Marianne

These days, Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958) is one of the best-known early 20th century modernists in Finnish classical music. In his early years, he composed in the National Romantic style, but by the time he was 23, he had developed a much more progressive style. By the beginning of the 1920s, he was writing in a modern, free-tonal musical language with a strong focus on timbral colour. Merikanto himself considered his “radical” style to be innate, but we know he was in fact inspired by Debussy and Scriabin, and especially Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony. After moving from the countryside back to Helsinki in 1928, Merikanto started actively networking with other Finnish composers, which also had an effect on his music.

Marianne Faithfull celebrated her 50th anniversary in popular music with 2014’s Give My Love to London. That recording, among her best, revealed a career and life fraught with achievement, tragedy, addiction, illness, and redemption. No Exit documents that album's supporting tour. Issued in various formats, the standard edition contains an audio disc and a DVD…

Few stars of the '60s reinvented themselves as successfully as Marianne Faithfull. Coaxed into a singing career by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964, she had a big hit in both Britain and the U.S. with her debut single, the Jagger/Richards composition "As Tears Go By" (which prefaced the Stones' own version by a full year)…

The Very Best of Marianne Faithfull' is a particularly strong collection of Marianne's earliest recordings made for Decca between 1964 to 1968. This album contains every one of her singles which made the charts both in Britain and America during those fruitful four years.

Faithfull pegged her comeback to a brutal survivalist persona, but by this fourth album of her second career, she had mellowed at least to the extent of constructing flowing song structures with her collaborators, Barry Reynolds and Wally Badarou, that eased the bitterness still found in many of her lyrics…

As the liner notes to this intriguing release tell, Faithfull had a long-simmering interest in German cabaret, particularly the work of Kurt Weill. It came fully to life via her role as Pirate Jenny in a staging of The Threepenny Opera in Dublin as translated by Frank McGuinness and her attendance at a workshop organized by Allen Ginsburg. After a series of initial performances with pianist Paul Trueblood, Faithfull took her revue of many classic songs from the mid-century, titled "An Evening in the Weimar Republic," to the road…

Fully established as a dramatic, innovative singer with astonishing appeal and energy thanks to her string of excellent '80s releases, Faithfull concluded her renaissance decade with Blazing Away, an excellent live album recorded in New York's St. Anne's Cathedral…

Mobile Fidelity reissued Marianne Faithfull's two dark milestones, 1979's Broken English and 1987's Strange Weather, on one CD. Although there were nearly ten years separating these two records, they share a moodiness and faux-torch arrangements that make them a perfect match…

Because more than half of the 35 songs on this two-disc retrospective of Marianne Faithfull's 1979-95 output come from her three great albums – Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances, and Strange Weather – or are previously unreleased outtakes or B-sides from them, A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology makes a fine primer to Faithfull's often challenging, always mesmerizing (or would that be always challenging, often mesmerizing?) music…

A unique new album of poetry and music featuring Marianne Faithfull, set to the music of Warren Ellis, and featuring Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal.