Carlos Chavez Chamber Music Vol. 1 (2003)

Michael Nyman's three String Quartets were not conceived as a series, as they owe their origins to three very different sets of circumstances. However when the composer heard them together on the 1991 Argo recording featuring the Balanescu Quartet reissued here, he realized that the works had an unintentional but unmistakable consistency of compositional approach. Each work is built around the principle of conflict - not necessarily conflict between the instruments, as is the traditional view of the quartet medium, but conflict between sets of musical materials that appear to be at odds with each other. In the first, the conflict is between two 'found' musical objects, separated both by their cultural origins and by a distance of around 300 years. The conflict in the second is between Indian and European musical styles, while the third's comes from the process of adapting an earlier choral work into a string quartet, interspersing the original with Romanian folk music fragments.

This disc of the complete Piano Trios of Michael Nyman, performed by the Irish Fidelio Trio, is the first volume in a set of the composer's complete chamber music. Each of Nyman's trios has a programmatic element. Poczatek, a world premiere recording, contains five movements derived from Nyman's score to the film of the same name. Its musical material is inspired by classic Polish feature and documentary films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. The Photography of Chance, another world premiere, refers to the re-seeing of industrial reality in early Soviet photography. The trio Yellow Beach is a transfigured version of 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands', from Nyman's score to the film Prospero's Books. Time Will Pronounce was inspired by Joseph Brodsky's poem Bosnia Tune, which deals with the horror of the staggering daily death toll of the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

The American composer John Stamp (b. 1954) – universally known as ‘Jack’ – is a familiar figure in the worlds of the symphonic wind-band movement that flourishes in US universities and of the brass band on both sides of the Atlantic. This first Toccata Classics album of his music presents a cross- section of recent works for woodwinds, brass and strings, varied in mood, from upbeat to reflective, and in style, from a solemn hymn-setting to buoyant, outdoors Americana à la Copland, now and then coloured by a hint of jazz.

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard: based in rural France, he worked as a translator, composing ‘for the drawer’. A recent Toccata Classics recording of his Third Symphony and other orchestral pieces revealed him to be a major symphonic voice. The works on this first album of his chamber music show the same long-term control of harmonic tension, occasionally leavened by a mischievous sense of humour.

MPR presents the world premiere recordings of chamber music by the forgotten English genius Percy Hilder Miles, Professor at the Royal Academy of Music and teacher of Rebecca Clarke. This first volume showcases his Sonata in C for Pianoforte and Violoncello, Sonata No. 2 in G major for Pianoforte and Violin, and the Piano Trio in B minor. Led by Ian Tindale, the Ensemble Kopernikus Piano Quartet is an exciting young chamber group, praised for it's 'imaginative and demanding' programmes, combining well-known works with rarely- performed gems.

acques-Martin Hotteterre (1674–1763) possessed talent, taste, showmanship, and a shrewd business sense. Few musicians have been so synergistic in their accomplishments. As a performer, he attracted the attention of many members of the nobility and upper middle class who sought him out for lessons. Several surviving letters indicate that he would then demonstrate the music he published, for all levels of students, on instruments fashioned in his own workshop. (The Hotteterres were originally rural cask-makers, who began creating wind instruments around the turn of the 17th century.) By all accounts he was a smooth self-publicist whose Baroque flutes ranged from simple, attractive, inexpensive examples to elaborate, beautiful specimens fit for collectors.

An album of world premiere recordings of works written to accompany poems by celebrated Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Desmond Earley and the University Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin release their fourth album on Signum Classics.

An album of world premiere recordings of works written to accompany poems by celebrated Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Desmond Earley and the University Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin release their fourth album on Signum Classics.

It may be a cliché to write of the clarity of Gallic writing for the flute – the kind of elegance found in the music of composers like Debussy, Fauré, Gaubert, Jolivet, Messiaen and Taffanel – but French music for flute does indeed have a sound of its own. The flute works of Nicolas Bacri, born in Paris in 1961, uphold the proud tradition of his predecessors with textures of crystalline transparency and poised, almost weightless, melodic lines – and reserves of sardonic bite and freewheeling energy as required.