Opus 55

Academy Award-nominated composer and pianist Dustin O’Halloran presents his debut album Silfur on DG – released on CD, vinyl and digital formats. Silfur explores the shifting perspective of music through time and place in new tracks and reimagined earlier works. O’Halloran divides his time between Reykjavík and LA. Unable to return to California because of the lockdown, he spent the imposed time of isolation in a state of introspection and stillness, writing new material and revisiting works from four solo albums and refining them with a renewed sense of self.

The title of the new album says it all: Opus, the new release of Danish music project Afenginn, has indeed become a major work, consisting of four movements - just like a classical symphony. Within those pieces, an unusual world of sounds unfolds, largely unspoilt by traditional patterns and structures. Influenced by folk, world music and classical music, Afenginn have created their own individual style, acoustic, innovative, dynamic and doleful, which has brought them a wealth of awards and grants in their home country as well as worldwide appreciation and success. Afenginn was founded in 2002 in Copenhagen by musicology student Kim Rafael Nyberg from Finland and Rune Kofoed from Denmark.

The twenty sonatas on this recording show Handel writing for the professional musicians of his London opera orchestra; they demand considerable skill and stamina both from the soloist and the continuo. Prominent bass parts give the sonatas a contrapuntal strength and vitality, and Handel keeps the elements of display and purely musical argument in admirable balance in these works. For this reason, they are among the most attractive Baroque solo sonatas and deserve their lasting popularity.

It was some years after founding the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century in 1981 that Frans Brüggen first turned his attention to the music of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and endeavoured to perceive that special orchestral landscape, in order to transform it into musical sound, with the use of period instruments rediscovering historical tonal colours. Now, his quest undimmed, Brüggen has submerged himself once more into the glories of Beethoven’s orchestral music for a new cycle being issued in a sumptuous new hybrid SACD box set by Glossa.

It's very hard to write a bio of band that has such a long history but only one official release, the story OPUS EST is full of situations that could had lead o the development of a real and prolific band, but the circumstances were against them, starting with the fact that the idea of the band was formed around 1977 when Prog Rock was dying due to the pressure imposed by Punk from the alternative musical spectrum and Disco from the mainstream side, so it was hard for a new band to appear in such a chaotic moment…