Fitkin

One of the most prominent latter-day British minimalists, Graham Fitkin enjoys both renown in Europe and a kind of enfant terrible status in his native England, although this is gradually wearing off. Nevertheless, to know Fitkin is not necessarily to love him; blogger/composer Alex Christaki has written that Fitkin's Mesh is "quite typical of a 'contemporary' style, meaning that its capturing texture feels to well adapted to today's modern music. I also feel that once you have heard it a second hearing is unnecessary." Another English critic once commented that "if I hear Fitkin's Cud one more time I'm afraid I'm going to lose my mind."

Graham Fitkin is a British composer, pianist and conductor. His compositions fall broadly into the minimalist and postminimalist genres. Described by The Independent in 1998 as "one of the most important of our younger composers", he is particularly known for his works for solo and multiple pianos, as well as for music accompanying dance.

LOOSENING is a double album of five works by award winning composer GRAHAM FITKIN. Each one has the string quartet at its core but every work includes its own additional soloist. The string quartet is a really homogenous group, steeped in history and tradition, in which timbrally similar instruments create a well-honed sound through trusted communication and shared purpose. Each work has clearly defined roles for the two protagonists – quartet and solist. Each piece allows for two perspectives, two distinct approaches to the material and yet each protagonist is affected by the other. Approaches often evolve through the works, perhaps the quartet splits their honed homogeneity to focus more on individual constituents or conversely maybe they subsume the incomer into their group creating a larger group. An album of world premiere recordings: Four of the five works have never been recorded before, and the fifth is a new arrangement (also never recorded). DISTIL won the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Chamber Works in 2015.

Clarinettist Barnaby Robson performs a rich programme of 20th-century and contemporary music for clarinet and piano, including world-premiere recordings. The release opens with Barnaby Robson’s collaboration with BAFTA-winning sound designer Martin Cantwell: a recording of Steve Reich’s intricate New York Counterpoint, which involves eleven pre-recorded clarinet lines. Herbert Howells is celebrated for his choral music but his instrumental works are less famous; with pianist Fiona Harris, Robson performs the 1946 version of Howells’s Clarinet Sonata, never recorded before.

Dave Stapleton - Catching Sunlight (2008) {Edition Records EDN1005}
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© 2008 Edition Records | EDN1005
Jazz / Post Bop / Modern Jazz / Piano

Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes you just have to listen, let the music catch you and carry you with it. Sometimes the music is everything. Catching Sunlight has everything. Pianist and composer Dave Stapleton’s new album Catching Sunlight is filled with gorgeous melodies, drenched in sensual harmonies and driven by subtle, shifting rhythms and strange, exotic time signatures. New Music group, the Lunar Saxophone Quartet, commissioned Stapleton to write a long work in 2007 for four saxophones and piano.