The choral music of Richard Lambert, born in Bath in the English West Country in 1951, covers a wide range of expression, ranging on this album from straightforward SATB settings for church performance to a sardonic parody of the excesses of established religion. It also encompasses the timeless and the timely, with a number of contributions to the age-old tradition of Christmas music to a cantata inspired by the Covid pandemic.
Our new album ‘Echoes Across Borders’ is brought to you by principal clarinettist of the Welsh National Opera Thomas Verity and British-Hungarian pianist and composer Michael Csányi-Wills. This album takes as its jumping-off point Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg’s Clarinet Sonata. Its resonances are then answered in Csányi-Wills’s brand new Clarinet Sonata. References to Jewish themes emergent in both works take centre stage in Michael’s Variations on a Ukrainian Theme, which takes as its source material a recording of a song by a 19-year-old concentration camp prisoner from 1945 – the same year that Weinberg wrote his Sonata. Finally, we come full circle but heard afresh, with a cross-genre realisation of Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes by a contemporary klezmer band.
CD-reissue of a noteworthy album from the Dutch psychedelic scene of the late '60s-early '70s. Reminding of fellow Dutchmen s.a. Cosmic Dealer, Outsiders ('CQ'-era), Group 1850 and late Q65, this album (originally dating from 1970) offers driving progressive/psych rock with lots of organ, howling guitars and functional use of echo.