SKU: AP.36-52703177
ISBN 9781621569367. English.
Some of the best loved operatic tunes are featured in this collection arranged by Lynne Latham. Ideal for the advanced quartet, players will find performances of these Opera Favorites fulfilling and enjoyable. Included: 1. O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi (Puccini), 2. The Flower Song from Lakme (Delibes), 3. Der Vogelfänger from The Magic Flute (Mozart), 4. Bei Männern from The Magic Flute (Mozart), 5. Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach), 6. Habanera from Carmen (Bizet), 7. The Toreador's Song from Carmen (Bizet), 8. Meditation from Thaïs (Massenet).
These products are currently being prepared by a new publisher. While many items are ready and will ship on time, some others may see delays of several months.
SKU: HL.49045305
ISBN 9781495082405. UPC: 888680656539. 9.0x12.0x0.256 inches.
Following the premiere of my opera An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera, the President of the Manhattan School of Music, Robert Sirota, called me and told me that the American String Quartet had asked him to commission me as part of the school's 90th anniversary celebration. I was very excited because this meant that the first new music I would compose after my largest piece ever would be a string quartet for my alma mater. I embraced the chance to return to chamber music with gusto because I saw this not only as an opportunity to incorporate everything I'd learned writing four grand operas into an intimate yet profound genre but also as the starting point of a new direction in my compositional thinking. 20 years separate my first and second quartet and it is not difficult to hear the evolution between the two. Tobias Picker.
SKU: PR.16400272S
UPC: 680160588442. 8.5 x 11 inches.
My third quartet is laid out in a three-movement structure, with each movement based on an early, middle, and late work of the great American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Although the movements are separate, with full-stop endings, the music is connected by a common scale-form, derived from the name MARY CASSATT, and by a recurring theme that introduces all three movements. I see this theme as Mary's Theme, a personality that stays intact while undergoing gradual change. I The Bacchante (1876) [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] The painting shows a young girl of Italian or Spanish origin, playing a small pair of cymbals. Since Cassatt was trying very hard to fit in at the French Academy at the time, she painted a lot of these subjects, which were considered typical and universal. The style of the painting doesn't yet show Cassatt's originality, except perhaps for certain details in the face. Accordingly the music for this movement is Spanish/Italian, in a similar period-style but using the musical signature described above. The music begins with Mary's Theme, ruminative and slow, then abruptly changes to an alla Spagnola-type fast 3/4 - 6/8 meter. It evokes the Spanish-influenced music of Ravel and Falla. Midway through, there's an accompanied recitative for the viola, which figures large in this particular movement, then back to a truncated recapitulation of the fast music. The overall feeling is of a well-made, rather conventional movement in a contemporary Spanish/Italian style. Cassatt's painting, too, is rather conventional. II At the Opera (1880) [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts] This painting is one of Cassatt's most well known works, and it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting shows a woman alone in a box at the opera house, completely dressed (including gloves) and looking through opera glasses at someone or something that is NOT on the stage. Across the auditorium from her, but exactly at eye level, is a gentleman with opera glasses intently watching her - though it is not him that she's looking at. It's an intriguing picture. This movement is far less conventional than the first movement, as the painting is far less conventional. The music begins with a rapid, Shostakovich-type mini-overture lasting less than a minute, based on Mary's Theme. My conjecture is that the woman in the painting has arrived late to the opera, busily stumbling into her box. What happens next is a kind of collage, a kind of surrealistic overlaying of two different elements: the foreground music, at first is a direct quotation of Soldier's Chorus from Gounod's FAUST (an opera Cassatt would certainly have heard in the brand-new Paris Opera House at that time), played by Violin II, Viola, and Cello. This music is played sul ponticello in the melody and col legno in the marching accompaniment. On top of this, the first violin hovers at first on a high harmonic, then descends into a slow melody, completely separate from the Gounod. It's as if the woman in the painting is hearing the opera onstage but is not really interested in it. Then the cello joins the first violin in a kind of love-duet (just the two of them, at first). This music isn't at all Gounod-derived; it's entirely from the same scale patterns as the first movement and derives from Mary's Theme and its scale. The music stays in a kind of dichotomy feeling, usually three-against-one, until the end of the movement, when another Gounod melody, Valentin's aria Avant de quitter ce lieux reappears in a kind of coda for all four players. It ends atmospherically and emotionally disconnected, however. The overall feeling is a kind of schizophrenic, opera-inspired dream. III Young Woman in Green, Outdoors in the Sun (1909) [Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts] The painting, one of Cassatt's last, is very simple: just a figure, looking sideways out of the picture. The colors are pastel and yet bold - and the woman is likewise very self-assured and not in the least demure. It is eight minutes long, and is all about melody - three melodies, to be exact (Young Woman, Green, and Sunlight). No angst, no choppy rhythms, just ever-unfolding melody and lush harmonies. I quote one other French composer here, too: Debussy's song Green, from Ariettes Oubliees. 1909 would have been Debussy's heyday in Paris, and it makes perfect sense musically as well as visually to do this. Mary Cassatt lived her last several years in near-total blindness, and as she lost visual acuity, her work became less sharply defined - something akin to late water lilies of Monet, who suffered similar vision loss. My idea of making this movement entirely melodic was compounded by having each of the three melodies appear twice, once in a pure form, and the second time in a more diffuse setting. This makes an interesting two ways form: A-B-C-A1-B1-C1. String Quartet No.3 (Cassatt) is dedicated, with great affection and respect, to the Cassatt String Quartet, whose members have dedicated themselves in large measure to the furthering of the contemporary repertoire for quartet.
SKU: PR.164002720
UPC: 680160573042. 8.5 x 11 inches.
