Tracklista:1. Re:Fire 2. The End 3. Die For You 4. Step 5. Sweet Temptation 6. One Way 7. Believe Myself 8. Piece Of My Wish 9. Moment 10. Kocho no Yume 11. Dearly 12. Dominator (live bonus track) 13. White Crow (live bonus track)
Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade was born in Paris in 1857 and died in Monte Carlo in 1944. Although she came from a non-musical family she was something of a prodigy as a pianist and composer – she began writing sacred music at the age of eight. It was Bizet who advised Chaminade’s parents that she deserved a sound musical education: as she was unable to enter the Conservatoire (which did not then admit women) she studied privately with several teachers. These included Le Couppey (for piano) and Savard (for counterpoint, harmony and fugue); she also studied violin with the celebrated Belgian Martin Marsick, a pupil of Joachim, and composition with Benjamin Godard. Furthermore, she attained proficiency as a conductor, made her concert debut at the age of eighteen, toured widely, and became a well-known public figure, eventually receiving the Légion d’Honneur from the French government. In the course of her long life Chaminade produced around 350 works including a comic opera, a ballet, a choral symphony entitled Les amazones, chamber and orchestral music, and about a hundred songs. But the area in which she excelled and was most productive was the short lyric piano piece, and many of these became very popular, bringing her considerable commercial success and fame in France, Britain and the USA. They fed a market of domestic and salon music-making which had little use for profundity or complexity of thought but responded to graceful melody, simple forms, clear textures and dextrous, gratefully written exploitation of the medium: music, with its ‘easy velocity’, often designed to sound harder to play than it really is. As a result, for long decades Chaminade’s reputation has been that of a mere purveyor of pleasant but deeply unimportant salon music: an ephemeral figure, virtually beneath musicological notice. (Eaglefield Hull’s admirably comprehensive Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians of 1925 ignores her very existence; it is symptomatic of the same attitude that she rates but one passing mention in Martin Cooper’s classic volume on French music from the death of Berlioz to the death of Fauré – as ‘charming’ and ‘fashionable’ – and that The New Grove takes over unaltered and unquestioned the brief and supercilious entry from the previous edition of Grove’s Dictionary.) But with the increasing attention being focussed in recent years upon the distinct achievements of women composers, and with belated respect thus accruing to such signally gifted figures as Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, Rebecca Clarke and Ruth Crawford, the reputation of Chaminade almost certainly calls out for upward revision. After all, as Norman Demuth perceptively remarks in his study of French piano music – which, if he cannot quite bring himself to intrude her into his main narrative, at least gives Chaminade a little ‘interlude’ chapter to herself – she was ‘nearly a genius in that she knew exactly what, and how, to write for pianists of moderate ability … we wish every writer for the piano had her innate gifts and could be equally musicianly in their own ways’. Demuth also stresses the fact that Chaminade’s music gracefully complements that of Fauré: while she may lack (or scruple to attempt) the latter’s innate profundity, she often matches him in elegance, melodic beauty and lyrical cantabile. It is hardly a criticism that she is usually easier to play. What any substantial sampling of her pieces makes clear, however, is that she spanned a wider range than the conventional picture of a ‘salon composer’ leads us to expect. Romantic attitudes and keyboard delicacy, yes – but also a wit that occasionally approaches irony, a robust rhythmic energy, and a melancholic vein that sometimes turns dark indeed. Maybe it does her most justice to appraise Chaminade as a direct forerunner of Poulenc, a composer who mates the elegant and the naive with a very sophisticated technique, and conducts a quintessentially French exploration of that area where sentiment shades over into profound emotion. Certainly the present selection opens with the salon composer to the fore in Arlequine, a crisp and scintillating exercise in the almost obligatory ‘Pierrot piece’ of Chaminade’s day – tuneful and inventive, with plenty of twinkly, dextrous work for the right hand. But a