Between Silence Beyond Time

‘Going all the way back to the Celts and the Druids, the term nemeton designates a place where forces and energies are crystallised, generally clearings where solemn or ritual actions were performed. The best-known nemeton is certainly Stonehenge. The architectural marvel of Chartres Cathedral is built on a nemeton. In composing this piece for solo percussion, I wanted to depict a “place” of this kind by means of sound. I’m utterly fascinated by the instrumentarium of this work, consisting chiefly of metal, wood and skin instruments that don’t have their own “specific” resonance.

Jordi Savall, La Capella Reial, Hesperion XX - Francisco Guerrero - Sacrae Cantiones (1992) {Naïve Astrée ES 9953 rel 2000}
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© 1992, 2000 Auvidis / Naïve / Astrée | ES 9953
Classical / Renaissance / Choral

Sixteenth-century Spanish composer Francisco Guerrero is featured in a reissued disc of motets for four, five, six, eight and 12 voices, with and without instruments. They come from a handful of collections published between 1555 and 1597 and show Guerrero’s skill in evoking a wide range of moods, joyful, sombre and contemplative in turn. Jordi Savall’s ensemble is well-equipped to project the skilfully wrought structures and expressive allure of the music. Some of the pieces fare better than others in respect of vocal texture and ensemble. Tenors and basses occasionally lack tonal refinement but, at their strongest the performances provide a radiant conspectus of Guerrero’s masterly motets.

In her complete recording of the solo and accompanied harpsichord pieces of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Blandine Rannou invited us to ‘change dimensions, accept – decide – that a silence between two notes, a slight time-lag between two voices . . . can be genuine events, striking, powerful, raucous, overwhelming or sensual’.

"I feel like 'Home' is a second part of the same book, that the start was in 'Esja', a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where 'Home' will lead me and my music". — Hania Rani

Enigma is a German electronic project formed in 1990 by Michael Cretu, David Fairstein and Frank Peterson. Cretu is both the composer and the producer of the project.

Brett Dean is not shy about revealing what his music is ‘about’. Whether inspired by certain individuals (as in Epitaphs), or by an ecological or human disaster (as in his String Quartet No. 1, on the now all too topical plight of refugees), Dean’s works are usually – perhaps invariably – driven by extra-musical narratives. Rather than tease out any innate structural puzzles or tensions, his music typically falls into short little dramatic narratives – no movement on this disc lasts as long as eight minutes, many of them rather less than five. The most obviously successful work here is Quartet No. 2, ‘And once I played Ophelia’, effectively a dramatic scena. Its soprano soloist is no mere extra voice (as in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet) but the leading protagonist. Allison Bell’s genuinely affecting performance is backed by the Doric Quartet’s expressionist scampering and sustained harmonies, the strings occasionally coming to the fore in the manner of a Schumann-style song postlude.