TREE
THE HERMES EXPERIMENT
1 Marianne Schofield (b. 1991) Islands * [5:35]
2 Abel Selaocoe (b. 1992) Buhle Bendalo * [9:08]
arr. Benjamin Woodgates (b. 1986)
Laura Moody (b. 1978) Rilke Songs *
3 I. An die Musik [3:47]
4 II. Sonnet to Orpheus [3:38]
5 III. Rose [4:42]
6 Oliver Pashley (b. 1992) But I still breathe * [3:08]
7 Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) Les rossignols ** [5:23] arr. Marianne Schofield
8 Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) La lune paresseuse ** [2:33] arr. Marianne Schofield
9 Nicola LeFanu (b. 1947) The Bourne ** [3:31] arr. Anne Denholm-Blair
10 Fergus Hall (b. 1996) Look what I found – II. * [6:40]
11 Hannah Peel (b. 1985) The Almond Tree ** [3:26] arr. Oliver Pashley
12 Héloïse Werner (b. 1991) Thunder clears * [3:51] arr. Héloïse Werner
13 Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958) Tree ** [4:11] arr. Héloïse Werner
Total playing time [59:41]
* premiere recordings ** premiere recordings in these arrangements
ANNE DENHOLM-BLAIR harp OLIVER PASHLEY clarinet
MARIANNE SCHOFIELD double bass HÉLOÏSE WERNER soprano
The Hermes Experiment is extremely grateful to the Francis Routh Trust, Vaughan Williams Foundation, Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust, Lieselotte Charliaguet and other sponsors who wish to remain anonymous for their generous support towards this album. Huge thanks also to all those who supported its Kickstarter campaign, including John Holland, Neil Alderton, Florence Anna Maunders, Wendelin Werner, Antony Holt, Kirill Borusyak and Adrian Ainsworth. Special thanks to Raphaël Neal, Maebh Lehane, Eleanor Philpott, Megan Steller, Ivo Ivanov, Marchus Trust, Royal Philharmonic Society, SJE Arts and Sam McShane at Kings Place.
Recorded on 24-26 November 2024 in SJE Arts, Oxford
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover image: Raphaël Neal
Session photography: Will Coates-Gibson/ foxbrush
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
www.delphianrecords.com
‘Beaches have a funny way of reflecting your feelings back at you,’ remarked a friend to the composer Fergus Hall during a rain-streaked walk by the sea together. ‘I was experiencing periodic feelings of grief,’ Hall continues in his commentary on Look what I found, written in 2024 for The Hermes Experiment, ‘yet something about this desolate beach with the grey water and rain battering the hood of my jacket was strangely comforting … The expanse and motion of my surroundings were a gentle comfort that carried me along and left me free to feel whatever came to the surface as I splashed along.’ For Hall, as for many of us, there is solace to be found in this sort of bleak natural beauty and a reminder that, like the ‘truly awful weather’ of that day, even the most painful and turbulent emotional states tend to pass. As Hall states at the close of his note: ‘Beaches are always in motion, transient and impermanent.’
We hear the second and final movement of Hall’s poignant Look what I found here. With its warm harmonic palette and mellow timbres of bass clarinet and plucked double bass, the movement offers a sense of reassurance and peace, perhaps expressed most keenly as the instrumentalists one by one begin to sing towards the work’s close. The theme that underpins Hall’s piece – the ways ‘your environment can reflect what you are feeling and how, even if that is grief and sadness, that is a beautiful and precious thing’ – threads
through this album as a whole. Across a varied and colourful programme, The Hermes Experiment explores the connections we seem compelled to seek, and find, between our inner life and the natural world. Featuring new commissions and striking new arrangements of both contemporary and older works, the album guides us among trees, across oceans, past thunder and under the moon, as we move through states of grief, joy, anger, wonder and uncertainty. Nature alerts us to the fruitful possibilities of transformation, but it can also present us with darker reminders of mortality, and, in our current state of climate breakdown, highlight a sense of disconnection and isolation.
Marianne Schofield’s Islands offers a gentle injunction to seek connection where we can. Schofield writes, ‘I was thinking about how the digital age has changed the way that we connect emotionally with each other, as well as our relationship to the natural world and world events. We have never had more knowledge and more capability of connection available to us through the internet and social media, but this has come with a new kind of weariness, emptiness and isolation.’ With a performance marking of ‘Clock-like, desolate’, the work opens coldly; the scoring for the ensemble is sparse and fractured, and the harp’s lower C-string is detuned, disconcertingly, by a quarter tone. Even amid the piece’s warmer central section – where groupings of five
semiquavers marked ‘flowing and luscious’ ripple between harp and double bass – the text speaks only of ‘remembering feeling alive’; connection here belongs just to the past. Yet despite this last line of sung text, the close of the work still holds a note of optimism, expressed through the fuller harmony of the harp chords and shimmering improvised glissandi that sing through the double bass.
