Highland Dawn Anna Markland

EM Records is thrilled to introduce this disc from Excalibur Voices, “And the Blackbird Sang”, a remarkable recording showcasing the brilliance of English choral music.

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Anna Besson is a flautist with a passion for traditional music, who has already made an album of Irish folk music, The Dubhlinn Gardens (ALPHA447).

Of Ukrainian origin, Boris Pigovat is now based in Israel where he has won several distinguished national awards. His Holocaust Requiem received the ACUM prize in 1995, and was premièred at a concert dedicated to the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar. Each movement is named after the Latin Mass text, the emotional symbols of sorrow, suffering and hope expressed purely instrumentally but led by the ‘human’ voice of the viola. The deliberately Russian Romantic style of Poem of Dawn was especially chosen by the composer for the work’s dedicatee, acclaimed violist Anna Serova.

On September 22, Anna Ternheim releases the album Before the Dawn, a cover album containing a total of five songs. The album began when Anna was still living in New York when the pandemic hit and paralyzed an entire world. The streets were empty and there was a generally eerie atmosphere. Then and there the idea of a cover album was born.

This album is the second commercial release by the two renowned Pembroke College choral ensembles (the Chapel Choir and the Pembroke College Girls' Choir) under the direction of Anna Lapwood.

Anna Besson is a flautist with a passion for traditional music, who has already made an album of Irish folk music, "The Dubhlinn Gardens". For this new recording, she teams up with the Russian fortepianist Olga Pashchenko, an eminent specialist of Beethoven’s music, to which she has already devoted three recordings dedicated to Beethoven on Alpha. Together they explore his interest in the popular melodies and the various folklores that make up the mosaic of European music by performing four of his ten National Airs, Op.107 and two Themes with Variations from Op. 10, which will take the listener from one end of the Old Continent to the other, from Scotland to Russia via Austria. The selection of works by Romantic composers that completes the programme shows how they shared the interest in folk material pioneered by Beethoven and his teacher Haydn – Swedish tunes for Kuhlau, Hungarian for Doppler, Auvergnese for Walckiers.