Matthew Kaner: Chamber Music

matthew kaner chamber music GUY JOHNSTON MARK SIMPSON BENJAMIN BAKER & DANIEL LEBHARDT GOLDFIELD ENSEMBLE

matthew kaner (b. 1986)

chamber music

MARK SIMPSON

I. Glints in the Water

[3:33]

12

I. The Land of Nod

[9:33]

2

II. Ripples

[4:52]

13

[4:53]

3

III. Eroding Lines

[3:29]

II. Searching for the Dimmest Stars

basset clarinet

GUY JOHNSTON cello

I. Prelude

[1:06]

14

I. The Swift

[4:02]

15

II. The Kestrel

[8:10]

5

II. Moto perpetuo

[0:54]

6

III. Interlude

[0:53]

7

IV. Sarabande (i)

[0:46]

8

V. Capriccio

[3:45]

16

I. Out on the Hills

[3:22]

[0:50]

17

II. A Light Dusting

[2:47]

[3:05]

18

III. Snowbells

[2:29]

[1:40]

19

IV. Thawing

[3:50]

20

V. Fireside Tale

[5:45]

9 10 11

VI. Sarabande (ii) VII. Lamento VIII. Postlude

GOLDFIELD ENSEMBLE

With thanks for their sponsorship to RVW Trust and the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust, Graham Cumming, Alan Davey, Rosa Mannion, Colin Matthews, Julia Orford, Hugh Richards, Oliver Rivers, James Shedden and Helen Innes, Helen and Richard Sheldon, Joanie Speers, and many other generous individuals and friends

Flight Studies for basset clarinet

Suite for Cello 4

BENJAMIN BAKER violin & DANIEL LEBHARDT piano with MATTHIAS BALZAT cello

Matthew Kaner is supported by PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund in partnership with Jerwood Arts

At Night for clarinet quintet

Piano Trio 1

Five Highland Scenes for violin and piano

Total playing time

Kate Romano clarinet / artistic director Nicola Goldscheider violin Alexandra Caldon violin Bridget Carey viola Toby Turton cello

[69:57]

Premiere recordings

Recorded on 4-6 & 30 January and 24 February 2022 at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge Producers/Engineers: Paul Baxter & James Waterhouse 24-bit digital editing: James Waterhouse 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: Eliot Garcia Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover: Sabine Kaner, Eroded Lines, embroidery; photo: Jake Kaner Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

Notes on the music Matthew Kaner comes from a family of makers. His mother is a textile artist, his father a furniture designer and restorer. He grew up surrounded by the physicality of craft, valuing the handmade over the machine-made and inheriting an open-minded, exploratory approach to the discovery of new techniques.

A composer is both designer and craftsman.

There’s no factory-like replication in Kaner’s music; indeed, he rails slightly against the idea of ‘finding his voice’, fearing repetition and describing each piece of music as inhabiting a distinctive and particular world where certain things belong and certain things don’t. Above all, he is a musical storyteller, whether writing for the stage or instrumental forces.

The myriad ways in which music can – and can’t – tell a story underpin his creative thoughts, illustrated most clearly on this album in the Five Highland Scenes, the two Flight Studies (‘The Swift’ and ‘The Kestrel’) and the clarinet quintet At Night.

In 2018, when I was working with Matthew Kaner on his Hansel and Gretel as commissioner, producer and performer, I became acutely aware of this liminal place that his music occupies, straddling both real world and story, flitting seamlessly back and forth between fact and fiction. Hansel and Gretel – a stage work for which Kaner wrote the music to a new poetic retelling

by Simon Armitage – proved to be highly

influential in his development, establishing patterns of composing which he has applied in his subsequent work. To put it simply, he sets out the sound world for each piece (the ‘landscape’ or ‘scenery’) then continually plays with the voice of the narrator, foregrounding and backgrounding, shifting between autobiography and third person. There are close parallels with the way that a fairy story functions; familiar frameworks are set up enabling us to focus on the features, variations and inflections provided by the ever-changing storyteller.

