The Naxos label is marking his centennial by bringing out his complete orchestral music, conducted by no less than Leonard Slatkin…
… It’s time to pay tribute to this popular American composer, who was born 100 years ago on June 29 in Cambridge, Mass…
… Now those little gems, along with several that were never before recorded, are part of his complete collection of orchestral works, just in time for his centennial celebration.
Composed 11 years apart, Michael Nyman’s Six Celan Songs and The Ballad of Kastriort Rexhepi feature Sarah Leonard and Hilary Summers, singers the composer cites as key interpreters of his vocal music.
The Six Celan Songs were composed in 1990 for acclaimed German singer Ute Lemper. For this cycle, Nyman selected six of Paul Celan’s less hermetic texts, which represented the poet’s attempt to come to terms with the impossibility-according to German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno-of writing poetry after the Holocaust. The songs individually and collectively express the horror and emptiness experienced by the writer in exile. Nyman uses music to reinvent an imaginary emotional world related to the Romanian background in 1920s Bukovina, where Celan was born.
The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, unlike the Six Celan Songs, deals directly with a war situation: an 18-month-old Kosovan boy, left for dead during the Balkan Wars, is found and re-named by the Serbs and reunites with his parents six months later. It is the most recent in Nyman’s series of collaborations with visual artists-in this case, the American feminist/conceptualist Mary Kelly. Kelly provided the composer with a complex text in simple ballad form, which he brilliantly subverts in his 18-minute piece. The work was written for Sarah Leonard and the Nyman Quartet and received its first performance in 2001 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, surrounded by Kelly’s visual representation of the text.
Nyman Brass marks the first time an entire album of the composer’s music has been entrusted to an ensemble other than the musicians who regularly work with him. For this recording, Nyman’s works have been expertly arranged by John Parkinson and Andrew Berryman for the British brass band Wingates Band.
The two main sequences on the album are from the scores to Volker Schlöndorff’s 1996 film The Ogre and Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (2005). Rounding out the album are two Michael Nyman Band classics, In Re Don Giovanni and Chasing sheep is best left to shepherds from The Draughtman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982). Here the music sounds significantly different from the original performances. The composer remarks that “the whole sound-world was transformed. Things like repeated rhythms which I originally gave to piano are punchier, edgier, more dangerous on cornets and trombones.”
Wingates Band was formed in 1873 by the members of the Bible Class of Wingates Independent Methodist Church in Westhoughton, Bolton, in response to a challenge from members of Westhoughton Old Band, founded in 1858. By the turn of the century, led by legendary ‘giant’ of the British brass band movement Willaim Rimmer, Wingates had become one of the top bands in the country. In 1906, the Band achieved national fame by winning the “double”: the British Open and the British National Championships. The following year, Wingates astounded the brass band world by completing the “double” again. For more information, visit www.wingatesband.org.
Michael Nyman comments that it was “a privilege” to work with Wingates. Although his music is very different from what the players were used to, Nyman says they “picked up the style, especially the formality of the music, and it soon sounded second nature to them …I loved the spirit of the playing, the instant dedication and the energy in what is a very new sound world for me.”
On June 24, Naxos releases the newest addition to Chandos’ Britten catalog: Owen Wingrave, a rarely-performed late Britten masterwork and his second-to-last opera (Chandos 10473). Owen Wingrave features seasoned Britten performer Richard Hickox, who leads the City of London Sinfonia and a cast that includes Alan Opie, James Gilchrist, and Janice Watson.
Commissioned by BBC Television in 1966, Owen Wingrave is a “Cinderella story” among Britten’s operas, despite its imaginative, closely-knit score, possibly because it was composed for television. Like its 1954 predecessor, The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave is based on a ghost story by Henry James. Britten read the story while working on The Turn of the Screw and was inspired to set it as an opera. The music employs the relatively spare textures Britten adopted in his later years.In his latest recording for the label, Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda leads the BBC Philharmonic in performances of three works by Serge Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1, The Isle of the Dead, and Youth Symphony (CHAN 10475).
