Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey

Russia’s rich tradition of art song began with early 19th-century salon pieces: lyrical ‘romances’ that evolved to embrace grander themes yet never lost their intimacy. This selection explores some fascinating but less-trodden paths through this repertoire, inspired by the theme of distant lands and encompassing the enduring themes of travel, romantic landscapes, love and loss, life and death. In this recital, Borodin meets Taneyev, a Moscow composition professor from the next generation; Shostakovich stands alongside another major symphonist, his Moscow colleague Myaskovsky, and Shostakovich’s student Boris Tchaikovsky, a prodigy widely known for his film music, passes the baton to Elena Firsova, a post-Soviet émigré to England and a distinctive lyrical voice of today. Inspired by the songs of Taneyev, Myaskovksy and Firsova, countertenor Hamish McLaren embarked on distant travels of his own, journeying to Russia where he found two previously unreleased film songs by Shostakovich, heard here in their world-premiere recordings.

Over the ten years that the Romantic Piano Concerto has been running one of the projects most often requested by the many fans of the series has been a recording of the complete Lyapunov works for piano and orchestra. Well finally here it is!

Imprint is the second collaboration between Mike Griffin, founder and owner of Hypnos Recordings, and Dave Fulton of Dweller at the Threshold. It is difficult to imagine two more divergent styles of e-music and even more difficult to imagine them working in tandem, but they do. Griffin is solidly and firmly entrenched in the dark ambient and minimalist arena, while Fulton is one of the U.S.A.'s leading Berlin-schoolers. It is most easily depicted by describing the images of their October 2002 concert in Philadelphia. Griffin sat calmly and stoically at his MacIntosh Powerbook and re-created his atmospheres. Fulton was lost among his huge banks of analog synths; his rig resembled the bridge of the Starship Enterprise…