Kaner creates these worlds using musical tropes or traits associated with cultural and social norms. They offer listeners a sense of characters and environment, or create a backdrop or mood for dramatic action. At other times, they serve more literal word-painting and onomatopoeic effects; on this album, you can hear chiming clocks, music boxes, tiny pizzicato footsteps, falling snow, ‘breathing’ chords, bells, rocking minor thirds to evoke a lullaby, snatches of birdsong. He sometimes embeds quotations such as the Lord Salisbury Pavane in the Cello Suite or the lullabies in At Night that point to a specific time and place.

Again, there is a parallel with the fairy story which builds up clusters of narrative units or ‘motifs’ (the wicked stepmother, the lost shoe, etc.) so that the reader is cast into the Realm of Fairy and expectations are adjusted accordingly.

In both cases, an identifiable framework draws listeners in. But who is telling the story? Sometimes it’s the composer, sometimes it’s someone else. Kaner’s narrators can step in and out of their stories, reflect on the past, address their audience directly or look to the future. In ‘Fireside Tale’ (Five Highland Scenes) Kaner says that the storyteller at the very end is not him, but an anonymous Scottish local, telling the story in his own voice and syntax to a gathered audience around the fire in a remote mountain pub. The music captures Kaner’s own experience of a trip to Scotland, but he feels that he is only really present as a stranger in the pub, listening to the storyteller. Kaner concludes ‘it’s a narrative about narrativity, or a story about story-telling’.

A narrative element was also critical in the composition of ‘The Kestrel’. Kaner describes a ‘significant creative epiphany’ when he realised that the movement should be structured as a story rather than a static portrait, and he revised the musical plot several times after watching a documentary about the hunting habits and behaviours of the kestrel. The music follows a traditional ‘heroic’ shape where the climactic kill takes place in the final two minutes, before the kestrel flies away.

‘The Kestrel’ and Five Highland Scenes have narrative elements that grow organically from the music. But the clarinet quintet At Night was a deliberate expansion on these ideas, set out at the very start. Kaner describes At Night as ‘a cycle of three musical stories … each inspired by and adapted from three poems that I identified as suggestive of musical narrative, linked by a common theme of night’. These ‘stories’ combine his own first-hand experiences (sleep, dreams, nightmares, night terrors and ghosts) with the worlds that the poems inhabit, all placed in the wider context of the ‘night’ repertoire, including nineteenthcentury nocturnes and night pieces by Debussy, Bartók, Mussorgsky and Britten, as well as berceuses and Wiegenlieder.

It all presents an intriguing position for the performers of At Night, whose voices are the final ‘storytellers’ when the piece is played. Whilst rehearsing, we sometimes missed the quotes or references. I certainly did not immediately spot all of the lullaby references in the first movement – Chopin, Fauré, Brahms – but I recall being strongly aware of a ‘feeling of lullaby’ and an urge to play very tenderly, which was not dictated by the title or knowledge of the inspiration behind the piece. When Matt showed me the referenced music written side-by-side with his score, I could fully appreciate

Notes on the music the extent of the obliqueness. He has composed around them, sometimes leaving just an imprint, a ghost, a remnant of the original.

I was initially puzzled by Matt’s choice of cover art for this album. Eroded Lines, a textile sample by his mother, Sabine Kaner, is a beautifully intricate piece, consisting of rows of stitching of varying intensities on a painted background. It is also the inspiration behind the third movement of his Piano Trio. But it also seemed to be everything his music was not – fragmented, interrupted, with strands that break off without warning, closure, or conclusion. On listening to the whole album, I feel that his attraction to this textile reveals something fundamental at the heart of his music. ‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it’, goes an old Tuscan proverb, quoted by Italo Calvino in his introduction to Italian Folktales. It’s an open invitation to keep on telling the tale, to keep the storylines open, refreshing it anew each time it is performed.

