Cello Octet Amsterdam

"Eight cellos in a circle. The audience can sit around the octet, or even inside the circle. The cellists start to play, and the resulting music spirals around like a moving object. 8 is part of a series of works that started with Timber for six percussionists playing amplified simantras, and includes Rushes for seven bassoonists and Amplified for four electric guitarists. Each of these works is meant to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state, in the listener as well as the performer."

This album contains all the music Arvo Pärt created for the Cello Octet: Solfeggio, Silouan's song, Da Pacem Domine, Summa, Psalom, Missa Brevis, O-Antiphonen and Pari Intervallo.

Following his first two solo albums, streaming sensation Joep Beving releases new reworks of his music by acclaimed and up-and-coming artists such as iconic “synth legend” Suzanne Ciani, CFCF, Tom Trago and more. Conatus features reworks of pieces from Solipsism and Prehension and also foreshadows his next solo album with a rework of one of Beving’s new tracks.

"Sacrum Convivium" presents a vision of French music over two millennia: from Gregorian chant through Guillaume de Machaut’s extraordinary ‘Lai de Nostre Dame’ to the Twentieth Century of Maurice Duruflé, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, all three of them influenced in some way by the spirituality and sensibility of Gregorian chant, which Messiaen himself described as “the greatest treasure we possess in western music.”

The performances of the music here are excellent, but the whole package matters, and it does not disappoint. The set comes in a good sturdy box. The 16 CDs are in similar study slipcases, with beautiful artwork on the front. There and full track listings and artist info on each one, so no rummaging in the booklet to find what is on the discs.

Today we take high fidelity sound quality for granted, but how did it start? When was the moment when compressed and scratchy sound gave way to natural, realistic sound that captured the whole picture of a performance? Decca Sound ‘Mono Years’ seeks to answer that question and shows how, 70 years ago, amidst war-time privations, a small team at Decca made technological breakthroughs that brought hi-fi to the world. This latest cube explores Decca’s earliest high-fidelity history, and restores some restores critically acclaimed albums from ensembles such as the Trio di Trieste, Quintetto Chigiano and Griller Quartet which have not been available since their original LP release more than sixty years ago. An equally impressive array of soloists includes pianists Clifford Curzon, Julius Katchen, Friedrich Gulda and Moura Lypmany and violinists Ruggiero Ricci and Alfredo Campoli. Several generations of cellists are represented with recordings by Pierre Fournier, Maurice Gendron and Zara Nelsova.