female Harlequin? Perhaps ‘feminine caprice’ (Chaminade inhabited an age with no horror of sexual stereotyping) is suggested by the abrupt, flouncing cadences. Fauré’s Romances sans paroles were probably her model in the early, lyrical Pièce romantique, where the elegant melody is mainly carried by the left hand against lapping off-beat quavers in the right. But in the much later Chanson bretonne, which actually belongs to the set of Romances sans paroles, Op 76, the technique is bolder and starker, with a crowing, folk-like tune (of the type that, a generation later, might have interested Koechlin or Emmanuel) made the basis of a vigorous dance-like piece: through-composed, with no separate middle-section apart from a suggestion of ‘exotic’ chromaticism, and rising to a resounding conclusion. The deliciously lilting Divertissement of 1901 is again the salon composer at her best, polish and elegance creating sheer enjoyment from the merest wisp of an idea, embellishing a bright D major tonality. By contrast the B major Consolation, the fifth of the set of Op 87 Pièces humoristiques, is something more serious, testifying to this composer’s intelligent absorption of the manners, and something of the matter, of great elder contemporaries. The undulating left-hand pattern and the lapping right-hand notes hint at a barcarolle rhythm which is intensified in the gorgeously Fauréan middle section, recalled in the piece’s closing bars. Liszt, rather than Fauré is, however, the presiding spirit here, nowhere more so than in the glittering little transition back to the main idea. The E major Passacaille, as Op 130 a comparatively late work, makes an interesting comparison with the very early Chaconne included in volume 1 of this series. In fact even less than that piece is this a strict study in ground-bass variations, as its title might imply – though the presence of a ground is occasionally hinted at. Instead it is a sophisticated exercise in neo-Baroque evocation, recalling the virtuosity of the great clavecinistes of the age of Rameau and Couperin, and going back to the origins of the passacaille, which was a vigorous triple-time dance before it ever became a showcase for contrapuntal learning. Even later is the Op 165 Nocturne, published in 1925, and it bespeaks a composer who has attained a serene maturity without relinquishing one whit of her elegance. The poised and limpid outer sections perhaps inevitably awake echoes of Fauré. But now Chaminade is able to approach the profundity of the older composer’s last nocturnes, finding real depth of emotion in the più animato middle section. Clarity and calm are restored in the reprise, and the piece expires in a rippling coda. The Scherzo-valse is an altogether lighter affair, capricious in its moods but merely meant to entertain; while Sous bois is another of the Op 87 Pièces humoristiques that proves more lyrical than humorous. No French composer for the piano could be unaware, in using this title, of the seductive Sous bois of Chabrier in his epoch-making Pièces pittoresques (the same set of course, contains the ‘Scherzo-valse’ of French piano literature). But Chaminade’s piece relates more to her own characteristic procedures. Compare the opening with that of the early Pièce romantique. Gesture and texture are almost the same, but a much more extended movement develops from these very similar premises: a melodious intermezzo whose central span is enriched by what seems like the distant pealing of bells. With the Étude symphonique in B flat we are apparently on altogether more serious ground – as befits a piece dedicated to Paderewski, no less. But though the music, unfolding at first as a calm andante, gathers force through the elaborate motion of its inner parts, and then plunges into an allegro appassionato which intermingles a measure of motivic development along with turbulent bravura display, there is no real symphonic drama here, and the cat-like contentment of the final bars suggests it was really all a game. We are nearer to reality in the short Élégie in D flat, third in a set of Feuillets d’album published in 1910. On one level this is yet another example of the ‘song without words’ genre. But the harmony tends to wander into shadowed areas, discreet canonic imitation intensifies feeling, and some of the later developments engender an unexpected measure of passion. The superb D major Gigue, Op 43, dedicated to the composer and conductor Camille Chevillard is one of Chaminade’s frequent studies in semi-archaic dance rhythm, and one of the more brilliant. Though the general impression is ‘mock baroque’, carried through with joyful velocity, the piece is remarkable for its inventive and enlivening use of cross-rhythms, and for a keyboard style whose solidity and energy suggest Brahms in his bravura moods. When she required it, Chaminade could certainly summon up the grand manner, and nowhere to greater effect than in the most extended work on this disc, Au pays dévasté. Here there is no thought of entertainment. Published in 1919, this ‘devastated landscape’ is unmistakably a war elegy such as we find in some of Debussy’s last piano music, though its bleak and deeply felt G minor lamentation is couched in an idiom more Romantic than Impressionist. Superbly constructed, and lingering long in the memory, this powerful work deserves to be much better known. Landscape of a very different kind features in the delicate F major Pastorale, published ten years before the Great War. This is really another clavecin-style piece, but one of such formal polish that – not only in the blithe and lyrically decorate
„Voices” to, przełomowy project Maxa Richtera, inspirowany Powszechną Deklaracją Praw Człowieka. Tekst czyta ceniona amerykańska aktorka Kiki Layne (znana z filmu Gdyby ulica Beale umiała mówić). Wielogłosowe narracje ludzi z całego świata budują głosowy pejzaż, przez który płynie muzyka: są tytułowymi „Głosami (Voices)”. Orkiestra „Voices” to radykalnie przeobrażony zespół. Ponieważ świat został wywrócony do góry nogami, podobnie stało się z proporcjami tej orkiestry. To niemal same kontrabasy i wiolonczele. Tracklista: CD 1 1. All Human Beings 2. Origins 3. Journey Piece 4. Chorale 5. Hypocognition 6. Prelude 6 7. Murmuration 8. Cartography 9. Little Requiems 10 Mercy CD 2 1. All Human Beings (Voiceless Mix) 2. Origins (Voiceless Mix) 3. Journey Piece (Voiceless Mix) 4. Chorale (Voiceless Mix) 5. Hypocognition (Voiceless Mix) 6. Prelude 6 (Voiceless Mix) 7. Murmuration (Voiceless Mix) 8. Cartography (Voiceless Mix) 9. Little Requiems (Voiceless Mix) 10 Mercy (Voiceless Mix)
Tracklista:1. Free Piece One2. Piece for Poppy3. Free Piece Two4. My Ship5. Free Piece Three6. Beija Flor7. Some Other Time8. After Supper9. Free Piece Four10. What's New11. Improvisations On Bach's Prelude in E-flat Minor12. Free Piece Five13. What Kind of Fool Am I?
Schubert is unique among great composers in having written almost as much piano music for four hands as for two. Piano duetting was a popular pastime in his day, and the prospects for having such pieces published were far healthier than they were for solo piano music, particularly when it came to works of the ambitious scope Schubert wanted to write. Several of his most significant four-hands works had their origins in his two protracted visits to Hungary, where he was employed as music-master to the daughters of Count Esterházy von Galánta at his summer residence in Zseliz (now Zveliezovce, in Slovakia). When Schubert first went there, in 1818, the younger countess, Karoline, was a girl of thirteen, but when he returned six years later she had blossomed into a young woman, and by all accounts he fell deeply in love with her. Schubert may have intended the piano duets he composed at Zseliz for his two pupils to play together, or he may have taken one of the parts himself, thereby from time to time allowing himself a degree of intimacy with Karoline. In all likelihood, the players would have assumed the primo and secondo parts by turns—as, indeed, do Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis on the present recording.One of the four-hands works Schubert composed during his first visit to Hungary was a set of variations in E minor on a French song (D624). It was his first piano duet to appear in print, and its title-page bore a dedication to Beethoven. Schubert returned to the key of E minor, and to ostensibly French sources, for a larger work which he may have composed during his 1824 stay in Zseliz. The piece had a somewhat chequered publication history: its first movement was issued in the summer of 1826, under the grandiose title of Divertissement en Forme d’une Marche brillante et raisonée pour le pianoforte à quatre mains composé sur des motifs origineaux [sic!] Français par François Schubert. The remaining two movements appeared the following year, under a different opus number, as an Andantino varié and Rondeau brillant. In dividing the work into two halves the publisher no doubt hoped to increase his sales revenue, but also to disguise the nature of what Schubert must have intended as a large-scale sonata in three movements. Just how