Movements I and III of Five Highland Scenes for violin and piano (‘Out on the Hills’ and ‘Snowbells’) were first written and premiered in 2016 as part of a residency to celebrate 70 years of BBC Radio 3, in collaboration with Sound and Music. ‘Out on the Hills’ was originally titled ‘The Graig’ and was written for solo violin, to accompany poetry by Oli Hazzard.

© 2022 Kate Romano

Returning to these two short pieces at various points throughout 2017 and 2018, I began to think about reworking and combining them as part of a cycle of five miniatures for violin and piano. Both the original works deliberately conjured images of nature and the outdoors. Following a solo cycling and walking trip I made in 2017 I began to contemplate further exploring this theme in the remaining movements.

(Mostly) fond recollections of the tendency for Scottish mountain weather to veer between extremes of sun, gentle snow, and heavy downpours all within a single day inspired the broad range of characters and evolving textures found throughout the piece.

Kate Romano has a 25-year career as a chamber musician and solo clarinettist. She regularly writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and is CEO of Stapleford Granary Arts Centre in Cambridge.

When, back in 2016, I had my first opportunity to write for basset clarinet for Mark Simpson during a 2016 residency with BBC Radio 3, I quickly fell in love with the instrument and its possibilities for creating a

full-bodied sound, without the need for any accompaniment, across its extended range.

The piece I wrote imitated the strange and unusual dance that the Red Crowned Crane performs when socialising with other birds of the same species, and occasionally alone (for reasons that are not understood).

When presented with the opportunity to write for the instrument again, I set about creating a ongoing series of Flight Studies that further explore its remarkable ability to soar across its register, and the huge variety of tone colours it can produce within them, in order to imitate the flight patterns and behaviours of various different birds. (My own yearning for wide-open spaces during the first Covid-19 lockdown partly inspired the decision to write about birds swooping and diving across vast aerial spaces.) The swift is remarkable for its incredible speed and agility, reaching up to 70 miles per hour, and for remaining in flight for great lengths of time, including while sleeping, only leaving the air to nest. The piece depicts the graceful swooping and soaring motion of these birds from the very start, along with the idea of never landing; while the music slows at times, it remains in near-perpetual motion from start to finish.

The kestrel is perhaps best known for its remarkable ability to hover, keeping its head entirely still, even in the wind, whilst tracking and hunting its prey. Eventually it will begin the attack by swooping downwards, before finally making the kill with a firm peck to the back of the neck. The music depicts this behaviour as a narrative sequence of events, with long pedal tones to suggest the bird’s motionless hovering and ‘swooping’ playfully into the lower register as it explores its territory and seeks its next target. The prey (a jittering insect or lizard of some kind) eventually shows itself and the kestrel pursues it with ever increasing energy, leading to an inevitable conclusion. Finally, the kestrel flies away and into the distance. ‘The Swift’ and ‘The Kestrel’ were commissioned as Sinfonietta Shorts by the London Sinfonietta, and were premiered at King’s Place by Mark van de Wiel on 24 March 2021.

At Night is made up of a pair of movements inspired by poems on the theme of night.

The first depicts the excited play of a young child (inspired by my own recent experiences as a first-time parent) as bedtime slowly draws near. After being lulled to sleep by a caring parent, the child enters the ‘Land of Nod’, as described so

Notes on the music beautifully by Robert Louis Stevenson in his poem of the same name. In this strange dream-realm, various odd, imp-like creatures are depicted, dancing and playing, before the child eventually begins to awaken, slowly returning to the playful state of the opening.

Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear.

The second, ‘Searching for the Dimmest Stars’, begins by evoking the calm, thoughtful yet ultimately mysterious act of stargazing depicted in a beautiful poem entitled Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter) by the poet and cosmologist Rebecca Elson. Elson’s poem ponders the nature of dark matter that physicists suspect mysteriously holds the universe together, completely undetectable except for its gravitational effect. She considers the so-called heat death of the universe with ‘its last star going out’, before striking an optimistic tone, willing enough dark matter into existence ‘for immortality, / Always a star where we can warm ourselves’, enough to light ‘the bright spark of resurrection’. The musical follows a similar trajectory, ‘going out cold’ into silence midway through, before ‘relighting’ itself in the music’s final moments of harmonic warmth.

