Radio Radio

Australia's All India Radio is an Ambient Electronic/Post-Rock project helmed by songwriter/producer Martin Kennedy whose sound straddles the line between '60s psychedelia, '70s Krautrock, and contemporary styles from downtempo to chillgaze. All India Radio first gained attention issuing a series of evocative, often cinematic recordings in the 2000s, including The Inevitable, Permanent Evolutions, and The Silent Surf. All India Radio's music has been used on TV shows like CSI: Miami, One Tree Hill, The Lying Game, and Emmerdale, among others. Kennedy has also played with the Church's singer Steve Kilbey for a series albums, including 2014's sci-fi soundtrack The Rare Earth and 2017's Glow and Fade.

“Le Sacre du Printemps” (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky is regarded as a key work of classical music of the 20th century. Due to its rhythmic and tonal structures, interspersed with numerous dissonances, it created turmoil in the audience at its world premiere in Paris in 1913, but was then able to quickly establish itself as a central work in the repertoire of concert halls.

This year marks the 90th birthday of Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–2020), one of the most prominent 21st Century Polish composers. Sacred themes and texts surround the creative work of Penderecki, including many of his large-scale works. This album by the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir under Sigvards Klava consists the majority of his impressive sacred a cappella choral works from five different decades and which are mainly written in Latin. These deeply religious choral works are modern classics in choral repertoire. Recent album by the choir, featuring choral works by John Cage, received nomination for the Gramophone Awards 2023.

About the album Porridge Radio grew out of Dana Margolin’s bedroom, where she started making music in private. Living in the seaside town of Brighton, she recorded songs and slowly started playing them at open mic nights to rooms of old men who stared at her quietly as she screamed in their faces.

When Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin, one of the most vital new voices in rock, began to consider the themes of her new album, three vivid words began to emerge: joy, fear and endlessness. The artwork of the band’s third full-length, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, is a surreal image that evokes the ducks and dives, slippery slopes and existential angst of life in recent times. “To me, the feelings of joy, fear and endlesses coexist together,” says Dana. “You’re never just happy or unhappy.” Following Every Bad’s release in 2020, Margolin was quickly becoming regarded as one of the most magnetic band leaders around. But if Every Bad established Dana’s bravery in laying herself bare, her band’s third record takes that to anthemic new heights. While there are moments of guttural release, she also finds soft power on songs. “I used to think I had to be loud to be heard,” she admits, “but now I’m definitely less afraid of being gentle.”

Despite all the differences in the musical language of the works by the Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki included on this recording, they are united by their quality as a lament: Szymanowski's Stabat mater, completed in 1926 and based on a Polish translation rather than the original Latin text of the medieval poem, is still considered one of the most important contributions to 20th-century music.

The MDR Leipzig Radio Choir and its artistic director Philipp Ahmann present a collection of Felix Mendelssohn’s choral music, which arguably represents the pinnacle of German nineteenth-century religious music. Ranging across psalm settings, motets, Latin verses, the Deutsche Liturgie as well as the ethereal chorus Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen, which was later adapted and incorporated into his oratorio Elijah, the album highlights the unique stylistic range and expressive power of Mendelssohn’s choral output.

Mate saule is Mother Sun – and Peteris Vasks worships her. Any meeting or interview with the Latvian composer is likely to end up with a tramp through the forests or a swim in the Baltic. And much of Vasks’s music is a meditation on the eternal attributes of Nature, in a continuum of life which stretches beyond the fever and the fret of his own fast-changing world. Mate saule is an early choral work, its voices oscillating like the shimmer of a sun slowly rising from the horizon, and lit by flares and fragments of chant. Vasks’s choral music has tended to be instrumental in texture, focusing on the overall mood rather than the specific verbal activity of any text he is setting. The ‘white diatonicism’ of Mate saule gives way to more disturbed, aleatoric harmonies and more disruptive textures as political change and human turmoil take centre stage in the late Eighties in Zemgale, a song about the anguished dilemmas of exile. This is a subject at the very core of the work of the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (now resident in the USA); and the three poems set by Vasks in 1994 receive their world premiere recording. They were originally written for the Hilliard Ensemble: here the excellent Latvian Radio Choir works with concentrated focus on the spare harmonies and elusive metres which recreate the wonder of three transient moments out of time.

The baritone Matthias Goerne, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Mikko Franck launch a trilogy of Shostakovich’s works for baritone and orchestra with a recording of Symphony No.14. This will be followed by Symphony no.13 (Babi Yar ) and the Suite on poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti . The soprano Asmik Grigorian joins Matthias Goerne for this monumental yet highly subtle symphony setting poems by García Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke.

The Netherlands Radio Choir and its chief conductor Benjamin Goodson bring together choral works by Josef Rheinberger and Felix Mendelssohn, presenting some of the greatest choral compositions of the nineteenth century. This recording begins with Rheinberger’s rarely-recorded Mass in E-Flat Major and closes with the composer’s stirringly beautiful Abendlied. Four of Mendelssohn’s most expressive and original psalm settings are paired with his lesser-known Sechs Sprüche, powerful choral miniatures that reflect on key moments in the church year. These pieces are performed in a warm, intimate acoustic, allowing the words and remarkable detail in this music to be heard and relished.