Composed for The Hermes Experiment in 2024, Buhle Bendalo (which translates as ‘natural beauty’ in Xhosa) by South African cellist, singer and composer Abel Selaocoe explores the idea of nature as a prompt for us to accept and relish the possibilities of transformation. Selaocoe’s brief text is unflinching: natural beauty ‘deteriorates’ and ‘dissipates’; it is ‘the one that shatters’. And yet the music of Selaocoe’s score is anything but downcast, instead it builds from the meditative to a vibrantly rhythmic vocal chant heard across the ensemble. In doing so, Buhle Bendalo advocates an acceptance of transience through the image and idea of nature; here death serves as an urgent reminder to live.
Christina Rossetti’s poem The Bourne, as set by Nicola LeFanu, explores similar themes of transience, but through a characteristically dark Victorian lens. Here, the creeping force of death and decay is evoked through reminders as to what lies ‘beneath the growing grass … the living flowers’. LeFanu’s setting was
originally composed for voice and harp, and commissioned for The NMC Songbook, a disc celebrating that label’s twentieth anniversary in 2008. Heard here in an arrangement for the ensemble by harpist Anne Denholm-Blair, the song moves from the plaintive, folksonglike feel of the introduction for solo voice, to a passage of great vibrancy with glittering chromatic sweeps in the harp, before a return to something of the sparse introduction (in keeping with the return of opening lines of text). Hannah Peel’s The Almond Tree, the first track from her 2011 album The Broken Wave, conjures a not dissimilar scene with its gothic lyrics and repeated plea to ‘Bury me under the almond tree / If anything should happen to me’. Yet for all the bleakness of the text, the song itself hums with warmth and mischief, a mood sustained in this shimmering arrangement from Oliver Pashley, who writes: ‘The Almond Tree has, to me, a darkly comic side. Its upbeat tempo and persistent beat add a gritty funk to the sinister subject matter, and while my arrangement adopts a slightly more reflective stance, I hope to retain the wry twinkle-in-theeye of the original.’
Something of this mixed mood is shared by Errollyn Wallen’s enigmatic Tree. Wallen’s beautifully spare text and music explores, with depth and mystery, how the human world and natural world pull at one another. Like The Bourne, the piece was composed as part of the 2009 NMC Songbook project and
originally scored for voice and piano. Heard here in a new arrangement by Héloïse Werner, Wallen’s song pits the ‘rooted’ persistence of the plucked bass line against increasingly free improvisatory solos in the clarinet and harp. The ‘impassive moon’ is also invoked – a subject long understood, or imagined, as intricately bound to shifts in human mood, as it is too in Chaminade’s La lune paresseuse.
A pioneering force among French female composers, Cécile Chaminade published over 400 pieces in her lifetime, many of which were songs for voice and piano. In 1913, she was the first female composer to be elected Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour and she toured widely throughout America and Europe, including the UK, where she won the admiration of Queen Victoria who presented the composer with the Jubilee Medal. Composed in 1905, La lune paresseuse sets a poem by Charles de Bussy which moves between celebration and playful admonishment of ‘the idle moon’, notably how it toys with one’s ‘tender agitation’. This warm arrangement by Marianne Schofield opens with chorale-like solidity in the harp and double bass, before a more mercurial central section captures the glint of moonlight in glistening harp arpeggios.
Such ‘tender agitation’ is further explored by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre in her lilting Les rossignols. Another pioneering French
female composer, Jacquet de La Guerre was born into a family of musicians and instrument makers, and won particular acclaim for her extraordinary ability to improvise on the harpsichord. ‘Les rossignols’ is taken from Céphale et Procris (1694), an opera loosely based on the myth of the same name, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This cheering aria sung by ‘a shepherd; a shepherdess’ is here reimagined by Marianne Schofield with an introductory passage that evokes ‘a gentle dawn chorus, morning light emerging with small chirrups, wings fluttering, droplets of dew falling’. For the central section, Schofield adheres more closely to the original score, where the ensemble ‘behaves like baroque instruments (theorbos and viols)’ before the song’s conclusion returns to something ‘hazy and watery, with voice, bass and clarinet exchanging semi-improvised bird-like chatters’.