Written for Guy Johnston and commissioned

by Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, my Suite for Cello links directly to Hatfield House and its rich musical history, with a quotation from Orlando Gibbons’s Lord Salisbury Pavane (written for Robert Cecil) embedded within the opening theme of its Prelude. Also looking to the past, the form of the work is a reinterpretation of the baroque dance suite after Bach, covering a range of contrasting moods and styles in each of its eight movements, but with much of the music reappearing later, often in a transformed light.

Composed during the height of lockdown in 2020, the suite captures something of the unease, uncertainty, and even melancholy I felt at a time that had such a devastating impact on so many people’s lives. Yet there are also moments of hope and anticipation, prompted by the imminent arrival of my son, who was born not long after the piece was completed. Ultimately, the piece was, in no small part, inspired by the exquisite lyricism and remarkable range of expressive colours that Guy conjures so beautifully with his playing.

The first movement of the Piano Trio, ‘Glints in the Water’, was written and premiered in 2016 as part of the BBC Radio 3 residency mentioned above. It takes inspiration from a solo piano piece by the South Korean composer Unsuk Chin, and her brilliant set of Etudes for the piano. Amongst these I was particularly drawn to the one entitled ‘Toccata’, which features thrilling pulsing staccato notes throughout, in a real test of the player’s technique. Yet though the piano writing in my piece alludes to Chin’s étude, I took an entirely different approach to the violin and cello, which play long melodic phrases together against the piano’s glittering semiquavers, with results perhaps comparable to points of light reflected in a flowing river. Later these expansive lines come more to the fore in a stiller section, which the piano responds to with quiet bell-like echoes. Finally, all three instruments come together in a kind of reprise of the energetic opening, with dancing pizzicato notes in the strings to complement the bursts of staccato notes and chords in the piano.

‘Ripples’ is more meditative in character, slowly building its material from a quiet initial chord progression in the piano, accompanied by fragmentary figures in the strings. These opening sounds slowly evolve into much fuller textures, leading to

large, rich chords in the piano and expansive melodic lines in the strings, before they ultimately begin to die away, reaching a state of near-stillness at the end. The title depicts this sense of outwards expansion from a small initial ‘ripple’ into a much larger one, before it eventually disperses, leaving only a still pool of water behind.

The final movement, ‘Eroding Lines’, takes its title from a beautiful piece of textile art by my mother, Sabine Kaner, entitled Eroded Lines. Again, the piano writing suggests an étude-like texture with a series of fast rising scalic lines (also partly inspired by Unsuk Chin’s piano études, this time ‘Scalen’).

Eventually, the piano passes this material over to the strings, after which it is playfully exchanged across the whole ensemble.

At times the scales are played together in pairs; elsewhere they move at different speeds, resulting in a playful web-like texture of overlapping lines. However, after an emphatic climax in which the lines finally ‘align’ in a single melodic phrase, they begin to ‘erode’, shedding more and more notes as they go, until nothing remains at all. © 2022 Matthew Kaner

Benjamin Baker Since winning 1st Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and 3rd Prize at the Michael Hill Competition in New Zealand, Benjamin has established a strong international presence as a violinist.

Described by the New York Times as bringing ‘virtuosity, refinement and youthful exuberance’ to his debut at Merkin Concert Hall he is much sought after as soloist and chamber musician.

Recent highlights include regular appearances at Wigmore Hall and on BBC Radio 3, his debut with Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the East Neuk Festival and with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in New Zealand, alongside solo recordings with the BBC Concert and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras. In 2021 he recorded ‘1942: Prokofiev – Copland – Poulenc’ with Daniel Lebhardt on Delphian (DCD34247) which was released to considerable critical acclaim.

Charles Brookes

Kaupo Kikkas

Biographies He has undertaken tours of the USA, Colombia, China and Argentina and taken part in the Al Bustan Festival in Lebanon and the Sanguine Estate Music Festival in Australia. 2021 sees the launch of his At the World’s Edge festival in Queenstown, New Zealand and solo appearances with the Auckland Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic and Fort Worth Symphony Orchestras.