SKU: FG.55011-498-2
ISBN 9790550114982.
Kimmo Hakola's String Quartet No. 4 op. 95 (2016) was commissioned by the Kimito Island Music Finland and it's dedicated to the Meta4 Quartet. In composer's words, it is the floundering, playful, if necessary defiantly dramatic, surprising, capricious and unrestrained tour de force of a youthful entity.Kimmo Hakola has gone through a number of styles and influences in his career as a composer, his idiom expanding at times to embrace Romanticism, Orientalism and klezmer. He has attained international recognition with an output that spans various genres from intimate solo works to full-length operas such as La Fenice (2011) commissioned by the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Many of his works are expansive and epic: his Piano Concerto (1996), for instance, clocks in at 55 minutes. Hakola says that he sees music as drama. His dramas explore almost Shakespearean extremes, from moments of raging 'sound and fury' and violent battles to quiet moments of meditation and heart-rending monologues.
SKU: FG.55011-497-5
ISBN 9790550114975.
SKU: BT.DHP-1185855-070
ISBN 9789043153911. English-German-French-Dutch.
The Phantom of the Opera is, without doubt, one of the great classics of our time. The stage production of this tale, exciting and mysterious in equal measure, has now captivated over a million theatre-goers. The phantom sings the song The Music of the Night to the beautiful Christine, who he has just kidnapped into his realm, as if entrancing her. This enchanting mood is so authentically recreated in Nico Dezaire’s sensitive arrangement for string quartet that it feels like listening to the singer perform the original version from the musical.De musical The Phantom of the Opera is zonder twijfel een van de grote klassiekers van onze tijd. De theaterversie van dit spannende en tegelijk mysterieuze verhaal heeft in de loop der tijd al een miljoenenpubliek getrokken. Met het lied The Music of the Night brengt het spook de mooie Christine, die hij zojuist naar zijn rijk heeft ontvoerd, als het ware in trance. De betoverende sfeer wordt in dit gevoelige strijkkwartetarrangement van de hand van Nico Dezaire zo authentiek overgebracht, dat het voelt alsof je luistert naar de zanger in de originele versie uit de musical.Das Phantom der Oper gehört zweifellos zu den ganz großen Musical-Klassikern unserer Zeit. Die Bühnenversion dieser ebenso spannenden wie mystischen Geschichte hat schon ein Millionenpublikum in seinen Bann gezogen. Mit dem Lied The Music of the Night singt das Phantom die schöne Christine, die er soeben in sein Reich entführt hat, gleichsam in Trance. Eben diese Stimmung lässt Nico Dezaire in seiner einfühlsamen Bearbeitung für Streichquartett so glaubwürdig wieder aufleben, dass es sich so anfühlt, als höre man dem Sänger der originalen Musical-Fassung zu.Le Fantôme de l’Opéra est, sans aucun doute, l’un des grands classiques de notre époque. La représentation sur scène de cette histoire, la fois exaltante et mystérieuse, a déj captivé plus d’un million de spectateurs. Interprétée par le fantôme, la chanson « La Musique de la nuit » s’adresse la belle Christine, qu’il vient d’emprisonner dans son repaire, comme pour la subjuguer. Ce climat enchanteur est tellement bien recréé dans l’arrangement habile pour quatuor cordes de Nico Dezaire qu’on a l’impression d’entendre le chanteur de la version originale de cette comédie musicale.
SKU: EC.LMP046
These Four Dances from CLORINDA AGONISTES (Clorinda the warrior) are taken from a recently completed dramatic work; a hybrid opera & dance theatre work currently of the same title. The name Clorinda comes from Monteverdi’s opera Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda , whose libretto is from the epic poem by Tasso titled, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Liberated). The dramatic work, which was commissioned by the London based Shobana Jeyasingh Dance company, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the Royal Philharmonic Society, was composed as a companion piece to Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento.
Contents: I. Transitions II. Pursuit III. Shawq شوق (Yearning) IV. Unity (We dance together)
SKU: HL.48025367
UPC: 196288194286.
Simon Laks (1901-1983), who moved from Warsaw to Paris in 1926 at the age of 25, belonged to the large group of composers from Central and Eastern European countries who went down in 20th-century music history as the “École de Parisâ€. Slavic temperament amalgamated in their music with French esprit, the folklore of their native countries combined with the stylistic elements of neoclassicism and jazz typical of the time. As a member of the “Association of Young Polish Musiciansâ€, Laks quickly made his way into French musical life. However, his career was ended with the beginning of World War 2 due to the collaboration of the Vichy government with Nazi Germany. Internment in 1941 was followed by deportation to Auschwitz in 1942. Laks survived the Shoah as a member and later leader of a camp band in Birkenau, which he testified to in his moving book Music in Auschwitz. After the traumatic experiences, Laks did not return to regular compositional activity until the 1960s, producing an opera, songs, and chamber music works, some of which were awarded important composition prizes. At the peak of this optimistic creative phase, he composed incidental music for Peretz Hirschbein's famous Yiddish comedy Dem Schmids Techter (The Blacksmith's Daughters), which premiered in New York in 1918, for a new production of the play at the Théâtre de'lÂ’Entrepôt in Paris. Along with Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes and Shostakovich's cycle From Yiddish (Jewish) Folk Poetry, it is one of the most significant 20th-century explorations of art music with Jewish folklore – homage to a culture irreparably destroyed. From the original score, Holger Groschopp compiled two suites, for violoncello and piano and piano solo, that capture the essence of Lak's enchanting drama music. The premiere recording of the suites with Holger Groschopp and Adele Bitter was awarded the Opus Klassik 2023 in the category Editorial Achievement of the Year.