Nature is regarded as somewhat simple in its needs in ‘Les rossignols’. As the text of the aria’s second half (not included here) goes on to state: for the ‘happy herd’ which ‘abide[s] on the greenery’, such things as ‘Possessions, aspirations / Could never trouble your hearts’.
Nature in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, however, occupies a more complex space and Laura Moody’s striking Rilke Songs aptly capture the searching intricacies of the poet’s writing. In her composer’s note, Moody relates, with enjoyable candour, the complex background to the composition itself. She explains how
these settings ‘started life as musical elements in a theatrical production so wildly idealistic and metaphysical in design and so utterly disastrous in practice that several participants, including myself, had to abandon it for health reasons’. While Moody had the sense that Rilke may well have ‘appreciated all this drama’, she later decided to rescue and resurrect these songs, extending and reworking them as a new piece for the ‘ever adventurous’ Hermes Experiment.
The first song, ‘An die Musik’, situates Rilke’s ode to the power of music in a place of ‘wildness and abandonment, referencing modal music to be sung outdoors amongst the hum of nature’. There follows a setting of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus 1, iii, which ‘reimagines Rilke’s meditation on human limitation in the face of the god-like workings of art as a Mahlerian Lied interpreted by wonky mechanical devices’. Here the score is inspired by Moody’s enthusiasm for ‘antique automatons, orchestrions (the elaborate, automated “orchestral” machines of the 19th and early 20th century) and the sci-fi mainstay the GlitchBot, a humanoid robot whose imperfections and glitches serve to highlight particular aspects of human-ness’.
The third and final song sets Rilke’s shortest poem, a brief, enigmatic hymn of praise to the rose, which was also chosen by the poet to be the epitaph on his grave. The song has
the feel of a lullaby, and Moody reflects in her composer note how ‘the setting is inspired by wildlife photographer Neil Bromhall’s time-lapse films of roses opening and fading, the contemplative ostinato compositions of Meredith Monk, and the spirit of Bill Evans’s Peace Piece and Mark Hollis’s The Colour of Spring’.
Two works by members of the ensemble remind us of the agency of the natural world itself, contemplating how nature might stand as a witness to human concerns, or indeed plainly ignore them. Oliver Pashley’s But I still breathe conveys a quiet melancholy. It is written ‘from the perspective of the earth, calmly looking up and seeing all the change happening around (and to) me while remaining steady and still myself. The accompaniment and musical line itself is ambiguous; the singer wonders aloud to herself, semi-privately, unconcerned with who hears.’
In Thunder clears, Héloïse Werner creates a ‘sonic painting’ of a poem by Ali Lewis. Originally composed for solo voice, this new arrangement by the composer invites the ensemble to improvise, often in response to the vocal line, and includes an array of evocative sonic effects including ’wind sounds’, where the harpist’s hands run up and down the strings, and ‘rain sounds’ of high-pitched harmonic glissandi in the double bass. Meanwhile, the performance instructions for
Notes on the music
the ensemble as a whole direct the sound to be ‘always hushed … blurry, quietly active under the surface but never rushed’. Lewis’ taut, beautiful poem notes how the birds form ‘crotchets … on the stave of the fence’ yet ‘don’t sing the notes / they faithfully represent’. Here we have the sense that the human desire to project meaning and intention onto the natural world often misses the mark, and that nature, in all its complexity (and if we pay
close enough attention) is writing its own kind of music.
© 2025 Kate Wakeling
Kate Wakeling is a writer, poet and musicologist. She is writer-in-residence with Aurora Orchestra and a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.
Texts and translations
1 Islands
Disconnect
World apart
We are islands in the dark. I find myself sad for you. Shells of ourselves, still, Tide eclipses time And we are islands sinking, Remembering feeling alive, Reaching you.
Marianne
Schofield
2 Buhle Bendalo
Hla-belela bo Buhle bendalo
Hla-belala ngo buhle bendalo
Buya phela wole hela bo
Ubuhle bendalo
Buzo nyamalala
Ubuhle ba nhaphandle
Buzo nyamalala
Botle baho thubeha
Thu ba wuza
Abel Selaocoe
Sing
Beauty of nature
Sing about the beauty of nature
It deteriorates
Natural beauty It dissipates
External beauty It dissipates
The one that shatters Chant
Rilke Songs
3 I. An die Musik
Musik: Atem der Statuen, vielleicht: Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache, wo Sprachen enden, du Zeit, die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung vergehender Herzen.
