Early Music For Meditation

In 1989 the young pianist Sam Haywood was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Julius Isserlis Scholarship. Years later, having become friends with Julius’s grandson Steven, Sam came across some of Julius’s piano compositions in a drawer at the house of George, Julius’s son. The editions were unclear and full of printing errors; so, struck by the beauty of the music, Sam decided to make his own edition, the fruits of which are to be heard on this recording.

(the organ of Notre Dame de France, London)
…Henri Mulet was born in Paris in 1878 and by all accounts was a good student, a skilled organist, and professor of music. However in 1937 he burnt his manuscripts and left Paris for Provence where he served as organist at the cathedral in Draguignan living out the remaining thirty years of his life in seclusion among the monks at the abbey there until his death in 1967…

A fresh approach to one of contemporary composition’s most iconoclastic and inventive figures, issued on the occasion of John Cage’s 100th birthday. Early Cage is the subject here, strikingly original songs and piano pieces from the 1930s and 1940s. Songs in which Cage sets words by writers whose vision was as independent as his own – James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings. As Paul Griffiths writes, “The music exists in singing that has a raw, living edge, and it exists in piano tone that can be utterly simple and utterly remarkable. There is also a third presence that of the producer, bringing forward the extraordinary resonances that come from Lubimov’s piano, with preparation or without.”

When one evaluates Paul Horn's career, it is as if he were two people, pre- and post-1967. In his early days, Horn was an excellent cool-toned altoist and flutist, while later he became a new age flutist whose music is often best used as background music for meditation. Horn started on piano when he was four and switched to alto at the age of 12…