Having made a gradual switch during the 15 years since his first album was published from electronica to instrumental variations on ambient and minimalism, Max Richter is among the most commercially successful composers of our time. This album of his solo piano music belongs in the genre explored so thoroughly for Brilliant Classics by Jeroen van Veen, whose prolific recording history includes hugely popular albums of Philip Glass (BC9419) and Michael Nyman (BC95112), Ludovico Einaudi (BC94910) and Yann Tiersen (BC95129) and his fellow Dutch musician Jakob ter Veldhuis (BC94873) and himself (BC9454). The appetite for slowly moving, unchallenging, post-Minimalist music is apparently infinite, and so this new album is sure to be a success.
Looking ahead to the 300th anniversary of the birth of Haydn in 2032, the Joseph Haydn Foundation of Basel has joined forces with the Alpha Classics label to record all of the composer’s 107 symphonies. This ambitious project is placed under the artistic direction of Giovanni Antonini, who now presents the third volume, after two previous issues that attracted great attention and received numerous awards, including the Echo Klassik Prize 2015 for the ‘best orchestral recording’ of the year.
13 previously unissued solo acoustic demos including 5 unheard original composition, showcasing Buckley's recognisable style of acid-folk tinged with harpsichord and harmonium. Recorded in 1967, remastered from recently discovered tapes and rare acetate.
Lock the doors, close the curtains and turn the lights down before putting this disc on. Here is music for an intimate space: solo music for solitary souls. This is a rare opportunity to hear solo lyra viol music from the early 1630s played on a beautiful period instrument by one of today’s foremost exponents of the Jacobean repertoire. Richard Boothby has been playing English consort music (some of it by Lawes) with Fretwork for over 30 years, so is as well placed as anyone today to interpret this body of solo music, most of it recorded here for the first time.
This album by gifted Romanian pianist Eugen Cicero was recorded during Hungary's Debrecen Jazz Days in September 1978, but the tapes remained in the archives until 2004 when a Slovenian collector discovered them…
Like Mick Jagger before him, Steven Tyler itched to launch a solo career, but where Mick struck while the iron was relatively hot – 20 years after "Satisfaction," true, yet the Rolling Stones still packed arenas – the Aerosmith singer took the better part of a decade to figure out what he wanted to do on his own. Stumbling through a starring gig on American Idol and an accompanying flop single that led to an awkward 2012 reunion with Aerosmith, Tyler finally resurfaced as a country singer – a surprise, because the closest he ever came to country was the Desmond Child co-write "What It Takes," a power ballad that provides a good touchstone for 2016's We're All Somebody from Somewhere.
This new recording by Ondine includes the world premiere recordings of four works by the celebrated Finnish contemporary composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928). Rubáiyát (2015) is a song cycle based on the poetry of Omar Khayyam (1048–1131). The work was written for Gerald Finley who in this recording sings the solo part of the orchestral version of the work.