Gefühle zu wem? O du, der Gefühle
Wandlung in was? – in hörbare Landschaft. Du Fremde: Musik. Du uns entwachsener Herzraum. Innigstes unser, das, uns übersteigend, hinausdrängt, –
heiliger Abschied: da uns das Innre umsteht als geübteste Ferne, als andre Seite der Luft, rein, riesig, nicht mehr bewohnbar.
Music: breath of statues, maybe: silence of images. You, language, where languages end; you, time, who stand upright from the course of mortal hearts.
Feelings toward whom? O you, you are the transformation of feelings into what? – into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You are the heart space that has outgrown us, our innermost, which, transcending us, escapes –a sacred leave-taking: in which what was inside us surrounds us as the most proficient distance, as the other side of the air, pure, vast, no longer inhabitable.
4 II. Sonnet to Orpheus
Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier?
Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.
Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr, nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes; Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes. Wann aber sind wir? Und wann wendet er
an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne?
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst, wenn auch die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, – lerne
vergessen, daß du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch. Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.
5 III. Rose
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern.
Rainer Marie Rilke (1875–1926)
A god can. But how, tell me, shall a man follow him through the slender lyre? His mind is divided. At the crossroads of two paths of the heart stands no temple to Apollo. Song, as you teach it, is not desire, is not an encouragement of something yet to be finally achieved; song is existence. An easy thing for the god. But when do we exist? And when does he turn the earth and the stars toward our being? That isn’t it, young man, the fact that you love, even if that voice then opens your mouth – learn to forget that you sang out. That passes. To sing in truth is quite another breath. A breath about nothing. A fluttering within the god. A wind.
Rose, oh, pure contradiction, the desire to be no one’s sleep under so many eyelids.
translations © Delphian Records
6 But I still breathe
Between the flowers and the clouds
I look up and around.
A frost out and in.
I remember a time when it was hot and dry.
My fields cracked and rivers parched.
I am burned, I am broken, but I still breathe.
Oliver Pashley
7 Les rossignols
Les rossignols dès que le jour commence,
Chantent l’amour qui les anime tous ;
Si les oiseaux cédent à sa puissance
Quel mal faisons-nous
D’aimer à sentir ses coups !
Si leur instinct est rempli d’innocence, Quel mal faisons-nous
De suivre un penchant si doux ?
Joseph-François Duché de Vancy (1668–1704)
The nightingales
The nightingales, before day breaks, sing of the love that animates them; if even the birds give in to its might, what wrong are we doing if we like to feel its blows!
If their instinct is full of innocence, what wrong are we doing if we follow such a sweet inclination?
translation © Delphian Records
8 La lune paresseuse
Dans un rayon de crépuscule
S’endort la libellule ;
Le rossignol s’est endormi
Sur la branche d’un chêne ami,
L’herbage est plein de lucioles, Le ciel d’étoiles folles,
Et pourtant la lune qui luit
Laisse ses ombres a la nuit.
Mollement, Lune, tu reposes
Sous des nuages roses …
Oh ! la paresseuse, pourquoi
Te jouer de mon tendre émoi ?
Toujours voilée à l’heure douce
Où, glissant sur la mousse, Les cigales chantent moins fort,
Tu ne te montres pas encore !
Lève-toi ! brillante et sereine,
Viens éclairer la plaine !
Lune d’argent, Lune au front blanc, Illumine mon bras tremblant !
Frôle de ta lumière pure
L’or de ma chevelure :
Car c’est bientôt que va passer
Sur la route mon fiancé ! …
Charles de Bussy (1875–1938)
The Idle Moon
In a twilight gleam the dragonfly is falling asleep; the nightingale is sleeping on the branch of a friendly oak, the grass is full of fireflies, the sky of crazy stars, and even so the shining moon allows the night its shadows.
Sluggishly, Moon, you take your rest beneath pink clouds …
Oh! lazy one, why do you toy with my tender agitation?
Always concealed at the sweet hour when, gliding over the moss, the cicadas sing less loudly, you still do not show yourself!
Rise! shining and serene, come, light up the plain!
Silver Moon, white-faced Moon, Illuminate my trembling arm!
Brush with your pure light the gold of my hair: for it’s almost time for my fiancé to pass by on the road! …
translation © Delphian Records
9 The Bourne
Underneath the growing grass,
Underneath the living flowers,
Deeper than the sound of showers: There we shall not count the hours By the shadows as they pass.