unfashionable such serious fare was can be seen from the fate of Schubert’s great Piano Sonata in G major D894, of 1826: although the word ‘Sonata’ was prominently displayed on the title-page of his manuscript, it did not figure at all in the first edition, which marketed the work instead as though it consisted of four disparate pieces.In the case of the so-called Divertissement sur des motifs originaux français D823, the adjective ‘raisonée’ in connection with the opening movement was the publisher’s only hint that the piece was a rigorously argued sonata allegro. The work is seldom played in its complete form, but its slow movement, the Andantino varié in B minor, has achieved the status of a self-contained item—understandably so, since it is one of the most perfect and beautiful of all Schubert’s duets. The inspiration behind it is likely to have been Mozart’s piano duet Variations in G major K501, which have a similar chamber-music intimacy, and in which—as in Schubert’s piece—the theme returns in all its original simplicity to round the music off. Among Schubert’s variations, the second, with its toy-trumpet fanfares, has a Mendelssohnian lightness and transparency; while the third presents a continuous pattern of semiquavers in seemingly effortless counterpoint between the players’ right hands. In the deeply expressive final variation the tempo slows, and the music undergoes a sea-change into the radiant key of B major. Rather than offer a literal repeat of each half of the theme, as in the first three variations, Schubert now presents elaborately ornamented quasi-repeats, so that this is in effect two variations rolled into one. From here, the music dissolves into an abbreviated reprise of the original theme, its unadorned nature highlighted by the intricacy of the music that has preceded it.On a larger scale are the Variations in A flat major, D813. They were composed in Zseliz in the summer of 1824, around the same time as the most ambitious of all Schubert’s piano duets, the Grand Duo D812. Reporting from Zseliz to his artist friend Moritz von Schwind, Schubert told him that the new variations had been greeted with particular applause there. ‘But as I don’t quite trust the Hungarians’ taste’, Schubert added, ‘I shall leave it to you and the Viennese to decide about them.’Schubert’s variation theme is a march whose salient features are an unexpected turn to C minor at the end of its first half, and the canonic imitation of the melodic line at the start of the second half. Both these characteristics leave a mark on the eight variations that follow. The third of them transforms the theme’s march rhythm into Schubert’s favoured dactylic pattern (one long note followed by two short), with the melody given out in contrapuntal dialogue by the primo player, while the secondo has a pulsating inner voice and a delicate pizzicato bass-line. The same rhythm pervades Variation 5—a melancholy and deeply expressive piece in the minor (the turn to the minor at the close of the original theme’s first half is now replaced with a corresponding change to the major); but even more haunting is the penultimate variation, whose chromatic harmonies convey an infinite sense of longing. This time the music turns not to C minor at the end of the first half, but to C major, in a passionate outburst of overwhelming effect. The extended final variation brings with it a change in metre that allows the work to come to a brilliant conclusion.The remaining pieces recorded here were all composed in the last year of Schubert’s tragically short life. The Allegro in A minor, D947 and the Rondo in A major, D951 were written in May and June 1828 respectively, and may well have been intended to form a two-movement sonata along the lines of Beethoven’s E minor Sonata Op 90. Schubert’s rondo is lovingly modelled on the lyrical finale of Beethoven’s sonata: his theme follows a similar harmonic pattern, and even the keyboard layout of its opening bars, with the melody’s initial phrase followed by a more assertive answer in octaves, echoes Beethoven’s. Schubert mirrors Beethoven’s procedure, too, by transferring the final reprise of the rondo theme to the sonorous tenor register, with a continuous pattern of semiquavers unfolding above it. But Schubert’s piece is far from a slavish imitation, and it can more than hold its own against Beethoven’s. Particularly beautiful is the manner in which one of the important subsidiary themes returns towards the end, surmounted by a shimmering pianissimo accompaniment in repeated chords from the primo player.The A major Rondo