One of the most remarkable composers of the 20th century, Rachmaninoff wrote three Romantically-inclined symphonies, two of which are now standard orchestral repertoire. However, the premiere of Symphony No. 1 was such a disaster that Rachmaninoff refrained from composing anything more for the next three years. The conductor, Glazunov, is rumored to have been drunk, and Rachmaninoff was unable to attend the entire performance. He reacted by tearing up the score. Luckily, the instrumental parts were preserved and rediscovered in 1945, permitting the restoration of the work. The recording also features the ‘Youth Symphony’, the first movement of an unfinished symphony in D minor, composed when Rachmaninoff was only 17, and the great symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s painting of the same name, which Rachmaninoff had seen on display in Paris in 1907. Composed in 1909, it is still a relatively early work, but contains some of the dark Russian spiritual qualities which Rachmaninoff would develop in later compositions.
At the same time, sound quality is important to classical music collectors and most are not really satisfied with heavily compressed files. Higher-quality files are much bigger and are more difficult to download…
… We made our entire catalog available for streaming online, free, in 1996 so that people could listen to our recordings before purchasing them…
If the industry had gotten together in the late-1990s and come up with a concept like iTunes, it could have avoided most of the piracy problems it has been experiencing in recent years…
On June 24, Naxos of America, Inc. begins distribution of ERM Media, the record label of conductor-composer Robert Ian Winstin. Based in the Chicago suburban area and now celebrating its 25th year, ERM Media is devoted to recordings of music by living composers. The label is also known for its many series, which include the 18-volume Masterworks of the New Era; Holidays of the New Era; the Prestige Series (which features one composer per disc and is now in its third volume); and the upcoming Millienium Project: Made in the Americas series.
In addition to his work as a composer, Mr. Winstin is the principal guest conductor and composer-in-residence of the Kiev Philharmonic, recording conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony, and music director and founder of the Millennium Symphony.
The Taliban Dances are extra-musical comments on society, war, and death. They are full of life, devastating in their sadness, surprisingly humorous, and starkly serious. They are both Eastern and Western; composed for violin and orchestra, The Taliban Dances are loosely based on several authentic Arabic scales and modal rhythmic structures, gradually replaced by traditional Western-style harmonies and rhythmic structures.
The work begins with a violin cadenza-a “Call for Prayer,” which is intended to be a ‘prayer’ for all nations, East and West. This cadenza, used as the opening for both the first movement and the finale, serves to unite the work.
The first movement, which represents hope and youthful love, sets the tone for the piece. This movement, the most “Arabic”-sounding of the five, leads to the first of the two haunting lullabies. In the lullabies, movements two and four, Winstin uses many of the same themes with different textures, consistently returning to a more grounded, rhythmic texture. (In the second of the two lullabies, movement four, the textures are more aggressive-literally a musical fight between two cultures.)
Sandwiched between the lullabies is the humorous “Baghdad Bossa Nova” (movement three), complete with an atonal dance section which owes its structure to the more famous Bossa Novas of the early ‘60s and ‘70s, and, indeed, parodies them. It is a poignantly humorous look at war, featuring a surprising descending slide whistle (”incoming!”) and the popping of balloons to signify the dropping of bombs. It is an artistic statement on the absurdity of war.
After the repeated “Call for Prayer,” the Taliban Dances end with a fiendishly difficult solo violin line which whirls its way-in ever-increasing tempi-towards the climax by way of a nursery rhyme, a cacophonous “Dies Irae” (‘Song of Death’) quote and “Dixie.”
Masterworks of the New Era is the 12th volume in the landmark, award-winning series devoted to the music of living composers worldwide. This four-CD set includes new music by Abbott, Bagdazian, Barmor Rose, Bilotta, Blumhofer, Brickman, Clark, Constantinides, Dal Porto, Evans, Field, Garber, Gottschalk, Guthrie, He, Jones, Korneitchouk, McMullin, Olac, Powers, Rudenstein, Sartor, Schroeter, Timpson, Stadig, Walczyk, Winsor, Worthington, and Wylegala.
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Composed 11 years apart, Michael Nyman’s 
Commissioned by BBC Television in 1966, Owen Wingrave is a “Cinderella story” among Britten’s operas, despite its imaginative, closely-knit score, possibly because it was composed for television. Like its 1954 predecessor, The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave is based on a ghost story by Henry James. Britten read the story while working on The Turn of the Screw and was inspired to set it as an opera. The music employs the relatively spare textures Britten adopted in his later years.In his latest recording for the label, Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda leads the BBC Philharmonic in performances of three works by Serge Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1, The Isle of the Dead, and Youth Symphony (CHAN 10475).
One of the most remarkable composers of the 20th century, Rachmaninoff wrote three Romantically-inclined symphonies, two of which are now standard orchestral repertoire. However, the premiere of 
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