Eternal Light: A Requiem

Composer, clarinetist, singer and educator Angel Bat Dawid announces the release of a new work, Requiem For Jazz. A 12-movement suite composed, arranged, and inspired in part by dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s 1959 film The Cry of Jazz, the album is a wide-ranging treatise on the African American story from one of its most astute narrators.

The course of my whole life would undoubtedly have been very different if, one October evening in 1955, I had not had been fortunate enough to hear a live rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem. A few months earlier, on 1st August, I had turned 14, and luck would have it that my teacher, Joan Just (a composer, and the director of the Conservatoire in my home town of Igualada), decided to prepare the work with the choir of the local Schola Cantorum. That evening I was on my way to the Conservatoire to attend my usual counterpoint and harmony lessons with him; for some reason, I didn’t receive the message telling me that classes had been cancelled due to a rehearsal of the Requiem.

Though she launched her solo vocal career relatively late, Elin Manahan Thomas earned the reputation as one of the finest British sopranos of her generation. Some will hear her voice as more appropriate for Baroque sacred works, and while she has scored great success in that genre, she has also achieved acclaim in a wide range of operatic roles and has sung an eclectic choice of repertory in the concert hall.

NOVELA is perhaps one of the most popular and pivotal rock bands in Japan. Between 1980 and 1987 they delivered many albums. The sound on the first records was 'heavy progressive', later NOVELA turned more into a harder-edged rock band. NOVELA featured two known 'progrock legends': keyboard virtuoso Toshio Egawa (later Gerard and Sheherazade) and multi-instrumentalist Terutsugu Hirayama (he founded TERU'S SYMPHONIA).