Youth and health will be but vain, Beauty reckoned of no worth:
There a very little girth
Can hold round what once the earth
Seemed too narrow to contain.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
11 The Almond Tree
Temperance the dear old deer
Did not dare to bother anyone’s ear
With her uptight jaw and hair tightly pinned Who’d have thought the sin to be within?
Bury me under the almond tree
If anything should happen to me
Late last June I heard a cry
I ran to see my younger sister die
The poisoned meat had cut deep inside
I cast my revenge on temperance tonight
Bury me under the almond tree
If anything should happen to me
Bury me under the almond tree
If anything should happen to me
I walked for months through the rain and pour No sign of temperance and her deathly paw
I start to think did I dream it all up
What revenge is this, it’s my life now that’s been caught
Bury me under the almond tree If anything should happen to me
Hannah Peel (b. 1982), by permission of Beggars Music Ltd
12 Thunder clears Thunder clears its throat.
The cloud is almost black and the shape of England, like its own weather map.
The rain dribbles shorthand on the window and blurs the crotchets of the birds on the stave of the fence who don’t sing the notes they faithfully represent.
Ali Lewis (b. 1990), from Absence (Cheerio, 2024)
13 Tree
Does the tree own me?
Does the tree own the moon, the impassive moon?
Do the leaves seem to sing in the dark?
Does the tree own my heart?
Do I lie,
Do I lie,
In the arms of his art, confounding art?
I’m perplexed by the rune
I’m perplexed by rooted trees, by rooted trees.
©
Errollyn Wallen
Biographies
The Hermes Experiment is one of the UK’s leading young contemporary music ensembles. Winners of the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2021 and the Royal OverSeas League Mixed Ensemble Competition 2019, the group has rapidly built an international reputation for vibrant, genre-defying performances.
Described by The Arts Desk as ‘the cool kids of the contemporary music school’, The Hermes Experiment reimagines the concert experience with their idiosyncratic line-up of harp, clarinet, voice and double bass. The group’s collaborative ethos drives a dynamic programme of over sixty new commissions to date, alongside bold arrangements and electrifying free improvisation.
Performance highlights include Barbican Centre, Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Spitalfields
Music, Oxford International Song, Leeds Lieder, and Aldeburgh Festivals, as well as Tallinn Music Week, Rotterdam’s De Doelen, and the RPS Awards. The Hermes Experiment was a showcase artist at Classical:NEXT 2019.
The ensemble champions contemporary music in education and community settings. Recent projects include the Virtual Composition Project supported by Arts Council England, a residency with Young Music Makers of Dyfed, and workshops with Trinity Laban, RAM, RCM, RWCMD, Leeds College of Music and Birmingham University.
This is the ensemble’s third album with Delphian Records, following its critically acclaimed debut and sophomore records, HERE WE ARE (DCD34244) and SONG (DCD34274).
Jane Stanley: Cerulean Orbits
The Hermes Experiment, Red Note Ensemble DCD34281
This first portrait album dedicated to the music of the Australian-born, Glasgow-based composer Jane Stanley showcases pieces composed between 2013 and 2023 for different chamber combinations. In addition to some of her favourites among her existing works, Stanley took the opportunity to develop two new pieces: one for each of the two ensembles involved. A song cycle for The Hermes Experiment moves Stanley’s music intriguingly towards the tonal, lyrical sound-world of that group’s two acclaimed recent Delphian releases, while sharing with the purely instrumental music of the rest of the album – performed by Red Note Ensemble, also acclaimed Delphian regulars – an audible concern with intricately ornamented melody and intertwining woven textures.
‘Atmosphere and texture are at the heart of this recording … Captivating performances’ — BBC Music Magazine, November 2024
HERE WE ARE
The Hermes Experiment
DCD34244
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 lineup of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass in a compelling survey of styles and individual voices.
‘A most enticing calling card ... [Track 1] immediately shows off the ensemble’s frontline asset: the vivacious soprano voice of Heloise Werner, who 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
SONG
The Hermes Experiment DCD34274
Hot on the heels of its acclaimed debut HERE WE ARE, The Hermes Experiment’s second Delphian album is an equally bold statement. Songs commissioned specially for the ensemble – by Philip Venables, Ayanna Witter-Johnson and others – are interleaved with new arrangements (of composers including Barbara Strozzi, Clara Schumann and Lili Boulanger) for the group’s distinctive line-up of voice, clarinet, harp and double bass.
