Metier Records, the new-music label of Divine Art Recordings Group, has a fascinating new recording bringing together music by Robert Schumann and Tristan Murail. The album, to be released in June 2019, will be titled ‘Une rencontre’ (‘An encounter’) and is a meeting of Romantic and contemporary music, climaxed by the premiere recording of Murail’s ‘revisit’ to Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a transcription written especially for the cello soloist Marie Ythier.
Peter Hill’s latest CD for Delphian (DCD 34141) features the premiere of Messiaen’s recently discovered La Fauvette Passerinette, along with music by nine other composers who form part of the Messiaen ‘landscape’, from Ravel and Stockhausen to Dutilleux, Murail and George Benjamin. The CD has been selected as a record of the year in The Sunday Times, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, and Instrumental Choice in BBC Music Magazine.
When Niels Rosing-Schow was growing up, Danish music was adapting to the New Simplicity of Henning Christiansen, Ole Buck and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. European ears were growing familiar with the slow, crystalline musical metamorphoses of György Ligeti. From the Paris of Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Iannis Xenakis came the suggestion that sound and harmony might just be the same thing.
Wiek Hijmans (1967) has played the electric guitar since the age of eleven. His interest in both classical and popular music instilled a lifelong passion in him for integrating the electric guitar in classical music. Hijmans has been featured at the Holland Festivals Night of the electric guitar, and at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, as ‘the specialist in contemporary composed music for electric guitar’. Hijmans holds a Performing Musician’s Diploma from the Sweelinck Conservatory of Amsterdam and a Professional Studies Certificate from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City where he studied with David Starobin.
The Beethoven 250th anniversary on 17 December 2020 is an event of national significance in Germany. It even finds its way into the text of the Federal Government's coalition agreement, where it is stated that the anniversary "offers outstanding opportunities for Germany as a cultural nation both at home and abroad. That is why the preparations for this important anniversary are task for the nation." Jazzrausch Bigband got the memo straight away. With their album "Beethoven's Breakdown" the band is honouring the pioneering composer in its own way. Not by being historically authentic or by preserving him in aspic, but in a manner that befits Beethoven the radical innovator. Just as he revolutionized the history of music, the equally forward-looking JRBB has pushed ahead with its bold concept of orchestral techno-jazz.