Classical Music 249 Items

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

Domino is extremely proud to present Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) performed by Beth Gibbons and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki.

The performance took place at The National Opera Grand Theatre in Warsaw on November 29th 2014, and was part of an evening of programming that also featured Jonny Greenwood's (Radiohead) 48 Responses To Polymorphia and the world premiere of Bryce Dessner's (The National) Réponse Lutosławski.

Following an invitation to collaborate at the concert, Beth Gibbons undertook an intense preparation process, including tackling the challenge of learning the original text (and the emotional weight it carries) without speaking the mother language. Typical to Beth though - the elusive yet iconic frontwoman of one of the most important British bands of the last two decades - the challenge was met and exceeded. Her performance alongside the maestro Penderecki has been hailed as triumphant, as you canhear on this release.

»In June 2017, I was due to perform in Moscow when I met Kirill Gilels, the grandson of the famous pianist Emil Gilels. He listened to what our Phoenix Mastering® restoration process, can achieve, and made the decision to entrust us with the results of several years of research: he gave us a list of dates and places of the previously unreleased recordings of his grandfather. In Berlin, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, we came across a treasure trove, stunning in terms of both the quality and consistency of Emil Gilels’s playing. We were fully aware that he was one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. It was in Amsterdam where at last, we succeeded in extracting this fabulous recital from 1976 at the Concertgebouw – recordings that had fallen into oblivion. We were allotted a studio where we listened to the tapes one by one, we did not utter a word, so overcome were we by the beauty of what we heard.« (F. D’Oria-Nicolas) Considered one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century, he was a pupil of H. Neuhaus. He wins the current Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels and takes on an international stature. In 1955, he was the first artist to be welcomed in the United States since the war: if the public, somewhat circumspect of Carnegie Hall, in New York, accompanies his entry on stage of a troubled silence, it is under a thunder of uninterrupted applause that he will refuse to leave the stage!

180g vinyl, limted to 200 copies, including download code.

The corona pandemic slowed life down. No more gigs, clubs closed, festivals canceled. For me the chance to try new things and find a new way to make music. Without the club context, I was free in my mind. Making music right out of myself was a liberating feeling. I could do what had been dormant in me for a long time. There were attempts now and then, but in the end I couldn't get rid of the feeling of always doing techno. Nice too, but not everything for me. Many inspirations of my music come from artists such as Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Yann Tiersen, Martin Kohlstedt, Poppy Ackroyd and many others, as well as nature, forest and city noises. And often from the instruments themselves. I switched my setup in the studio from the electronic to a minimalist instrument setup, just piano, double bass and a Moog synthesizer. I also like the background noise that comes from an instrument, like the hammers and dampers on the piano, the fingerboard and bow noises of the double bass. So I tried a lot of recording techniques and microphones until I found the sound I was looking for. After a few recordings, a number of pieces came together that went well together. I decided to finish it as an album. Some of them are one-takes with the associated imperfections, others are recorded and arranged layer by layer in the studio. I also used field recordings. A warm summer rain was the starting point for "Rain". The album will be released in May 2021 as a limited vinyl edition and digitally on my newly founded label "Feldeffekt".

When a synth master like Steve Moore joins forces with the legendary KPM, magic must materialise. And so it does with Analog Sensitivity: cinematic, enigmatic synthscapes to both haunt and heal. New York-based multi-instrumentalist/producer/film composer Steve Moore is probably best known for his synthesizer and bass guitar work as Zombi, together with Anthony Paterra. But he is also part of Miracle and Titan as well as being a prolific solo artist releasing music as Gianni Rossi, Lovelock and under his own name. The story of Analog Sensitivity starts with those soundtracks, or more specifically the time in between them. Rather than being commissioned by KPM, this LP comes from music Steve was recording sporadically and tinkering with for over three years during the downtime between his film projects. There were no ideas about what it was nor a plan for how it would be released, or even if it was going to be released at all. However, after Jon Tye invited him to play on the Ocean Moon project for KPM Steve realised that the hallowed library label might be the perfect home for what he had been working on. The people at KPM agreed. Finishing production in late 2019 in Albany, NY, he came up with the track sequencing and suddenly, he had an album: Analog Sensitivity.

"How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation," Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky's River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh "Henry" Orlov's profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual - the bank and the river.

Arranged for two pianos with accompaniment from strings, trumpet, and electronics, this is Svirsky's deepest dive yet into the instability of listening and its transformation of musical semantics and affect. Like Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, Svirsky overlays romantic musical gestures to create a lush unfamiliarity. No sooner than each track begins the next moment unfurls beneath it, cascading time and blurring perception of past and present. River Without Banks is less an album of songs than songs of a singular, unlocatable album. Performed by the composer with assistance from Britton Powell, Max Eilbacher, Leila Bordreuil, Tim Byrnes, and recorded by Al Carlson.

There is no such thing as confused programming! Relentless, grungy dark Acid with an industrial feel at a reasonable pace by I-F as Jungian Archetype!

Composer and Golden Globe winning Jóhann Jóhannsson releases his first album for Deutsche Grammophon Recordings. It feels like a meditation over beauty and creativity Jóhannsson is a role model for the growing scene of contemporary composers who draw their inspiration from soundtracks, Minimalism, Ambient und electronic music. “Orphée describes the way out from the dark into the light inspired by mythical variations from Ovid to Cocteau. It’s the story of death and reincarnation as a metaphor for our society. Again Jóhannsson mixes acoustic elements combined with electronics, mysterious soundscapes paired with orchestral and a capella voices.

Clear vinyl seems unlayed. Hole in back cover. With stickers.

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.

The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin's Westend on February 2, 2019. "Live im Haus des Rundfunks" documents the first half of this evening, in which the individual composer-pianists introduced themselves to the audience in solos, duos and trios. This carefully choreographed set served as an electrifying prelude to the grand finale, the 20-minute collective mantra of Steve Reich's 1973 composition Six Pianos, a studio recording of which has already been released on the 2016 record Steve Reich "Six Pianos" – Terry Riley "Keyboard Study #1" (FILM LP/CD 002).

In celebration of Specialty Records’ 75th anniversary, a new Sam Cooke compilation featuring tracks from his Specialty catalogue focusing on his pop-leaning tracks plus the live recordings from the legendary 1955 Shrine Concert that has never been available on vinyl before. 3x10″ released in a triple-gatefold jacket, featuring replica flyers and other ephemera included as inserts in the packaging.