Michael Nyman

Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are two new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter. Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper. Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'.

Michael Nyman came of age as a classical composer in the radical London of the late '60s. His work embraces multiple vernaculars (jazz, avant garde, conceptual art) and helped cement the foundation of what came to be known as minimalism. Decades into his career, Nyman's score to Jane Campion's film The Piano made him a star. The movie's themes of colonialism and silence (its protagonist, portrayed by Holly Hunter, cannot speak) were perfectly aligned with his longtime interests in world and ambient music. Horn players assist members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in fleshing out Nyman's stately, hymn-like motifs. On the more heavily orchestrated cues, sentimentality wins out over minimalist restraint; the best tracks feature Nyman on solo piano, playing the rudimentary, faux period repertoire of Hunter's character.

Michael Nyman's 8 Lust Songs comes with a Parental Advisory warning for explicit content, but the songs are in Italian, so only a small number of Italian speakers in the English-speaking world will have the opportunity to be offended (unless, of course, you read the translations in the booklet). Nyman describes the settings of these explicit sixteenth century poems by Pietro Aretino – essentially bedroom dialogues between lovers – as a natural progression in his work, which, since his days as a student, has frequently been concerned with sex.