Sine

This is CPO’s second release of Pejačević’s chamber music. The internationally active and renowned Sine Nomine Quartet from Switzerland and Oliver Triendl are outstanding advocates on behalf of this versatile composer. The last movement of the Piano Quintet Op. 40 is a highlight; with a solemn introduction and animated theme, which pervades the entire movement with kinetic energy.

Call it ironic that the Aphex Twin's first U.S. album release was under a pseudonym, but given the many names Mr. James has used over the course of his career, perhaps it's just as well. Regardless of name or intent, on Surfing on Sine Waves he serves up a great collection of abstract electronic/dance madness, caught somewhere between the driftiness of his more ambient works at the time and the rave-minded nuttiness of "Digeridoo." The opening track, "Polygon Window," plants its feet firmly in both camps, with a brisk series of beats playing against the slightly dark, slightly quirky keyboard sounds with which the Twin first made his name…

Renaissance polyphony is generally held to be stately, calm, reassuring. But this pro- gramme of Palestrina’s six-part Missa sine nomine, complemented by five of his motets and three by Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36–92), was recorded after the Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, had undertaken a tour of Israel and Palestine. There the music and its texts (‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’) took on an extraordinary poignancy, with the dispossession and desperation of thousands of years ago animating the restrained dignity of Palestrina’s counterpoint with an unexpectedly topical intensity.

Johannes Tinctoris (ca. 1430-1511), known primarily for his music treatises, was also a skilled composer of sacred music notable for its long, intertwining melodic lines. This first recording devoted entirely to Tinctoris presents his Mass based on the popular L'homme armé tune, along with his starkly beautiful sine nomine (no-name) Mass for three low voices, notable especially for its astonishing low bass part.

Laraaji & Roger Eno - Islands (1995) {Sine Records sin001 rec 1989}
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© 1989, 1995 Sine Records | sin001
Electronic / Ambient

First of all, this album is not a collaboration between Laraaji and Roger Eno. It is a split live album with separate performances from the two, recorded at the Lanzarote Music Festival in 1989. Zitherist/composer Laraaji has the first three tracks, totaling about 24 minutes. and while his ambient meanderings are sometimes quite interesting and possessing a calm beauty, he manages to spoil the mood with disorienting vocal noises.

The three works on this recording mark staging posts in Herbert Howells’s compositional life. Sine nomine was commissioned at Elgar’s instigation when Howells was 30 and is predominantly orchestral, with wordless parts for the two vocal soloists. This arch-like ‘spiritual meditation’ was his first extended work for larger forces. Like the Hymnus paradisi (Naxos 8570352), the Stabat Mater is a direct musical reponse to the death of the composer’s nine year-old son, and further reveals his mastery of choral and orchestral polyphony. The Te Deum signalled a fresh and new approach to settings of Anglican canticles.