Classical Music Vinyl 588 Items

Patrick Higgins' new album Tocsin is full of thrilling opposites. It is a masterclass of visceral genre-bending sounds that are physical and delicate at the same time. Over the course of three large compositions, the listener is brought on a journey of constant surprise, as when the sound of violins dissolves into a halo of pure noise, more at home in an underground electronics show than anything that appears on a concert stage. The performers include the Wet Ink Ensemble, hailed as the 'Best Classical Ensemble of 2018'; acclaimed pianist Vicky Chow, 'one of our era's most brilliant pianists,"; and the Mivos Quartet, 'one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles.

Quirine Viersen returns to the cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach.
She decided she wants to share with you the development she has gone
through after deep inner work. Just as the cello suites were a new journey
for Bach, they signify now the same for her. “Bach gave me, time and again,
life energy. Through his purity he brought me back to my own purity and
closer to the answer on my questions.” Due to the enormous development
in length and size of the structure, Viersen suspects that they have been
an experiment for Bach himself, possibly even study material. “The further
you get into the suites, the larger the intervals and bigger the technical
challenges. It demonstrates that Bach was becoming more and more aware
of the enormous possibilities.
Being awarded the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, Quirine performed
with the Vienna Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta at the Lucerne Festival
in 2000. Since then, Quirine has played the cello concerto repertoire
with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt, Ingo
Metzmacher and Bernard Haitink, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra/
Valery Gergiev, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra/Jean Fournet and
many others. After working and recording extensively with Silke Avenhaus
for almost twenty years, Quirine has sought out new duo collaborations.
Recitals with pianist Enrico Pace kicked off with great success at the
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam in 2017.
Bach Cello Suites is available as a limited edition of 500 individually
numbered copies on black vinyl.

❝ J'aime écrire de la musique de chambre et des chorales, et particulièrement de la musique pour orchestres. Mais il n'est pas toujours simple de voir ces dernières jouées, l'orgue devient alors le meilleur moyen de donner au compositeur de vastes ressources ❞, écrivait Moondog en 1978 pour accompagner l’album Selected Works – confidentiel cousin américain de Moondog in Europe le premier disque enregistré en Allemagne.

Avec New Sound l’Ensemble Minisym fait le chemin inverse, emportant les pièces pour orgue(s) qui constituent l’album A New Sound of an Old Instrument (1979) – ainsi que des pièces composées en Europe durant cette même période – vers une instrumentation nouvelle et singulière. Le travail de l’Ensemble se base alors sur une grande connaissance de l’univers de Moondog qui a lui-même – et tout au long de sa vie – régulièrement donné de nouvelles couleurs à de mêmes compositions en changeant leurs instrumentations. Ce qui est d’ailleurs particulièrement manifeste au sein de l’album A New Sound of an Old Instrument dont la première face est constituée de pièces essentiellement composées aux milieu du tumulte des rues de New-York et marquée par une incroyable science du métissage (« Oasis », « Single Foot ») quand la seconde fait la part belle à de nouvelles compositions inspirées par ce sol européen que Moondog foule depuis peu et de manière désormais définitive (« Barn Dance », « Elf Dance », « Log in B »).
Empruntant des chemins de traverses les musiciens de Minisym déchiffrent par ailleurs des pièces jusque là inédites, parfois jamais jouées ni-même enregistrées par Moondog (« Logrundr in a », « Ground in d minor », « Marche Funèbre (Vercingétorix) », « Shneeflocken »).
Loin des académismes, c’est un monde que l’on rencontre ici, à l’ombre des instruments aussi rares que chers à Moondog. Ce disque, fruit d’un travail au long cours permet un souffle aussi fidèle qu’iconoclaste sur la musique d'un compositeur qui a passé sa vie entière à échafauder une oeuvre d'une naïveté toute particulière.

Piano Day 2021 sees Nils Frahm surprise the world with his Erased Tapes debut. Wait, what? How? Anyone who has seen the trail blazing sonic pioneer live will know Nils likes to deadpan a joke. Graz is in fact the first studio album he recorded for the label back in 2009, that somehow remained a secret… until now. Nils Frahm has quietly changed the musical landscape, reincarnating the centuries old figure of a pianist-composer for a new generation of music fans. As Nils’ word-of-mouth popularity grew and grew, so did the pop-culture profile of his instrument. He founded Piano Day with a team of like-minded friends in 2015 to help that process, some years releasing an album of piano recordings to celebrate one of humankind’s greatest inventions. Graz is one such record; an unheard snapshot of a young Nils recorded at Mumuth, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, in 2009 as part of the thesis Conversations for Piano and Room produced by Thomas Geiger, which received an award in the Classical Surround Recording category at the 127th AES Convention in New York. Whilst at the time it was decided to keep the grand piano recordings from the Graz sessions locked away and instead focus on his close mic’ed, dampened piano explorations which would become his acclaimed studio album Felt in 2011, two of the pieces — most notably Hammers — lived on as part of his live set, and were expanded on and re-recorded as part of his breakthrough 2013 record Spaces (a collage of field recordings from concerts which broke the Fourth Wall and included audience coughs). Over his mercurial career, Nils has pushed and pulled at the boundaries and parameters of his prolific work like that. He’s physically changed his piano (the softened prepared strings of Felt) played with a modified body (Screws recorded with 9 fingers and a broken thumb) played with scale (Solo recorded on the 3.7 metre high Klavins M370) and with the different layers of formats (last year’s Tripping with Nils Frahm nested his studio setup inside a live performance, concert film and live album). Now with Graz he has found the final frontier for play: time itself and his own discography. Graz is a moment of time at the very beginning of Nils’ quiet revolution. The essential genius is already evident; the harmonic language of classical, and the immediacy of jazz. Nils seems to pull down each idea moment by moment, gently, to not scare away the muse. He describes: “sometimes when you hear a piano, you might think it’s a conversation between a woman and a man. At the same time, it can hint at shapes of the universe and describe how a black hole looks. You can make