Autogenic Training Channel Healing Activation Chakras Music (2021)

A trio of 16th-century Italian organist composers, two of them almost entirely new to the record catalogues.

Eliodoro Sollima (1926-2000) was a Sicilian musician raised in the town of Marsala, where the concert hall is dedicated to his memory. From 1954 to 1991 he taught composition at the conservatoire in Palermo, where he was also the institution’s director for 16 years. This is the only album dedicated to his music: new recordings made by a young contemporary music ensemble, who are joined by the composer’s son, Giovanni Sollima, a cellist and composer in his own right who has made several previous albums for Brilliant Classics.

In a very specific sense in 16th- and 17th-century Spain and again in today’s Mexico (and elsewhere in Latin America) the Spanish term son denotes a particular genre of music with certain common traits including a close association with dance, text composed of several verses (coplas) and a fundamental harmonic pattern unique to each son.

Norwegian folksong and -dance constitute the very DNA of the music of Carl Gustav Sparre Olsen (1903–84), on both a large and a small scale – from Draumkvedet, the 1936 oratorio that was his first major success, to the tiny miniatures that form most of his piano music, recorded here in its entirety for the first time. The apparent simplicity of much of this material belies the unassuming sophistication of its construction: many of these pieces, some barely a minute long, seem – to adapt William Blake – to contain the world in a grain of sand.

With orchestral concerts on hold for the foreseeable future, the Linos Piano Trio’s Stolen Music project takes inspiration from earlier times and brings distilled versions of great orchestral works to smaller spaces.

Nowadays, the oeuvre of Polish composers active in the 19th century can be considered one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of our national music. In recent years, works of many of them have experienced a well deserved renaissance, which is reflected in their increasingly marked presence in concert halls and among CD releases, which, in turn, is a direct result of intense research activity of musicologists as well as of the considerable interest of performers, who are more and more keen to include those pieces in their repertoires.

It was a significant step: the decision of the French composer Erik Satie, in 1884, to write his first name henceforth with a “k”. He was born on 17 May 1866 as Eric Satie in Normandy’s Honfleur, from where England lies almost in view. His mother, born in London, had English and Scottish blood. And in his work and in his personage, irony, understatement, and British-sounding humour are never far away. Despite an unmistakably French sound in his music, he did not regard himself as a musicien français, as his friend Debussy styled himself on his card.

Behind the lines of the Western Front, the young Scottish composer Cecil Coles sent his friend and mentor Gustav Holst a score, stained with mud and blood. Only one movement survived: the rest was believed destroyed by enemy action.Four months later Coles himself was killed in battle rescuing injured comrades.

Simple Music for piano is a collection of inspired fragments from themes of classic Georgian plays and films for the stage and screen by Giya Kancheli (1935-2019). On this album the set is performed, improvised, arranged, even reimagined by the innovative pianist Jenny Lin and accordion virtuoso Guy Klucevsek as an engaging mixture of solos and duos.

Joseph Martin Kraus, regarded in his lifetime (1756–1792) as one of the world’s six most formidable composers, has like many other contemporaries since languished in the historical shadow of Mozart. Kraus was hailed by none other than Joseph Haydn as Mozart’s equal in terms of creativity and genius but had a career more like Haydn’s and was more of a polymath. Born in central Germany, he studied composition in Mannheim, Mainz, Erfurt and Göttingen. In 1778 he decided on a career in music and emigrated to Sweden, where he became Vice-Kapellmeister at the court of Gustav III in 1781 and Kapellmeister in Stockholm in 1788.