Coastal The Field Mice

This is the second, and perhaps more aggressively experimental, installment in the Bang on Can All-Stars’ acclaimed commissioned composer series. Like its predecessor, More Field Recordings once again explores strange new terrain where found sound, samples and archival audio collide with contemporary classical music, written by a wide range of artists and performed by the All-Stars.

The Nocturne is one of the most popular and beloved forms of music. Yet, many of us today do not know the name of its creator: John Field. Born in Ireland, Field lived during the same period as Beethoven, and his musical legacy has influenced not only Chopin but also generations of composers up to the present day. “By recording this album, I hope to share the story of this historically important composer and to encourage listeners to discover the origins of the Nocturne.” Alice Sara Ott

On The Beths’ new album Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life?

British composer Ambrose Field is primarily known for his work in electronic music, much of it using the sounds of the natural world and of industrial and post-industrial society to create gritty and audacious musique concrète soundscapes. On this album, he takes fragments of vocal music by the great fifteenth century Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay and weaves them into allusive electronic landscapes of considerable subtlety.

The Nocturne is a romantic piano piece in which a nocturnal, romantic atmosphere is expressed, where perfumed melodies float serenely over a calmly murmuring accompaniment.-Credit where credit is due: the inventor of the genre is the Irish composer John Field, who made fame as a pianist of his own works. It needed the genius of Chopin to perfect the genre to the highest artistic level: Chopin's Nocturnes are the archetypes of romantic piano music, and count among his best loved works.

Simple melodies appealingly and tenderly hover over richly figured harmonies and seem to drift out into infinity. John Field is the author of these magical nocturnes, and one generation before the much more famous Pole (Chopin) he combined strongly expressive romanticism with an extraordinary keyboard intuition. Stefan Irmer performs on volume 1 of the complete nocturnes of John Field. Field never viewed his works as finished; every time he performed them he added something new to them – inspired by the circumstances, the public, and the atmosphere of the moment. For this reason, some of his nocturnes have been transmitted in significantly different versions. Stefan Irmer rises to this challenging piano adventure: employing musical means from our times, he continues Field's music, adding his own ideas to it. Influences from jazz and tango are also in evidence.

For many years, John Field, the Irish composer of wonderful piano music, was unjustifiably neglected by musicians and critics alike. If considered at all, Field, who came between Beethoven and Chopin, was considered at best a transition figure, or at worst a musical curiosity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Field's music is nothing short of a revelation. It is lyrical yet complex, the work of a master musician who could stand with the best of the writers for the piano. Fortunately Field's music is now beginning to be heard more often on classical radio and is more available on recordings. And this one, especially of his Second Piano Concerto, is excellent. .