth three times. Four fascinating attempts to understand nature and to explore humanity’s position within it. For the composer Brian Ferneyhough, Cornwalls inhospitable landscape of moraine became the starting point of a composition for six voices and an 18 member ensemble. Klaus Langs „The ocean of yes and no“ is a story with no beginning or end, no climax and no apotheosis. While Carola Bauckholt has often used the “fauna philharmonic” in her recent compositions, she works with a whole bestiary in "Schlammflocke". In Jorge E. Lopez’s „Gonzales the Earth Eater“ the composer quotes William S. Burroughs’s psychedelic sceneries with creatures such as „Gonzales“, who defies his own funeral. This recording contains four fascinating attempts to understand Nature and to explore man’s place (in Nature). The demanding artwork of the series is created with pictures by the painter Gerhard Richter, commenting on the thematic concentration of the programs in an artistic manner. Richter, one of the most important living German artists, has been a member of the board of trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

Rolf Riehm is... an unconventional artist. Before him, nobody has ever sensualized in music such a complex cosmos of philosophical reflections, historical facts, myths, fairytales, memories, scientific arguments, the sublime and the trivial, current sociopolitical findings, very personal ingredients and contributions.' - Bernd Leukert. In a letter to Guy Braunstein, soloist at the world premiere, Riehm describes “Shifting” for violin and orchestra as 'a huge, sweeping melody. For me, it is like a river that continually gains new strength from the downhill slope of its landscape – the landscape here is the expressivity which gives impetus to the "melody" and drives it forward, "…moltissimo appassionato…". The third section is nothing other than a single suspension extended to almost five minutes. And then shortly before the end: no more restrictions, no excessive pressures, only free movement. This is the true beginning of the piece!' Riehm sees his composition “Archipel Remix” for orchestra with electronic playbacks as an 'archipelago, a complex of islands, consisting of differently sized islands. The piece starts at the beginning and ends at the end, unsurprisingly, but I want to avoid [the natural passage of time]. Hence the metaphor of the archipelago and the type of designation.' - Marion Saxer & Rolf Riehm)

One of the most exciting young artists to emerge in recent years, Martina Filjak is garnering international praise for her poetic passion and technical mastery at the keyboard as well as for her charismatic personality and magnetic stage presence. Martina Filjak came to international attention by winning the Gold Medal, the 1st prize and the Beethoven prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2009, which brought her numerous engagements in the United States and internationally. Prior to that, she won 1st prizes at the Maria Canals Piano Competition (Barcelona) and the Viotti Piano Competition (Vercelli), and was a laureate at the Busoni Piano Competition. In recent years, Ms Filjak has performed with esteemed orchestras including The Cleveland Orchestra, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, The Florida Orchestra, the Strasbourg Philharmonic, Barcelona Symphony, Bilbao Symphony and the Granada Symphony; the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, the Staatskapelle Weimar; the Israel Chamber Orchestra as well as the Orchestre Symphonique de Nancy. For this release she has chosen works by Bach arr. Liszt, Schumann, and Scriabin.

There is no doubt that the present album has ane specially personal meaning for Juliane Banse, because it celebrates her many years of association with all three composers, Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann and Hans Werner Henze. Juliane Banse met these composers at the beginning of ther career and still enjoys a close friendship with them. A close collaboration has led over the years to the premiere of many of their works. It is not surprising that Reimann's "Drei Gedicht der Sappho" and Rihm's "Aria/Ariadne" are dedicated to her and the Munich Chamber Orchestra; Although Juliane Banse did not have regular contact with the composers during the period when these works were written, she says she had complete confidence that the pieces would be composed with her in minda nd appropriate for her voice. The finished works justified this confidence. The third piece on this album was written before Juliane Banse was born, but she does have a connection to Hans-Werner Henze: in the opera "L'Upupa und der Triuph der Sohnesliebe", from 2003, Henze wrote a role especially for her voice, and she was intensely involved in the compositional process.

