Eu și cu Ăsta Social Distancing (2020)

“The stone that’s buried: what the fruit is for.” So goes the title track from Plum, Widowspeak’s forthcoming fifth album. The line serves as an apt analogy for the record itself: the self-aware sweetness that the band employs to deliver the seed of a harder, sharper idea. Singer Molly Hamilton coats wry observations in a voice as honeyed as the sun-ripened fruit, and Widowspeak have always made a bitter pill much easier to swallow. From its opening strum, there’s a palpable warmth and familiarity to the music even as it hints at darker truths below the surface, questions about inherent worth. What value and meaning do we assign ourselves, our time, and how do we spend it?

Christmas 2020 will be unlike the Christmases of the past, because the Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have fundamentally changed the way we live. Maybe they will also make us yearn more for the true spirit and the joys of Christmas. As we reflect and contemplate on what is important to us, we know that we want to keep hold of our sense of friendship and community. We feel a strong imperative to reach out for whatever can bring joy to the world. And with that thought in mind, there can surely be very few people who can gift-wrap the Christmas season in music for us – and do so quite as naturally, effectively and magically – as Nils Landgren.

Violinist Daniel Hope spent his period of social distancing by performing chamber concerts from his living room in Berlin online and for Arte Concert with specially invited guests. Deutsche Grammophon is proud to present Hope@Home the album, a selection from this ground-breaking series of livestream events which attracted a combined audience of 2,5m viewers, to be released on 14th August. This album is a document of these extraordinary weeks. Everything you hear is live, one take only. Some pieces were rehearsed, others were not. In some cases Christoph Israel finished the arrangements literally minutes before we went live.

Perhaps best-known for his distinctive vocal style, Australian polymath Nick Cave here steps into the spotlight as librettist rather than performer, for a second operatic project with Belgian composer Nicholas Lens. Having collaborated on Shell Shock in 2014, they joined forces again during the global lockdown to create a new work, L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S.. At Lens’s request, Cave penned 12 litanies – “petitions to a divine maker” – simple, moving texts which the composer then wove into what he calls a “modest chamber opera of sleeping dreams”.