Moving and original, SONG reinvents a genre: here every instrument is a voice in its own right, and all four performers carry the drama.
‘Britain’s music scene offers numerous dynamic small-sized groups, but The Hermes Experiment, so spellbinding, so imaginative, continue to stand alone’ — The Times, October 2021
The Last Island: chamber music by Peter Maxwell Davies
Hebrides Ensemble
DCD34178
Peter Maxwell Davies’s later music powerfully evokes the isolated majesty of his Orkney island home, yet it also bears witness to his talent for friendship – to his associations, both personal and musical, with friends and supporters in Scotland and further afield. Among the warmest was with William Conway, whom Davies first encountered as principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and for whom he created the demanding solo part of his second Strathclyde Concerto. And it was for Hebrides Ensemble, founded by Conway in 1991, that Davies composed several of the most impressive and personal works to arise from his late engagement with chamber music – a genre in which he had previously worked rarely, here revealed as the ‘last island’ of this remarkable and prolific composer’s output.
‘Beguiling, even transfigured … vivid performances’ — Sunday Times, August 2017
Héloïse Werner: Phrases with Colin Alexander cello, Amy Harman bassoon, Calum Huggan percussion, Lawrence Power violin, viola, Laura Snowden guitar
DCD34269
Luminous and daring, this celebration of Héloïse Werner’s multifaceted gifts is nourished by rich dualities. Phrases reveals Werner as both singer and composer, as an artist shaped by both her native France and her adopted UK, and as a soloist of captivating individuality who is also an intrepid collaborator. The solos and duos that make up the album comprise five of Werner’s own compositions, four of Georges Aperghis’s avant-garde classic Récitations, and six newly commissioned works, by composers ranging from Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Nico Muhly to Oliver Leith.
‘a soprano of extraordinary range, tone and vocal abilities’ — Gramophone, June 2022, Editor’s choice
Héloïse Werner: close-ups
Héloïse Werner, Colin Alexander, Julian Azkoul, Max Baillie, Kit Downes, Ruth Gibson, Marianne Schofield
DCD34312
Héloïse Werner’s first album, Phrases, was received ecstatically. For her second, she wanted to create a programme with a cohesive narrative arc – a journey, but one that the listener can take in their own time and their own way. For it, she has assembled a group of musicians who both share in her concept but also bring to the project their own varied musical personalities to complement Héloïse’s own distinctive voice. Rightly described by Héloïse as ‘amazing people’, her collaborators – Colin Alexander, Julian Azkoul, Max Baillie, Kit Downes, Ruth Gibson and Marianne Schofield – stitch their individual contributions into close-ups in colours just as vibrant as Héloïse’s own.
‘jaw-dropping technical agility combined with an innate, instinctive musicality and boundless, breathless creativity’
— Gramophone, August 2024
Shortlisted in
James Dillon: Tanz/haus
Red Note Ensemble / Geoffrey Paterson
DCD34299
Coming almost a decade and a half after the last CDs devoted to James Dillon’s music, this twinned pair of digital releases from Delphian Records and Red Note Ensemble presents two major works written for and premiered by the ensemble in the last six years. Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 is one of Dillon’s richest recent conceptions: a 45-minute meditation on dance as a form of ‘trembling’, featuring electric guitar and – as in so much of Dillon’s recent music – a pre-recorded electronic track of immense mystery and power. The work secured for Dillon his fifth Royal Philharmonic Society award: an astonishing tally, unequalled by any living composer. EMBLEMATA: Carnival (released in parallel on Delphian DCD34309) is a compellingly sustained whole built up from a series of character pieces tailored to the imaginative as well as technical capacities of the Red Note musicians.
‘All gratitude to Red Note Ensemble, who, in high-definition audio, perform these works with razor precision’ — Gramophone, May 2023
Between Two Worlds (YCAT Vol 5)
Castalian String Quartet
DCD34272
From the darkness of night emerges day, the cycle of nature tracing the journey of the soul. The finely calibrated emotions of Orlande de Lassus’s song La nuit froide et sombre, and of his near-contemporary John Dowland’s Come, heavy sleep, are made newly vivid in transcriptions by the Castalian String Quartet, framing a programme which exists both inside and beyond time. Profound meditations on immortality and worldliness from Beethoven and Thomas Adès receive readings of extraordinary intensity, the Quartet’s burnished tone and astounding interconnectedness making this a debut that demands to be heard.
‘To hear this music, so full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection, felt like a miracle’ — The Observer, January 2020
2023 Shortlisted Contemporatry
