Anna Noferini, Luigi Cozzolino Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Hymns And Songs, Musique Pour Les Mouvements(2024)

Recent winners of the Steve Reid InNOVAtion Award for boundary-pushing new music creators, The Little Unsaid have spent the last year travelling the UK and Europe, leaving audiences emotionally rapt with a live show that’s been described as ‘a thumping depth of passion, recalling the intensity and melancholic overtones of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen.’ Led by Yorkshire-born songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John Elliott, the band have just completed their forthcoming album, Imagined Hymns & Chaingang Mantras, recorded with Radiohead engineer and acclaimed film score producer Graeme Stewart. Stewart’s touch lends a sweeping, cinematic quality to the album’s ten deeply personal songs, written during Elliott’s recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder after a year of ongoing personal trauma brought his life and music career to a standstill.

Arlen was a Jewish composer, originally from Austria who escaped Hitler’s invasion into Vienna. His family was persecuted, and lots of his family were murdered or committed suicide as a result of the holocaust, which inspired a lot of his compositional writing. When he escaped to the US where he lived with family friends, Arlen entered songs in a competition, winning first prize. This allowed him to live, study and work as amanuensis with Roy Harris. Through Harris he was introduced to famous composers of the day (such as Schoenberg, Mahler etc) and wrote for the Los Angeles Times as music reviewer for many years before committing to his own compositional works, both of whom have had additions made by conductor Kenneth Woods, with Arlen’s permission.

No one embodied the qualities of the American band master more supremely than John Philip Sousa. In this penultimate volume of an internationally admired series, a wide variety of his compositions can be heard, a number in world première recordings. The music ranges from the early Across the Danube March to music from his operettas, taking in a Chopin arrangement and the stirring Yorktown Centennial March. Also included are those inventive works, such as Pet of the Petticoats March, in which Sousa experimented with the march form itself. This recording coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy in 2015.

Henri Du Mont first made provision for the performance of a number of his compositions by women’s voices in his Cantica Sacra (1652) and thus made it possible for these works to be sung in convents. This recording includes not only the motets intended for these institutions but also one of the Messes Royales in plainsong and several organ pieces from his Meslanges composed for the Dames religieuses qui touchent l’orgue.

Francis I, as a princely patron of the arts, realised that music was a very useful tool for his policy of prestige: official music for great diplomatic events like the amazing musical ‘tournament’ between the Chapelle of the King of France and the Chapel Royal of Henry VIII of England at the Mass for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, reconstructed in this recording.

Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the death of composer Jacques Hétu, Pentadre Wind Ensemble and pianist Philip Chiu present a recording devoted to works by this renowned Canadian composer. The program reflects Htu's great interest in wind instruments. From his Wind Quintet to the Elegy for bassoon and pieces for flute and piano, this new recording invites the listener to discover an expressive and modern musical universe. A unique musical ensemble on the Canadian landscape, Pentadre explores a diversified and original chamber music repertoire. Founded in 1985, the five artists-musicians forming the quintet are recognized for the talent, technique, precision and color they bring to their performances. The ensemble has toured extensively across Canada, and also in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Lauded as "…a pianist-painter who turns every musical idea into a beautiful array of colors" (La Presse), Philip Chiu is acclaimed for his brilliant and sensitive playing. As a soloist and chamber musician, he appears in recitals with leading international musicians including James Ehnes, and Regis Pasquier. Chiu performs regularly with Jonathan Crow, concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony, and Andrew Wan, co-concertmaster of l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montral.