Khalab & M'berra Ensemble M'berra

The concept of metanoia – that, which goes beyond thought – most commonly describes a change in the way of seeing and thinking about things. With this recording, italo-brazilian conductor Simone Menezes and her chamber orchestra “K”, together with the choir “Sequenza 9.3”, go on a musical journey to find moments of metanoia in the lives and works of composers such as Giacomo Puccini, Arvo Pärt, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alexander Borodin as well as Johann Sebastian Bach.

This album marks the solo debut of Ensemble Diderot cellist Gulrim Choi and contains several World Premiere Recordings. Faithful to the values of the ensemble, she looks at a facet of a repertoire that has been neglected over time.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s six ‘Milanese’ quartets constitute a milestone in his artistic activity. Written between Bolzano and Milan between 1772 and 1773, they came a few years after the Quartet K80/73f that he had composed in Lodi during his first Italian visit. More than that work, these six pieces – conceived before Mozart left the Milanese public with his third and last work for the Lombard capital, Lucio Silla K135 – constitute one of the first organic sets of string quartets ever conceived. Though based on the model of Haydn, they reveal Mozart’s modern spirit, capable of following a new path and enriching it with his own personal contribution. Thirty years after the first and only recording of these works on period instruments by the Festetics Quartet, here is the recording debut of a young Italian ensemble, with the bonus of the first ever historically informed recording of the Quartet K156’s original second movement.

With Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the French ensemble Links presents a classic of the 20th century. Music for 18 Musicians is approximately 55 min utes long. The first sketches were made for it in May 1974 and it was completed in March 1976. Although its steady pulse and rhythmic energy re- late to many of my earlier works, its instrumentation, structure and harmony are new.

The only available complete recording of a hugely influential set of Baroque trio sonatas by a northern-Italian pioneer of the genre.

The 16th-century composer, Cypriana Bazylik, was born in Sieradz, an important commercial and cultural center at that time. He composed only for a short period of his life, when he was employed in the court band of Prince Mikołaj Radziwiłł in Vilnius. Several of his songs and several psalms have survived and are included on this CD. The music, masterfully presented by the Ensemble Jericho vocal group, is largely an original adaptation of the musicologist and organist Bartosz Izbicki - voices, new harmonies, and sometimes changed rhythmic formulas have been added.

This autumn, Erased Tapes are set to release ‘Give It to the Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded’ by composer and producer Peter Broderick and French 12-piece group Ensemble 0; a complete re-recording of Russell’s epic minimalist orchestral composition originally released in 1983. ‘Give It to the Sky’ also includes unreleased tracks by Russell which have been restored and re-recorded, resulting in an 80-minute reanimation that threads several lost songs into a meticulous and gorgeous rendering. The album was recorded live as a group in a small theatre in the Southwest of France with minimal overdubs.

France's contribution to the genre of the Baroque solo concerto seems late and tentative, but it is fascinating to see how French composers celebrated the arrival of the violin and combined Italian robustness and French elegance in their works. Johannes Pramsohler and Ensemble Diderot take a journey to the origins of this hybrid form, presenting here the very first violin concertos by French composers, with two world-premiere recordings of concertos by Jean-Marie Leclair and Andre-Joseph Exaudet at the heart of this virtuosic and exciting programme.

The Baroque Ensemble “Carlo Antonio Marino”, directed by Natale Arnoldi, already protagonist of important Classical and late Baroque productions, within this album is faced with the concertos from the seventh opus by Pietro Antonio Locatelli, well known composer and violinist from Bergamo. When it appeared, this collection was not particularly successful; probably the mixture of different musical styles in the Concertos was not appreciated by the public, which by then was moving towards the new sensitivity of the galant style. Op.7, in any case, is an excellent and occasionally brilliant work of Locatelli’s: a musician who, in spite of the fact that in 1741 he had already attained fame and glory, did not hesitate to run the risk of attempting to renew the waning Italian Concerto, by experimenting with approaches that might accommodate the new trends, without however denying his own origins.

Composers Craig Armstrong and Calum Martin have embarked upon a new collaboration, which began as a meeting of ideas with a mutual, long-held belief that there was a special project to be written, looking at the unique spiritual tradition of Gaelic Psalm singing. This has been achieved in a most spectacular way on the brand new album, ‘The Edge of the Sea’, featuring two new works: ‘The Martyrdom Variations’, and ‘Ballantyne’; with the concept being realised by bringing together a curated congregation by Calum’s from the Isles of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, along with the outstanding talent and enthusiasm of the Scottish Ensemble. It was agreed at the outset by them both that any music based on the Gaelic Psalms would have to be respectful of the tradition and that the composition written to accompany the singing would allow complete freedom of expression for the singing style.