Benjamin plays on a Giovanni Grancino violin from 1694 on generous loan from a charitable trust. He was a prize-winner at the YCAT International Auditions in 2013.

Matthias Balzat New Zealand cellist Matthias Balzat has been on the stage since he could walk. He grew up in a large musical family which nurtured his burgeoning passion for the instrument.

From an early age he showed promise, winning his first national competition at the age of nine, and has subsequently won every national competition available to him in the country, including the National Concerto Competition (twice), the Wallace International Cello Competition, and the Young Performer of the Year award. By the age of 17 he had completed his first degree,

Kaupo Kikkas

Guy Johnston Guy Johnston is one of the most exciting British cellists of his generation, with early successes including winning BBC Young Musician of the Year, the Shell London Symphony Orchestra Gerald MacDonald Award and a Classical Brit.

Recent and forthcoming performances have included appearances with BBC National Orchestra of Wales (at the BBC Proms), Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestra of Opera North, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia and Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie. Guy continues to play chamber music and recitals at venues and festivals across Europe, collaborating with instrumentalists such as Melvyn Tan, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Janine Jansen, Lawrence Power, Anthony Marwood and Brett Dean.

A prolific recording artist, Guy’s recent recordings include Howells’ Cello Concerto with Britten Sinfonia and a celebration disc of the tricentenary of his David Tecchler cello, and Themes and Variations with Tom Poster.

Guy is an advocate for contemporary composers, having recently commissioned works by David Matthews, Mark Simpson, Joseph Phibbs and Matthew Kaner. He is Artistic Director of the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, a founder member of the award-winning Aronowitz Ensemble, and an Associate Professor of Cello at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.

Daniel studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with István Gulyás and Gyöngyi Keveházi and at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with Pascal Nemirovski.

Daniel Lebhardt Pianist Daniel Lebhardt won First Prize at the 2014 Young Concert Artists International auditions in Paris and New York. He was selected by Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) in 2015, and a year later he was invited to record music by Bartók for Decca and in 2016 won the Most Promising Pianist prize at the Sydney International Competition.

Since 2018 he has been represented by Askonas Holt and is currently based in Taplow, UK.

Mark Simpson One of the most intriguing artists on today’s British music scene, Liverpool-born clarinettist and composer In 2021 Daniel debuted with Mark Simpson’s musical Konzerthausorchester Berlin and National life is a symbiosis of Philharmonic of Ukraine and returned performance on the to the Barbican for a performance with concert platform and poring over his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He has manuscripts. Current performance highlights given concerts in his native Hungary, UK, Germany, Austria, France, the USA, Canada, include the premieres of Alchymia, a new clarinet quintet by Thomas Adès dedicated to China, Japan, Colombia, Argentina and Mark and the Diotima Quartet; while major Chile. In the last year Daniel and Benjamin performances of his own works include Baker recorded violin sonatas by Copland, Prokofiev and Poulenc. Released by Delphian a Piano Concerto premiered by Vikingur Ólafsson and the London Philharmonic (DCD34247), it garnered much praise in the Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner; press and was featured by Apple Music. the German premiere of his first opera, Daniel was also given the opportunity to Pleasure at the Theater Erfurt in Spring release a selection of Schubert solo piano 2023; and his orchestral work Israfel with works with NAXOS. Deutsche Symphonie Orchester Berlin and Robin Ticciati.

Chelsey Browne

a Bachelor of Music at the University of Waikato under James Tennant, after which he moved to Germany to complete his Masters under Pieter Wispelwey at the Robert Schumann Musikhochschule in Düsseldorf, where he has settled as a freelance soloist and chamber musician, and has won numerous awards such as the ROSL Strings Competition, and the University Concerto Competition. Matthias also performs regularly with the Ares Trio in Germany and Italy, being associated to the Avos Project School in Rome. Matthias has often appeared as a soloist with orchestras in New Zealand, Australia and Germany; he performs on a modern Beilharz Cello.