was published in December 1828, less than a month after Schubert died, but its A minor companion-piece did not see the light of day until 1840, when Anton Diabelli issued it under the heading of Lebensstürme (‘The storms of life’)—a catchpenny title that belittles the stature of what is one of Schubert’s most imposing sonata movements. Its turbulent opening pages meet their obverse side in the serenity of a second subject given out in the manner of a distant chorale which leaves any notion of storms far behind. The piece as a whole is one that makes dramatic use of abrupt silences—nowhere more startlingly so than at the end of its first stage, where the music breaks off in mid-stream, only to be followed by an unceremonious plunge into a wholly unexpected key for the start of the central development section. The development is entirely based on the opening subject, which is transformed in its closing moments into a delicately tripping passage that throws the explosive start of the recapitulation into relief.The origins of the Fugue in E minor, D952 were recounted by Schubert’s composer friend Franz Lachner: In the year 1828, on 3 June, Schubert and I were invited by the editor of the Modezeitung [Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode], Herr [Johann] Schikh, for a country outing to Baden, near Vienna. In the evening Schikh said to us: ‘Tomorrow morning we shall go to Heiligenkreuz, to hear the famous organ there. Perhaps you could both compose a small piece and perform it there?’ Schubert suggested the composition of a four-hands fugue, which was completed by both parties towards midnight. On the next day, at 6 in the morning, we travelled to Heiligenkreuz, where both fugues were performed in the presence of several monks. Schubert, who was about to embark on the composition of his Mass in E flat major, D950, was much preoccupied with fugal writing during the final months of his life, and he subsequently used the same fugue-subject for an exercise in counterpoint which he prepared in the hope of receiving instruction from the renowned theoretician Simon Sechter. Although Schubert’s fugue is laid out for four hands, the presence during its closing stages of a long-sustained pedal-note in the bass indicates that he had the sound of the Heiligenkreuz organ in mind.Throughout his life, Schubert was fascinated by the challenge of welding the various movements of a sonata into a continuous and unified whole—much as Beethoven had done in the first of his two piano sonatas ‘quasi una fantasia’, Op 27. Schubert’s earliest surviving composition, written at the age of thirteen, is a Fantasie for piano duet; and the famous piano duet Fantasie in F minor, D940, composed in the early months of 1828, was preceded by two important works of a similar kind, both in C major: the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy for piano solo, D760, where virtually everything arises out of the repeated-note dactylic rhythm of the song-fragment that forms the basis of its slow second section; and the Fantasy for violin and piano, D934, which also makes use of a pre-existing song.Behind the Fantasie in F minor, D940, lurks the shadow not so much of Beethoven’s Sonata Op 27 No 1, as of Mozart’s F minor Fantasia K608—a piece written for a mechanical organ, but which circulated widely, as it still does today, in the form of a piano duet. Like Mozart’s, the final section of Schubert’s Fantasie incorporates a fugue (Mozart’s fugue is actually a contrapuntally intensified reprise of a passage from his first section); but no less significant is the presence in Mozart’s opening Allegro of a hair-raising excursion into the distant key of F sharp minor. Schubert treats the same startling harmonic shift on a vastly expanded scale, setting both middle sections of his Fantasie in F sharp minor. Moreover, just as the two outer sections of his piece are related to each other, so too, in a more subtle fashion, are the slow movement and scherzo, with the harmonic progression traced by the Largo’s grandiose opening bars returning in an accelerated form to underpin the scherzo’s theme.The Fantasie’s opening melody, with its expressive agogic appoggiaturas, is a not-so-distant cousin of the theme from the slow movement of Schubert’s C major String Quintet, composed in the same year. Both impart more than a trace of Hungarian speech-rhythm, and appropriately enough, when Schubert submitted a list of his available compositions to the publishers Schott & Sons in February 1828, he informed them that the Fantasie was to be dedicated to Karoline