Act Music

In September 1809, the Vienna Hofburg Theatre commissioned Ludwig van Beethoven to create new incidental music for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Egmont". The tragedy had premiered in Mainz on 9 January 1789. It calls for incidental music; but various attempts, some commissioned by the poet himself, remained unfinished or were unsatisfactory. In Vienna, however, the production of "Egmont" was to include the music called for in several places.

Out now to stream and download, Silva Screen Records releases ‘Re:Scored – Epic Classical Volume 2’ by London Music Works

Prolific Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig returns with a gorgeous new LP of material comissioned to soundtrack the computer game Magnesium 173. Whilst functioning as a score, ‘Music for Magnesium_173’ is far from being a set of short cues cues or lesser material. Released on double vinyl and digital formats, the record comprises a set of twelve bold and immersive pieces – the majority clocking in between 5-10 minutes in length and totalling 80 minutes of new music.

The tunes are instantly recognizable: well-known standards such as "All The Things You Are", "Over The Rainbow" or "Autumn Leaves". And yet the listener always has the impression of hearing something completely new. On "Painting Music", Danish pianist Carsten Dahl gives his own take on some of the great classics of the jazz repertoire in a way that is highly personal, resolutely individual and completely revelatory.

Der magische Spiegel (‘The Magic Mirror’), a 1954 ballet by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967), tells a pantomime tale of flirtation, cuckoldery, magical spells and perdition – but this is no puritanical morality play: using the limited resources of a chamber orchestra to surprisingly full-bodied effect, Flury conjures up a delightful sequence of dances – a generous number of waltzes, with a czardas, a bolero and more – that skip past in good-humoured succession. And behind its innocent title, the Little Ballet Music of thirty years earlier hides a buoyant dance-suite, scored with a feeling for colour that would have gone down well in Hollywood. This recording was made by the team – Paul Mann and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra – responsible for a ‘pulsating’ recording of Richard Flury’s one-act opera Eine florentinische Tragödie.

The time of rigid demarcations between musical genres is over. For those who see music, indeed who love music as a universal language offering unlimited scope for human expression, this can only be a positive development. When one considers the jazz pianists of our time, they have just about all received their grounding in classical music, and yet these are musicians who don’t just traverse many different jazz styles, they can also roam at will into other genres. And looking among them, it would be hard to find a pianist as quintessentially complete as Iiro Rantala from Finland.

Erased Tapes announce Bell Orchestre’s House Music — an immersive ecosystem of an album to be released on March 19, and the first full-length work released by the acclaimed Montreal-based outfit in over a decade. House Music unfolds as one long piece, a recorded-then-sculpted improvisation that vastly expands their work, coalescing classical and electronic instrumentation in the creation of genre-defying musical worlds.

When I started work on Geyser last autumn I had decided I was done composing music that reflected the pain of the pandemic. This new piece was to be instead a celebration – of music, its welcome return and that unique atmosphere created by musicians when they meet to perform. Its mood was to be predominantly joyful and optimistic, while its title was a metaphor for the music’s underlying rhythmic energy, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts – like explosions of water and steam from a pressurised geothermal spring. (This idea of tension, boiling under the surface, is a theme I return to in a lot in my music.)

In the penultimate episode of his widely popular and critically acclaimed HBO series, Painting with John, its creator, John Lurie, sat in a Manhattan recording studio, working out musical parts for the show’s soundtrack. “After the illness started, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do this again,” said Lurie.

Dean Torrence’s The Teammates: Twenty Years Of Making Music 1965-1985 is a curated collection that traverses the decades of the various musical teams Torrence has captained. Whether it was in the producer’s chair, behind the microphone or putting together musical entities, Dean has done it all. This collection includes many of Dean’s rare collaborations with the likes of Mike Love, Jan Berry, Bruce Johnston, Harry Nilsson, and Leon Russell.