Iain Ashley Hersey Nomad

SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce a celebration of Favourite Orchestral Classics by Iain Sutherland and the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. Recorded in Munich in 1988 and Hanover in 1992, these glorious recordings bear the unmistakable stamp of the Scottish maestro’s reputation for emotion, colour and drama.

A reduction in personnel rarely results in a broader musical expanse, but that's just what happened to Food, since trumpeter Arve Henriksen and bassist Mats Eilertsen departed in 2004. Molecular Gastronomy (Rune Grammofon, 2008)—Food's first duo recording, though the use of guests fleshed the group out to a trio—was Food's most accessible album to date, without sacrificing any of its inherent risk and sound of surprise. Quiet Inlet—Food's first for ECM, and featuring Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz on three tracks and Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on four—follows Molecular Gastronomy's path, but remains equally traceable to earlier albums, including Food's quartet swan song, The Last Supper (Rune Grammofon, 2005). Even as a duo, Food generates a lot of sound. Strønen, in particular, combines bastardized drum kit, hand percussion and technology into a distinctive soundscaping approach, from pulse-driven to textural; spatially ethereal to jagged and dense. Ballamy's more economical playing is equally key in establishing a group sound, and based on its performance at Punkt 2006, Food could easily have continued on as a duo, but increases the unpredictability quotient by introducing a third player to the set.

Sound Dreams is an album of great relevance to me because it brings together my closest collaborators. For over 17 years I have shared with Ensemble NOMAD a professional career that includes the recording of two monographic CDs: Bestiario (Bestiary) and Pruebas de vida (Proofs of Life), released by Urtext Digital Classics in 2011 and 2015, respectively. My long lasting collaboration with guitarists Norio Sato and Pablo Garibay as well as with shakuhachi player Reison Kuroda, shamisen player Hidejiro Honjoh and koto player Maya Kimura has been equally enriching both personally and professionally. I am convinced that this recording possesses the cohesion and warmth that can only arise from a group of friends that have been playing/ creating music together for a long time.

SOMM RECORDINGS is delighted to announce the debut recording of composer-pianist Iain Farrington’s Art Deco Trio, featuring 15 new instrumental arrangements blending classical and jazz influences of songs by George Gershwin.

There have been countless attempts to counteract the inherently boring nature of the CD as an artefact and the approach adopted by Feral shapes up better than some on the strength of this first release, which takes some excellent music by saxophonist Iain Ballamy (in the company of three young Norwegian musicians) and packages it with a set of intriguing print artworks by Dave McKean in an elegant library case. On the other hand, we may now be so accustomed to the blandness of the format that any attempt to escape it seems like a distraction. While debating this, it's important not to forget to play the disc, which is quite remarkable and a far cry from Ballamy's formative years in the sprawling bloke-jazz outfit Loose Tubes. Recorded live at the Molde Jazz Festival in 1998, it's astounding that this music seems to date from the very beginning of Ballamy's association with these musicians, given their obvious level of empathy.

Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside complete their survey of Schubert's song cycles with this recording of Winterreise. Composed in the late 1820s, towards the end of Schubert's tragically short life, Winterreise (Winter Journey) is a setting of twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Müller and describes a traveller leaving the town which was the home of the object of his unrequited love, to embark on a long journey, through a chill, wintry landscape, which ends in near-suicidal despair. This recording represents the culmination of a project that started back in 2015, when Williams accepted the challenge to prepare and perform all three song cycles in one season at the Wigmore Hall in London.