Esterházy.At the time Schubert worked on his F minor Fantasie, Paganini was making his sensational Viennese appearances. In the slow movement of the great violinist’s B minor Concerto Schubert had, as he told his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, ‘heard an angel sing’; and he tried to reproduce the effect, complete with a quasi-portamento, in the Fantasie’s slow movement, at the point where the forceful opening theme, in a sharply ‘dotted’ rhythm, gives way to the radiant calm of the major. When the initial theme returns, it does so at first in a distant pianissimo, as though it had been cowed into submission by the warmth of the violin-like melody; but the moment is short-lived, before the austere grandeur of the movement’s beginning is restored.The scherzo’s trio is a delicate piece in D major, but it had not always been so: Schubert’s sketches show that he planned to alternate the scherzo itself with a march, and to have each section appear twice. His instinct to make the whole design more compact was surely right; and at the end of the da capo a dramatic switch of key and an abrupt silence prepare the return of the Fantasie’s opening melody in dramatic fashion.The final section offers a substantial reprise of the work’s beginning, after which Schubert clearly needs to intensify his material in order to wind the piece up satisfactorily. His solution is to present the opening section’s march-like second theme in the guise of a double fugue. As the fugal section reaches its climax, the music is dramatically broken off, as though to renew the link between scherzo and finale. Once more, the silence is followed by the work’s opening theme, but this time the melody is presented in a new, chromatically enhanced harmonization that lends it added poignancy; and the chromatic guise is picked up in the work’s final bars—a cry of anguish that rises to a peak before sinking down onto a long-sustained final chord.
„Hustling Culture”, trzecia pełnometrażowa płyta i pierwsza nakładem Easy Star Records, na standardowym czarnym winylu z dołączoną kartą do pobrania dla MP3. Tracklista: 1. Hustling Culture 2. Uptown Set 3. Piece Of Love 4. World Of Happiness 5. People Business 6. The Horse 7. Top Shelf 8. Too Late 9. Reggae Pops Featuring – Dan Hastie 10. Thanks For Life
Tracklista: LP 1 1. I'm A Special Kid 2. Runnin' Wild (Ain't Gonna Help You) 3. Guessing Games 4. You Got Me Believing 5. I Love You Still 6. Because I Love You 7. Every Where You Go 8. I Want A Little Girl 9. Simon Says 10. I'm Free, No Dope For Me LP 2 1. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised 2. We Don't Dig No Busing (The Busing Song) 3. Funky Breakdown 4. Love Got A Piece Of Your Mind 5. Girl Why Do You Want To Take My Heart 6. It's Time For Love 7. Losing My Girl 8. The Other Guy 9. James Brown
1. Bombastic 2. In The Summertime 3. Oh Carolina 4. That Girl 5. Piece Of My Heart 6. Sexy Body Girls 7. Why You Treat Me So Bad (Clean Version) 8. Big Up 9. Soon Be Done 10. Woman A Pressure Me 11. The Train Is Coming 12. Geenie
Tracklista: LP 1 1. Phases III (1970) 2. Phases II (1969) LP 2 1. To Phyllis (1971) 2. Heroica Overture (1970) LP 3 1. Phases II (1969) 2. Whale Piece (1970-71) LP 4 1. Polish Wedding Music (1967) 2. Vortex (1970)
Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) had a great love for Italian music of the late Renaissance and Baroque. He was actively involved in editing and transcribing the music of Monteverdi, Vitali and Marcello and in 1917 began work on what was to become the first of three orchestral suites which he called Ancient Airs and Dances. These suites consist of arrangements of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and French lute and baroque guitar music. This recording presents the original lute versions of the works Respighi arranged, in essentially the same order in which they appear in his suites. It does not slavishly follow Respighi’s repeat schemes, his rearrangement of the structure of the original works, or his tempo indications. In the first Italiana, the Passo mezzo bonissimo and Gianoncelli’s Bergamasca, for example, Respighi interrupts each piece, inserts another work, and then returns again to the first. In the Bergamasca, a Tasteggiata (Prelude) from a suite in another key has been inserted, which would have required retuning the archlute. While these insertions are extremely effective in Respighi’s arrangements, they cannot have been so performed on the lute in the seventeenth century. Here, each work is performed in its entirety before moving on to the next piece.