Outhere Music

For twenty years Marco Serino was Ennio Morricone’s violinist, the soloist on his film soundtracks and on world tours where they were reworked for the concert hall. In January 2020, after what proved to be his last public concert, at the Italian Senate in Rome, Morricone finished the transcription of this magnificent and unpublished collection, which recasts the themes of his most famous scores in suites transcribed for violin and orchestra. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Marco Serino and dedicated to him as a fruit of the artistic partnership between the two men. The collection alternates between pieces already performed in concert and others that are heard in this version for the first time. A year and a half after the composer’s death, this extraordinary document, a testimony to friendship and professional esteem, now becomes a recording project with the collaboration of Andrea Morricone, the composer’s son, who conducts the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento.

For their fourth recording on Alpha Classics, Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra - who bring together the best Estonian talent and leading musicians from around the world each year in Pärnu - celebrate composers from Estonia and Poland, two nations closely connected by their history. Eduard Tubin (1905-1982) is a composer whose ten symphonies tower at the top of Estonian orchestral music.

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann ( Concerto Polonois ) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms. She has even toured the US with Kanye West and appeared in the hit HBO series Mozart in the Jungle . . . Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigour.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel , a dialogue between the voice of the cello and the piano.

While the sound of early instruments is reminiscent of chiaroscuro Baroque splendours, the bandoneon calls up the urban world of the tango. Combining the two, as Daniel Brel (b. 1950) does in his works, blurs these distinctions, allowing the instruments to speak with their own voices. The result is an extremely personal type of music that is both poetic and poignant, born of the moving encounter between Daniel Brel and Vincent Dumestre and his musicians.

Open the door onto one of the best-kept secrets of medieval music… It is the music from the Winchester Troper, one of the earliest, and most stunning sources of medieval polyphonic music, written in the first decades of the eleventh century, more than two centuries before the manuscripts of Notre-Dame polyphony. Without the existence of this repertory, our vision of music history would have been entirely different, and much poorer. Ensemble Dialogos offers a musical creation, placing the polyphonic music of tenth- and eleventh-century Winchester in a dialogue with virtuosic improvisations, while telling the story of a man haunted by visionary and terrifying dreams, as he tries to escape from three raging naked Furies, and finally finds salvation through Saint Swithun, a medieval Anglo-Saxon Superman. As you prepare to discover an unknown musical repertory from medieval England, you will be drawn into a stunning story about demons, dreams and miraculous healing, wondering whether the music you are listening to is archaic or incredibly modern.

While the sound of early instruments is reminiscent of chiaroscuro Baroque splendours, the bandoneon calls up the urban world of the tango. Combining the two, as Daniel Brel (b. 1950) does in his works, blurs these distinctions, allowing the instruments to speak with their own voices. The result is an extremely personal type of music that is both poetic and poignant, born of the moving encounter between Daniel Brel and Vincent Dumestre and his musicians.

The Lockenhaus International Chamber Music Festival is regarded as one of Austria’s most prestigious festivals: it was created by the violinist Gidon Kremer to offer a new vision of chamber music and the opportunity to create musical exchanges in an intimate setting. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt succeeded Gidon Kremer in 2012 and now continues the spirit of the festival. For this first recording in partnership with Lockenhaus, he is joined by experienced partners, including the Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang, the Hungarian violinist Barnabás Kelemen, the German pianist Alexander Lonquich – whose Schubert double album was recently released on Alpha (Alpha 433) – and the British violist Lawrence Power. Together they have selected two works, the Piano Quintet of Béla Bartók, a demanding composition, rarely performed even though it is considered an intensely personal work, and the String Trio of Sándor Veress, a former student of Bartók.

London 1651: the third year of Civil War. Opera houses and theatres are shut down, but the nightlife is buzzing: people enjoy a few hours of escape thanks to carefree dancing, cheerful songs and good drinks, living for today and not tomorrow. There’s so much life in the traditional tunes, virtuosic divisions and popular songs that were well-known thanks to the theatres! PRISMA takes us on a trip through the bars and pubs of London and explores the British dance music of the seventeenth century. This program comprises melodies from the famous collection The English Dancing Master , as well as music from The Division Violin , Scottish and Irish folk tunes, and even some later hits like Danny Boy – all served up in PRISMA’s spontaneous and lively signature style!

The percussionist Vivi Vassileva is one of the most fascinating classical soloists of her generation, and she now releases her debut CD, entitled "singin' rhythm", on the alpha classics label. Born in 1994 to a Bulgarian family of musicians – her mother is a pianist, her father and brother are violinists, her sister plays violin too and she herself learned the instrument – Vivi was captivated by music at an early age especially when she heard some hand drummers playing on a remote, unspoiled beach at the black sea where her parents own a house. It was then that she decided to change from the violin to percussion. With her dynamic, infectious way of making music, Vivi exudes a sense of enjoyment that is in no way limited to the elaboration of rhythms or the igniting of a display of tonal pyrotechnics. Her main aim is to touch people, to tell stories expressed in terms of melodies, harmonies and rhythms.