Category: Classical
Wooden Elephant: Landscapes, Knives & Glue
As classical musicians, we just never get to play this repertoire, and we think it’s some of the best music ever written. Aoife Ní Bhriain Working as a session viola player with the London Contemporary Orchestra while touring Jonny Greenwood’s string music and recording Radiohead’s…
Paolo Fresu & Daniele Di Bonaventura: Altissima Luce
The Laudario di Cortona is a mediaeval codex written sometime between 1250 and 1290 and still preserved to this day in the town of Cortona in southern Tuscany. The original manuscript is comprised of a collection of 47 “laude” or sacred songs in vernacular Italian.…
Murcof x Vanessa Wagner: Statea
From Rennes in Brittany, Vanessa Wagner is a classically trained pianist who has recorded the piano repertoire of Franz Shubert, Robert Shuman, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel among others as well as the music of contemporary French composer Pascal Dusapin. Born in…
Martin Hayes & Brooklyn Rider: The Butterfly
For many, East Clare traditional fiddler Martin Hayes started venturing outside the tradition with The Gloaming project from 2011 onwards, or more recently with the Martin Hayes Quartet since 2016. But the seeds of these new endeavours were probably sown much earlier. In 2009, Martin…
Danish String Quartet: Last Leaf
Our guiding principle for choosing repertoire has always been pretty simple, we only perform music we like. Asbjørn Nørgaard Born in Denmark and now in their mid-thirties, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (violin), Asbjørn Nørgaard (viola) and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (cello) originally met at a country summer…
Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet: Ladilikan
Opening the record, Trio Da Kali’s balafon (a wooden xylophone), bass ngoni (a traditional lute) and vocals clearly transport the listener to West Africa. But the introduction of Kronos Quartet’s classical strings a minute into “Tita” triggers an unexpected yet uplifting musical shift, thus unveiling…
Trio Mediæval & Arve Henriksen: Rímur
Based and formed in Oslo in 1997, Trio Mediæval is a Norwegian/Swedish vocal ensemble whose repertoire features a wide range of medieval music from France, England or Italy, traditional Folk songs and ballads from the Nordic countries as well as contemporary music written for the…
Erik Satie et les Nouveaux Jeunes Version 2
Modern classical composer Max Richter’s introduction to “Erik Sleeping”, his “recomposition” of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne n°1” for the newly released Erik Satie & les Nouveaux Jeunes – Version 2 on Arbouse Recordings (2015) perhaps epitomises best the overall spirit of the project: I learnt to perform…