Kaupo Kikkas

Biographies

Biographies His Violin Concerto received premieres with the London Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed by its dedicatee Nicola Benedetti, and his Nachtstück for horn and piano, written for Ben Goldscheider (as an ECHO Rising Stars Artist) has been performed in major concert halls across Europe.

Currently Mark continues his partnerships with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and JeanGuihen Queyras in performances of music

by Helmut Lachenmann. Recent concerto highlights have included the world premiere of his own Clarinet Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic, Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto at the BBC Proms and Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is visiting Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and St Catherine’s College, Oxford (where he graduated with a first class honours) and has recently been one of the 2022 Aldeburgh Festival’s artists in residence.

Mark’s recording of his own Geysir and Mozart’s Gran Partita (Orchid Classics) won a Presto Recording of the Year award and was shortlisted for the 2021 Gramophone Awards. Simpson was recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Award in 2010, and the first ever winner of both the

BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year in 2006. His oratorio The Immortal received the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Classical Music in 2019.

Goldfield Ensemble Founded in 2011 by clarinettist Kate Romano, Goldfield Ensemble is collaborative, relentlessly curious and driven by a love of storytelling. Its musicians are established chamber musicians, recording artists and orchestral players.

In 2018, the ensemble expanded into a fully fledged production company, creating acclaimed theatrical and visual touring productions with artists including Solveig Settemsdal, poet Simon Armitage, and composer Matthew Kaner. The finest chamber music remains at the heart of all they do. They have performed at Milton Court, Kings Place and most UK festivals.

They frequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and their recordings have been played on radio stations in Canada and the USA. In 2019, Goldfield released the first recording of the chamber music of 83-year old Erika Fox for NMC Recordings, applauded in every category by critics and broadcasters.

Also available on Delphian Oliver Iredale Searle: Pilgrim of Curiosity RSNO Wind Ensemble; Carla Rees Baroque flute

Ursa Minor: chamber music by Stuart MacRae Hebrides Ensemble; Joshua Ellicott tenor, Marcus Farnsworth baritone

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Oliver Iredale Searle is revealed in this first album devoted to his work as a poet of place and of sensation. Three works for wind ensembles vividly evoke journeys and their destinations, in a panoply of sights and sounds stretching from Chicago to Italy, the Balkans and East Asia – and forging unexpected connections between them.

The wind principals of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide performances of exceptional calibre, while Carla Rees’ passionate commitment to building a contemporary repertoire for Baroque flute shines through in a solo piece that she commissioned and premiered.

This compelling survey of music by the Scottish composer Stuart MacRae reflects diverse inspirations from nature and myth, while also revealing underlying continuities: a preoccupation, in particular, with questions of scale and perspective. The ancient Greek hero Prometheus receives an unexpectedly intimate portrait, his human aspects to the fore – flawed yet sympathetic. MacRae’s perception of the natural world, meanwhile, extends from the microscopic scale of lichen to the vastness of the night sky, in which the medium of distance transmutes all turmoil into calm.

‘Snowbirds has an almost Janáček-like spontaneity and energy … the trajectory of Searle’s music charts a satisfying progression from initial agitation to ultimate calm’ — Gramophone, December 2021 Martin Suckling: The Tuning Aurora Orchestra principal players; Marta Fontanals-Simmons mezzo-soprano, Christopher Glynn piano DCD34235

The everyday is transfigured in this intimate collection of chamber music and songs – settings of five magical, moonlit poems by Michael Donaghy and a string quintet written in collaboration with the poet Frances Leviston, whose readings of her own texts frame the four movements of a piece which pays dual homage to Schubert and to Emily Dickinson. Nocturne for violin and cello bears witness to Suckling’s night vigils at the composing desk, setting down his pen as the stillness starts to ripple with birdsong, while the cello solo Her Lullaby is a nostalgic reflection on the early years of parenthood that also displays Suckling’s characteristically refined harmonic palette. ‘ This beautifully played and recorded disc shows [Suckling’s] more intimate side’ — BBC Music Magazine, March 2022, Five stars

‘ This beautifully performed composer portrait from Hebrides Ensemble captures Stuart MacRae at his most searching’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2022, Five stars The Piano Tuner: contemporary piano trios from Scotland Fidelio Trio, Alexander McCall Smith DCD34084

Storytelling takes centre stage in the Fidelio Trio’s second recording for Delphian, in which they are joined by Alexander McCall Smith, who narrates Sally Beamish’s evocative The Seafarer Trio with a mingled intimacy and plangency. The comparatively abstract sounds of Nigel Osborne’s The Piano Tuner track a journey into the dark heart of nineteenth-century Burma, while the stories told in Judith Weir’s Zeninspired Piano Trio Two include that of ‘How grass and trees become enlightened’. ‘ as bracing as a splash of water from a Highland stream … This kind of music is food and drink to the Fidelio Trio and it gives sure-footed, rhythmically alive, directly communicative performances of all three works’ — International Record Review, December 2010

Also available on Delphian Raymond Yiu: The World Was Once All Miracle Andrew Watts countertenor, Roderick Williams baritone; BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sir Andrew Davis, Edward Gardner, David Robertson

HERE WE ARE The Hermes Experiment DCD34244

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With over sixty commissions to its credit after just six years of existence, The Hermes Experiment has already proved itself a force to be reckoned with in the creation and advocacy of new music. Now, ten of those commissions are brought together on the ensemble’s debut album release, showcasing its idiosyncratic line-up of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass in a compelling survey of styles and individual voices.

PRESTO Recordings of the Year 2020 – Winner

PRESTO Editor's Choice

‘ A most enticing calling card … [Soprano Heloise Werner] pounces on individual notes and words with a tiger’s tenacity and a kitten’s glee. The other musicians are equally crucial in the album’s tapestry of sounds’ — The Times, August 2020

PRESTO Editor's Choice

Resident in the UK since his late teens, Hong Kong-born composer Raymond Yiu has over the last twenty years developed a sophisticated yet defiantly eclectic style, heard to best advantage here on his debut portrait album, with an all-star line-up of performers. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is joined by baritone Roderick Williams in a song-cycle commissioned to mark the centenary of the writer Anthony Burgess, while Andrew Watts’ countertenor voice brings an unforgettable human dimension to Symphony, written for the BBC Proms. ‘ Terrifically engaging … the recording finds the BBC SO on brilliantly agile form and in every way a match for Yiu’s electric musical imagination’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2021

Isolation Songbook Helen Charlston, Michael Craddock, Alexander Soares

American music for marimba Calum Huggan

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The feeling of life gone into standstill which so many of us experienced in spring 2020 was especially acute for singers Helen Charlston and Michael Craddock, deprived not only of live concert opportunities but forced to put their April marriage plans on hold.

Seeking ways to redirect her creative energies, Helen wrote a poem for Michael to mark their postponed wedding date, and the composer Owain Park, a friend of the couple, set it to music. Helen began to contact other composers and poets, and unexpectedly but quickly a recording project took shape that would both fill the empty time and bear witness to it, with music proving its ability to build connections across physical distance.

In the burgeoning contemporary repertoire for percussion, the work of a group of North American composer-performers has a special place. Classically trained but influenced by rock and jazz, they have found a stellar advocate in the Scottish marimba player Calum Huggan.

On this landmark first solo album he showcases the instrument’s full spectrum of expressive possibilities, from Michael Burritt’s sparse and open textures to the generous warmth of Ivan Trevino; five premiere recordings by Trevino link imaginatively with modern classics such as Eric Ewazen’s Northern Lights and the Frenchman Emmanuel Séjourné’s legendary Nancy, which Trevino describes as ‘like listening to my favorite band play an unplugged version of a song I love’.

‘ A recital that’s hard to resist, at once fresh and profoundly familiar’ — Gramophone, March 2021

‘ Performed with an elegant, easy virtuosity’ — BBC Music Magazine, December 2021

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