Shaped equally by her roots in China as well as European influences, Ying Wang, with her struggle for an individual musical language, embodies in an exemplary way the challenges of finding a point of balance between two cultures. Ying Wang mediates between the two cultures. She has achieved quite personal solutions in her works, integrating dramatic impulses and meditative sensual sonorities. She regards as especially fruitful the transferring of techniques for the creation of electronic sounds to acoustical instruments. Restriction and freedom are important criteria in "Wave in D", where Wang, out of extremely limited tonal material, draws a rich assemblage of differentiated sound colors from the possibilities of the traditional instrument and the electronics. In "Tun Tu" baritone saxophone and electronic sounds interact and come together in an imaginary sound landscape. The distorted sounds of the instrument, embedded in a cosmos of mysterious electronic colorations, seem at first almost improvisatory, but "Tun Tu" is rigorously organized. In "Coffee & Tea" Ying Wang reflects on contrasts between the cultures of Asia and Europe and uses coffee and tea as metaphors.

The advantages of old master violins against modern violins - or vice versa - is one of the most discussed issues in the world of string instruments. A year can barely pass without a new scientific study, in which they claim to be able to definitely prove which one is better. For the most part, these supposed sensations reveal only one dimensional thinking, which can hardly ever be appropriate when defining a such complex phenomenon as a string instrument. The situation is absurd and confusing, because nothing is more vague than the price to sound ratio with stringed instruments. The more expensive an instrument is, the more irrational the opinion. The motto is: Close your eyes and listen carefully, because blind tests can sometimes lead to quite amazing, almost unmasking results. Hamburg born violinist and conductor, Philip A. Draganov, has enthralled audiences in Europe, Asia and teh USA with his "impulsive virtuosity...and exuberant musical power" (Hamburger Abendblatt). He had his debut as soloist at the age of only twelve with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra in the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg and has since enjoyed a multifaceted international career. In addition to solo performances, recitals and chamber music concerts, Draganov is regularly invited by major conductors such as Günter Wand, Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink, Christoph von Dohnány, Michael Tilson Thomas, Christoph Eschenbach, Alan Gilbert, Sir Roger Norrington and Ken Nagano wtih various orchestras such as the NDR Symphony Orchestra/Hamburg or the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Draganov plays a violin made by the Italian violin maker Tomaso Balestrieri from 1769 and a violin from the German luthier Peter Grenier.

Estelle Revaz is entering the "Hall of the Greats". This is how the press describes Estelle Revaz's playing when she joined Gautier Capuçon and the Armin Jordan's Camerata in the Vivaldi Double Concerto. Revaz is a 27-year old cellist from Switzerland, debuting her first recording with Solo Musica. The album features solo cello works by J.S. Bach and their reflections in selected repertoire of contemporary composers. Estelle Revaz belongs to the leading cellists of her generation, received several important prizes and is performing worldwide with great success as a soloist and chamber musician, as well. Since 2015 Revaz is a member of the prestigious "Forum of the 100" which shows off those who represent the future of Switzerland. The cello Revaz plays is by A.T. Fiorini and the bow by J. Eury.

String quartets have for a long time been received as a conversation between four rational people. For 20th and 21st century composers wanting to leave this idea of a discussion behind, the question has been: in what other ways can one write for two violins, viola, and violoncello? Helmut Zapf’s three string quartets perfectly illustrate the stages of such a confrontation. They have appeared throughout his entire career as a composer, and can be understood as markers for different periods in his compositional output. In Zapfs first string quartet elements of an individual musical rhetoric survive and are clearly understandable as such. However, the context – the “rational conversation” – is now present in only a rudimentary fashion. The second string quartet is a logical continuation of the path already established by Zapf: the last remnants of rhetoric and conversational discourse are dispensed with. The four instruments do not act individually, but are treated as a single organism. The third string quartet has been written for the Sonar group. This composition takes up the experiences of the previous pieces and at the same time tries to connect with the tradition: a reconnection from a great and skeptical distance.

Galina Vracheva excels in the worldwide piano scene not only with skillfully improvised cadenzas in piano concertos from the Baroque to the Modern, but also with spontaneous compositions to wishes expressed from the audience. Her education is equally unique, beginning with piano and composition lessons in Munich, Kiev and Berlin and more than ten years with master classes in concert improvisation at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Haus Marteau in Oberbayern, Mahidol University in Bangkok and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana. From this improvisation Galina Vracheva has meanwhile made her own art form. She improvises her cadenzas in piano concerts and at the moment of the orchestra entrance simply waits for what stirs her and what makes her sound. Or she asks her audience in the piano recitals to give her a theme, to sing a melody or to read a poem. For two nights Galina Vracheva composed piano fantasies for the recording of this album, all spontaneously improvised after Beethoven's symphonies.

