SKU: FG.55011-775-4
ISBN 9790550117754.
Alex Freeman found initial inspiration for his string quartet (2015) in a series of photographs a geologist friend showed him of en échelon veins in rock formations. The open strings punctuated with pizzicato unisons that begin the single-movement work call to mind something crystalline and shimmering, which is immediately infused with tumbling lyrical lines in something of a rapid caccia technique throughout. The middle of the work becomes more suspended in slower material loosely based on a technique of prolation canon, comprises layers of free, expressive, lyrical, and even elegiac music moving at different speeds. As the work concludes, the materials converge in a rhythmically pulsating stasis and an almost chorale-like statement. Duration: c. 13' This product includes the score and the parts (A4 sized). American-Finnish composer Alex Freeman (b.1972) has established himself among the foremost composers of choral music in Finland. A dedicated citizen of his musical community, a teacher, and a choral singer himself, he composes music that reflects an appreciation for a wide range of aesthetics and a passion for communicating with listeners and performers. In his choral works, in particular, we find music that aims to be sonorous, melodic, and resonant, but is always crafted to carefully avoid the cliches that can burden conventional tonality. His instrumental works run the gamut: a cantata with orchestra based on poetry of Whitman; a significant body of solo piano works that reveal deep roots in everything from austere absolute music to soaring elegaic rhetoric (see Albany Records, Inner Voice); his chamber work Blueshift (Navona Records), which is a kind of paean to Reich and Adams in miniature; open-ended modular works, like various iterations of his Slow All Clocks for electronic media, solo clarinet, and mixed choirs of kanteles; and, recently, some new directions in microtonal music.
SKU: ST.Y296
ISBN 9790220223525.
Nature and landscape have been the dominant themes of much of Rhian Samuel's vocal music of the last ten years, projected chiefly through the poetry of Anne Stevenson, and in her most recent song-settings, the writings of the Pakistan-born Texas-based poet Zulfikar Ghose. His poem 'Conspiracy of the Clouds' describes how, the clouds having chosen to become invisible, 'Even the astronauts on the space shuttle / looked down on a cloudless America' as hurricanes ravage Louisiana and storms engulf Nebraska. An intriguing conceit in the tradition of magic realism, the text is presented as a scena lasting around 16 minutes, with interpolations from 'Haze' by the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Thus modern fable and romantic nature-description are juxtaposed, and their interaction becomes the source of musical contrasts too. Thoreau's words are assigned predominantly to the vocalist's highest register, those of Ghose to her lower tessitura; and the suggestive and dramatic accompaniment builds tension steadily to the final ironic response of an incredulous American public: not one of awe and wonder, but the question 'Why weren't we told about it?
SKU: HL.49007921
ISBN 9790001111911. 9.0x12.0x0.238 inches.
In these lieder, Robert Schumann seems to mirror his life full of crises. The composition coincides with the first signs of his illness. The picture of the drowning Ophelia evoked in the first chant conjures up the image of his suicide attempt three years later. Aribert Reimann's transcription seems to be opposed to Schumann's endeavours to make stronger use of 'the development of the accompanying instrument, the piano'. On the other hand, the complete integration of the vocal part in the musical setting of the string quartet confirms Schumann's assessment that the singing voice alone cannot 'express everything; apart from the expression of the whole, even subtle nuances of the poem shall become apparent'. These transcriptions show Reimann's sense of timbre and his many years of experience as a lied accompanist.
SKU: DB.38-00812-KLA
ISBN 9790012412052.
