Classical Music 125 Items

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is one of the year’s best genre films. If you can handle its face-melting violence, then you are in for a visual and sonic treat.

It’s a visceral and unflinching assault on the senses that centers around Tanya Vos, a skille

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.

180g vinyl.

Limited to 150 copies with a signed artprint by Lambert.

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.

Toronto keyboardist R. Grunwald has played on sessions for hundreds of musicians, and has served as bandleader for jazz/pop chanteuse Jill Barber and country/folk songwriter Donovan Woods for the better part of a decade. Now he's ready to step onto the public stage with his own music'alone. Oma is an evocative and deeply personal solo piano record, inspired in part by the life story of his 96-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and pianist. Drawing from Erik Satie, Nils Frahm and others, Grunwald refers to his intensely melodic compositions as 'extended minimalism.'

'After quitting piano, it was my Oma who inspired me to get back into it. She survived the 2nd world war moving from town to town, hiding from the Nazis, and the Russians in Poland. Music was the one thing that tied her young life together. This music is a tribute to her.'

Enjoy in a quiet environment.

Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir hardly need an introduction - their distinct styles have graced the speakers of pretty much anyone enamored with experimental music in the last decade, and between them the two have chalked up an enviable canon of successes. Bertelmann, under the Hauschka moniker has explored the extremities of prepared piano improvisation, and Guðnadóttir has taken cinematic, explorative cello music into a new era of depth and passion, so to hear them both together is a rare and unexpected treat. Rare is putting it lightly even - „Pan Tone“ is a recording of a single concert which the duo performed on the 26th of February 2010 as part of Arctic Circle - Bubbly Blue and Green festival at Kings Place in London, and documents an event that would truly never be repeated. Sure, they could attempt to re-create the event, but the spontaneity and glorious serendipity in this particular recording is a pleasure to behold.

Bertelmann and Guðnadóttir decided to create a set of compositions which based on the idea of the ocean, and took a book of Pantones to extract exact references to the specific colors of the sea. These watery tones form the backbone of the performance and inform the direction of the collaboration, guiding us through rich blues, glassy greens and frothy whites. In listening to the music it seems incredibly appropriate that the artists should choose blue as the middle ground in their work; the ineffable lightness that Bertelmann brings to the table is a stark contrast to Guðnadóttir´s sinking darkness, and as the two styles collide we witness a plethora of tones, shades and hues. It sounds as if the two artists have been playing together for decades, and their sound is so perfectly matched you might wonder why it´s taken them this long to collaborate. All that´s left for us to do is to soak in the tidal beauty of this very exclusive body of music, to listen to it sing, bubble and crash through its duration before settling in total silence. When the record reaches its conclusion there is an unsettling calm, a sense that you have witnessed something very special indeed, and that is a feeling to prize amongst all else.

"In the Understage area of the Alexandra Trianti Hall, the musical saw in the hands of Nikos Giousef, and accompanied by piano, samplers and analog synthesizers, is transformed into a voice. ‘An otherworldly child’s voice’, ‘a Siren’s voice’ or ‘a castrato voice’, as it has been described, it easily climbs to tonic heights that the human voice can only reach with great effort." The pieces chosen for the program reflect this criterion, with works such as the aria “Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott” from the oratorio of J. S. Bach's “St Matthew Passion”, “Ave Maria” from Franz Schubert's “Ellens Gesang Iii”, H. Purcell's “Music for a while” as well as choral works like “Lacrimosa” from W. A. Mozart's Requiem and the First part (Grave) from G. B. Pergolesi's “Stabat Mater”. S. Rachmaninov's “Vocalise” is also a very interesting choice for musical saw, a song without lyrics as it is. The program also includes two works by greek composers, Ioannis Planiteros's “Ina ti”, written in the 17th century and still performed nowadays by local choirs in Zakynthos, and “ The Trawler” from Nikos Skalkotas's popular ballet “The Sea”, as a tribute to the great composer on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his death. George Katsanos, in three ambient tracks of the album, is really traveling us in the mysterious amazing music world of "Adagios from the Underground". Nikos Giousef soprano and baritone musical saw Irene Tiniakou piano George Katsanos Moog synthesizer, music box, kalimba, effects

Springing from body of work spanning decades, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with ‘Yeo-Neun’. Her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most ground-breaking and unexpected album to date.