One of the most famous pieces in the piano literature is Ludwig van Beethoven's Fur Elise. But what if originally the work was called "For Therese?" Every work of music is in some way relational, and since Beethoven, when he was 40, fell in love with 19-year-old Therese Malfatti, it seems logical. Similarly, Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated the "Prelude and Fugue in C Major" to his deep love Anna Magdalena. This musical journey takes us on a journey through time to explore these and similar relationships. Japanese pianist Masako Ohta devotes herself to classical and contemporary classical music. She studied piani at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, the University of the Arts Berlin, and with Gyorgy Sebok, Andras Schiff, and Gyorgy Kurtag. She compiled the musical declarations of love for this album alongside producer Stefan Winter.

Brahms’s complete sonatas for piano and violin (Op. 78, 100, 108 and Scherzo from the F.A.E Sonata) are the monumental works that inspire and intrigue chamber musicians as well as classical music audiophiles. With a fresh view of these important pieces, this recording puts the composer first, allowing the protagonist to meet the composer's requirements for the scores. With differentiated phrasing and tempi, Darvarova & Chen rediscover Brahms' violin sonatas in a completely different and new way. GRAMMY®-nominated, award-winning (Gold Medal at the Global Music Awards in 2017 and 2018) and a concert violinist since the age of four, Elmira Darvarova caused a sensation, becoming the first ever (and so far only) woman-concertmaster in the history of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. As MET concertmaster she has performed with the greatest conductors of our time, including the legendary Carlos Kleiber. Hailed as “brilliant” by Fanfare Magazine, multi-award winning pianist-composer Zhen Chen has performed as a soloist and chamber music artist at prominent music venues in USA and China, such as Stern Auditorium, Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall of Lincoln Center, and China National Centre for Performing Arts.

Big Data – the title reveals the defining themes of this recording! The Decoder Ensemble considers the possibilities and consequences of the limitless availability of media in the digital age. All of the pieces here focus in different ways on common contemporary practices like remixing, copying & pasting, sampling, and recycling. An involvement with these techniques is natural for the members of Decoder, three of whom are themselves composers. The group, founded in 2011, calls itself a “band for contemporary music” and is actively involved in the newest musical developments and trends including electronics, computer techniques, multimedia, and elements of pop and rock music. The idea for this release grew out of the group’s “Big Data Weekend”. According to clarinetist Carola Schaal, this was a small festival “organized in 2017 by the Decoder Ensemble for which the group commissioned eight works dealing with the theme of remix. We chose several of those works for this album, as well as a piece by Brigitta Muntendorf that seems to us to fit perfectly with the others.”

Siberia is known for its vast distances and the unfathomable dimensions of its unspoiled landscapes of rivers and lakes, forests and mountains, and tundra and taiga. The city of Krasnoyarsk is at the center of Eurasia between Moscow and Beijing and has a surprisingly vibrant musical life. In 2019, the city commissioned two works by Enjott Schneider, one of Germany’s most multifaceted composers. For the “Asia-Siberia-Europe Festival”, Schneider composed “Spirits of Siberia” for trumpet, strings, and percussion. In this work, trumpet virtuoso Reinhold Friedrich embodies the world of shamanistic mysteries. In the piece’s four movements, the soloist conjures the Siberian flora and fauna with mystical sound worlds that take us far beyond the reality of our normal physical senses. “Leporello & Giovanni” was commissioned by the Trans-Siberian Art Festival. The double continent of Eurasia is symbolized in this double concerto by double bass and contrabass balalaika played by two of the world’s finest virtuosos: Artem Chirkov, the principal double bass player of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia, and Mikhail Dzyudze, whose innovations have brought the balalaika from folk music into the classical concert halls of the world. The music moves against the background of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, with the soloists energetically personifying the complicated relationship between Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello.