Odessa Beach is taken from the album THE PIANO SINGS / Music composed and performed by Michael Nyman

'The Piano Sings' was the long-awaited first release on the MN Records label.

The album features music originally recorded for film soundtracks from 1993 to 2003 including Gattaca, Wonderland, The Diary of Anne Frank, End of the Affair, The Claim, Man with a Movie Camera and The Piano. With their more familiar band and orchestral settings removed, the pieces return to a point echoing their origins. Nyman commented "all of my music starts out as piano music – much of it in song form, so the opportunity to get back to that essence appealed to me, hence the decision to make the album". The album deliberately focuses on the lyrical side of Nyman's piano laying, hence the title.

The Piano Sings presents Michael Nyman's most intimate recording to date, neatly encapsulating the qualities that have made his compositions loved by millions of listeners around the world. While the composer's piano playing is a central element of his touring band and a familiar sound to the many people who've bought & loved his albums, this is the first time he has devoted a complete recording to solo piano.


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Odessa Beach

This version of Knowing The Ropes is taken from the album 'Acoustic Accordions' - on which nine of Michael Nyman’s Greatest Hits have been arranged and are performed by The Motion Trio.

This release heralds an extraordinary collaboration between Poland’s foremost, nay celebrated, accordion trio, The Motion Trio and Britain’s finest and most prolific classical composer, Michael Nyman.

The collaboration, which operates under the name Michael Nyman and Motion Trio, was originally dreamt up for the 7th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival and performed at the Barbican in April 2009. Together, they have produced Acoustic Accordions, an interpretation of nine of Nyman’s greatest hits (plus a bonus track Silence, written and performed by The Motion Trio) featuring Nyman on piano and Nigel Barr on Trombone and Euphonium.

“Nyman’s music is so wonderful it even sounds good on the accordion.”


Knowing The Ropes (Motion Trio)

Yellow Beach, performed by the Fidelio Trio, is taken from the album Michael Nyman Piano Trios 1992-2010 - an album which includes the World premiere recordings of Poczatek and The Photography of Chance

Yellow Beach piano trio is a transfigured version of 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands'.

"insistent motivic reiterations leavened with lyricism and compassion, inspired by war, industrial archaeology and birdlife and given fine performances” BBC Music Magazine

Yellow Beach

“once heard, you’ll want never want to live without it” Simon Price, Independent on Sunday

“an inspired pairing” Q Magazine

"Genuinely Remarkable” The Word

Take The Money And Run is the opening track to the critically acclaimed 2009 album 'The Glare'. An extraordinary collaboration between Michael Nyman and David McAlmont. 

David wrote new songs based on contemporary news stories over pre-existing Nyman compositions. 

McAlmont's subject matter explores pertinent subjects as varied as 21st century piracy (Going to America), trafficked prostitution in Europe (City of Turin), sexually-charged world leaders (In Rai Don Giovanni), assisted suicide (Friendly Fire), reality television (The Glare), African orphan migration (Fever Sticks and Bones), banking errors (Take the Money and Run)and drug mules (In Laos).

David felt strongly that the songs were most effective if written from the first person point of view of the individual characters discovered in the researched reports to create an emotional engagement with the subjects that is lost by the time their stories emerge in the glare of the 24 hour news media. This process of course caused initial concern for McAlmont because he was taking already brilliant compositions, adding to and adjusting them. But fortunately, Michael Nyman was delighted with the result.



“one of the most characterful albums of 2009” theartsdesk.com

“an inspired pairing” Q Magazine

“an audacious success” The Guardian

“sumptuous, memorable melodies” Hi-Fi Choice

“well-crafted, heartstring-tugging, quietly-beautiful little gems” Out in the City

“cannot be faulted for ambition or execution” Times Playlist

“Nyman’s orchestrations and McAlmont’s voice both push the lustrous end of their prodigious gifts without affecting the pursuit of technical excellence” MOJO

“the chemistry clicks instantly on this bejewelled union..” UNCUT Magazine

Take The Money And Run

taken from VERTOV SOUNDS - The Composers Cut Series - Volume IV

Michael Nyman has now completed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s.

To ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ he has added ‘The Eleventh Year’ and ‘A Sixth Part of the World’ and as a unique experiment for MN Records he has created a new Michael Nyman Band work - by making a montage of material from both of the soundtracks into a single, continuous piece which runs for 77 minutes.

"I wrote the score for Man with a Movie Camera in 2002 and now, with A Sixth Part of the World and The Eleventh Year, I am in the privileged position of having written soundtracks for the three major films that Dziga Vertov made at the end of the 1920s and on which his reputation is based in the west. In the same way as I avoided reading Vertov’s background notes to the music he designated for Man with a Movie Camera when I wrote my score, so with A Sixth Part and The Eleventh Year research was deliberately limited and most of my interest seemed to focus on the similarities and differences between those two films and Man with a Movie Camera (and had me musing on an interesting trio of self-borrowers -Handel, Laurence Sterne and Vertov, with whom I have a strong affinity!) My reaction was to Vertov’s images and the process of their organisation - to the two interrelated, but dissimilar worlds that he presented and promoted in these two films.

Subsequent research, with the help of Barbara Wurm and other archivists from the Austrian Film Institute (which has released a DVD of the two films with the new soundtracks), has allowed me to appreciate differently the content and the context (both cinematic and political) of these two films. And my discovery of the book ?Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, edited by Yuri Tsivian (2004) has thrown up some wonderful supplementary texts like the critic Izmail Urazov's appraisal of A Sixth Part of the World. He writes very powerfully about the musicality of Vertov’s film, which instinctively had influenced my score:

‘Vertov edits sequences like a composer’

That is the cause of the emotion which the film arouses. You cannot relate it; there is no plot, no intensification of the action, but there is an intensification of emotion. Like in music. That is where the emotion comes from. Vertov leads the 'melody', returning to it, playing with dissonances, using the exoticism of the polar snows and the burning hot sands, almost like something beyond sense, almost like a composer using the texture of the sounds.

And within Vertov’s sequences there is a rhythm, with which he infects the viewer: 'a Negress with a child on her back, hammering into your consciousness the tempo and rhythm of the montage of dancing legs, linked to the rhythm of a dance, of the movement of machines...' (Tsivian, p 187)

VERTOV SOUNDS represents a very different approach to the way of processing a soundtrack album: since the music for both films is sectional but continuous and, like Vertov, constantly refers back on itself, there are no ?named tracks' that can be separated out in the way that, say, ?Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' from The Draughtsman's Contract has become an independent concert work. So the music for the films is presented as a non-stop montage of alternating sequences (sometimes quite complex in themselves) from each film."

Michael Nyman
August 2010
Reviews

"The Michael Nyman Band has never played better than they do here and the sound quality is excellent. If you only buy one Nyman disc, this is the one to get." Haskins (American Records Guide)

A Sixth Part Of The World Part 5

“once heard, you’ll want never want to live without it” Simon Price, Independent on Sunday

“an inspired pairing” Q Magazine

"Genuinely Remarkable” The Word

City of Turin is the lead single taken from the critically acclaimed 2009 album 'The Glare'. An extraordinary collaboration between Michael Nyman and David McAlmont.

David wrote new songs based on contemporary news stories over pre-existing Nyman compositions.

McAlmont's subject matter explores pertinent subjects as varied as 21st century piracy (Going to America), trafficked prostitution in Europe (City of Turin), sexually-charged world leaders (In Rai Don Giovanni), assisted suicide (Friendly Fire), reality television (The Glare), African orphan migration (Fever Sticks and Bones), banking errors (Take the Money and Run)and drug mules (In Laos).

David felt strongly that the songs were most effective if written from the first person point of view of the individual characters discovered in the researched reports to create an emotional engagement with the subjects that is lost by the time their stories emerge in the glare of the 24 hour news media. This process of course caused initial concern for McAlmont because he was taking already brilliant compositions, adding to and adjusting them. But fortunately, Michael Nyman was delighted with the result.

“one of the most characterful albums of 2009” theartsdesk.com

“an inspired pairing” Q Magazine

“an audacious success” The Guardian

“sumptuous, memorable melodies” Hi-Fi Choice

“well-crafted, heartstring-tugging, quietly-beautiful little gems” Out in the City

“cannot be faulted for ambition or execution” Times Playlist

“Nyman’s orchestrations and McAlmont’s voice both push the lustrous end of their prodigious gifts without affecting the pursuit of technical excellence” MOJO

“the chemistry clicks instantly on this bejewelled union..” UNCUT Magazine


City Of Turin

a 30 second track written for Warwick University... available on the Sublime CD...(you may recognise as the music used as the backing track for 'Take the Money and Run' off the album 'The Glare'. 

Buy from Nonclassical

Warwick Fanfare

taken from SIX CELAN SONGS / THE BALLAD OF KASTRIOT REXHEPI

SIX CELAN SONGS - Hilary Summers contralto, Michael Nyman Band

THE BALLAD OF KASTRIOT REXHEPI – Premiere Recording
Sarah Leonard soprano; Nyman Quartet; Music composed by Michael Nyman

Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are two new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter.

Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard.

Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper.

Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The songs, individually and collectively, express both the horror, the emptiness of the writer in exile and are cast in a musical language which attempts to 'reinvent' an imaginary emotional world related to the Romanian background in 1920s Bukovina, where Celan was born.

The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, unlike the Six Celan Songs, deals directly with a war situation – an 18-month- old Kosovan boy left for dead during the Kosovo war, found and re-named by the Serbs and 6 months later reunited with his parents. It is the most recent in Nyman's series of collaborations with visual artists, in this case the American feminist/conceptualist Mary Kelly. Kelly provided the composer with a complex text in a simple ballad form which Nyman brilliantly subverts in his continuous 18-minute piece, written for Sarah Leonard and the Nyman Quartet and first performed surrounded by Kelly's visual representation of the text in the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2001.


Psalm

Irish producer and DJ/Electronic Artist, Max Cooper created 2 remixes of the Nyman & McAlmont track 'Secrets, Acusations and Lies' off the album 'The Glare'. We present his 'Reconstruction' remix. Watch the beautiful video here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khlLc7NNOok

Max also created more of a 'Dance-Floor' version called Deconstruction -- video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFO7Rg39FIU

Secrets, Acusations and Lies (Max Cooper 'reconstruction' remix)

the beautiful final few minutes of Michael Nyman's opera 'Love Counts' with libretto by Michael Hastings.

The opera was the tenth release on MN Records, and the second opera recording for the label, Love Counts is a love story between the unlikeliest of couples: Avril, a lecturer in mathematics at a major college who has divorced a man who physically abused her, and Patsy, a middle-weight fighter at the end of his career who cannot read or recognise numbers.

Michael Nyman uses Riemenschneider's collection of 371 Bach chorale harmonisations to help Patsy find his voice – they are harmonically fragmented, sped up, slowed down, overlaid with themselves. Just as Dr P, the Alzheimer's suffering protagonist of Nyman's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, has 'his' Schumann, so, in Love Counts, Patsy, a parallel sufferer, has 'his' Bach.

Award-winning writer Michael Hastings had previously worked with Nyman on the libretto for the opera Man and Boy: Dada, also available on MN Records.

Love Counts was commissioned by the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlesruhe, Germany and first performed there on 12th March 2005, directed by Robert Tannenbaum. This is a recording of the Almeida Theatre (London) production of Love Counts where it was performed in July 2006 by the Michael Nyman Band, bass baritone Andrew Slater and soprano Helen Williams, designed by Peter McKintosh and directed by Lindsay Posner.

The production received great critical-acclaim with four-star reviews from The Independent, The Times (London) and The Guardian.
Reviews

'Via this intimate coupling of music and words, by turns witty and nostalgic, Nyman and Hastings reveal themselves to be sentimental old souls, intent on turning Raging Bull into Love Story'. The Observer

'Andrew Slater is wonderfully believable as the gravelly voiced, slow-witted Patsy, his swagger long beaten out of him, and is perfectly counterpointed by Helen Williams's vulnerable, compassionate Avril. Together they bring the opera to life quite marvellously.' The Guardian

"There You Are....And That Tree"

taken from the album 'Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit' which couples two world premiere recordings.

Life's Chaos is the fourth of five songs in Nyman's song cycle 'Acts of Beauty -- based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Scwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial's Epigrams on another kind of sexual measurement: the weighing of penis. It presents an entirely different Nyman approach to vocal writing than is found in Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi.

Life's Chaos

from Act One of MAN AND BOY: DADA. 

An Opera in two acts composed by Michael Nyman
Libretto: Michael Hastings

Man and Boy: Dada is the first in a triptych of chamber operas written by Nyman with librettist Michael Hastings. It tells the story of the unlikely friendships between the ageing Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who is exiled in war-torn London; a 12-year-old boy called Michael, who shares the artist's obsession with collecting London Transport bus tickets; and Michael's mother, widowed by the war. The recording reunites the cast from the UK premiere performance at the Almeida Theatre in July 2004 – tenor John Graham Hall as Schwitters, William Sheldon as the boy, and soprano Vivian Tierney as the boy's mother. Paul McGrath conducts the Michael Nyman Band.

Nyman's identification with the storyline runs deep, for as a child growing up in South Chingford in the 1950s, he hoarded bus tickets as part of a collecting mania that also included cigarette cards, matchbox labels, coins and train numbers. In 2001, Hastings approached Nyman to suggest collaborating on a radio play about a post-war London boy who collected bus tickets. Nyman naturally recognised himself in the main character. But he also had an extra element to contribute to the story line. He had recently returned from Dusseldorf where he saw a Schwitters exhibition and discovered the artist's recurring use of bus tickets in his collages. The fusion of the two characters' mutual fixation leads to a friendship which drives the opera's plot which also reveals the terrible loss suffered by Schwitters as he was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany.
Reviews

The Almeida production of Man and Boy: Dada was greeted with critical acclaim. "Touching and witty, naïve and profound, Man and Boy: Dada is a journey, well worth taking," said Nick Kimberley in The Evening Standard. Writing in the Financial Times, David Murray called it a "genuine success," and Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph found it a "a subtle and touching piece of music-theatre."

Scarper!

...two tracks taken from the 'Wingates Band / Nyman Brass' album. 

Michael Nyman described it as 'a privilege' to work with Wingates. Although his music was very different from the kind that the players were used to, he said they 'picked up the style, especially the formality of the music, and it soon sounded second nature to them… I loved the spirit of the playing, the instant dedication and the energy in what is a very new sound world for me.'

The two main sequences on the album are from the scores to The Ogre [Volker Schlondorff, 1996] and The Libertine [Laurence Dunmore, 2005].

The Ogre was never seen in the UK and the soundtrack not released here, so this will be the first time many people will have heard this music. Originally composed for brass ensemble with saxophones, Wingates Band's performance is not hugely different from the original.

The album is completed with the Michael Nyman Band classics, In Re Don Giovanni and Chasing sheep is best left to shepherds from The Draughtman's Contract [Peter Greenaway, 1982], where the music sounds very different from the original performances. Michael Nyman says, 'the whole sound-world was transformed. Things like repeated rhythms which I originally gave to piano are punchier, edgier, more dangerous on cornets and trombones.'

Wingates Band was formed in 1873 by the members of the Bible Class of Wingates Independent Methodist Church in Westhoughton, Bolton, in response to a challenge from the members of Westhoughton Old Band, which had been in existence since 1858. By the turn of the century, led by legendary 'giant' of the British brass band movement Willaim Rimmer, Wingates had been turned into one of the top bands in the country. In 1906 the Band achieved national fame by winning the 'double': the British Open and the British National Championships. The following year Wingates astounded the brass band world by completing the double again. www.wingatesband.org.


'Magic Forest' and 'Göering's Hunting Party'

Recorded in April 2005 at Abbey Road Studios, this album is the definitive compilation of the music from the Nyman/Greenaway collaboration.

Miranda is taken from 'Nyman/Greenaway Revisited'...a collection of the most popular music from the five soundtracks provided by the composer for Peter Greenaway's feature films from 1982 – 1991. Music from The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts, Drowning By Numbers, The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover, & Prospero's Books is included.

Greenaway & Nyman had a very different relationship from that of most directors/composers, with Greenaway giving Nyman immense scope for the music. Nyman responded in kind with some of the best film music of the last quarter century. The working methods even varied from film to film. While the score of Zed and Two Noughts was composed without the composer even having seen a single frame of the film, the climactic scene of The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover was quite deliberately choreographed to the pre-existing piece Memorial. The music for these films became widely known & hugely influential on a succeeding generation of composers and directors.

One of Nyman's most recently completed film scores (for The Libertine) returns the composer to a film with a 17th century setting, with director Laurence Dunmore claiming it was the memory of hearing the music to A Zed and Two Noughts many years ago that led him to commissioning Nyman for this film, while Michael Winterbottom (a director who has also worked extensively with Nyman), used music from The Draughtsman's Contract for his newest film A Cock and Bull Story. This collection of music has also become immensely well known to a wide public audience. Among the most frequently performed contemporary music, whether on classical radio stations, or through use in film, TV programming or advertising use, these pieces are as familiar to a mainstream audience as many contemporary pop and rock songs.


Miranda (Nyman Band Version)

the opening track from Michael Nyman's self-titled debut 'Band' album. 

The first Michael Nyman Band Album originally released in 1981 and critically acclaimed as Nyman’s groundbreaking record that combined minimalist, experimentalist music and jazz improvisation for the first time, has only ever been available on the rarest of long-since deleted vinyl.

The physical album is beautifully packaged in a 6 panel digipack and includes two limited edition posters - of the original UK and Japanese LP artwork (the poster is of the cover of the Japanese LP sleeve which is a drawing of Michael Nyman by Molly Nyman, Michael's daughter). 

Most of the music on Michael Nyman was material from the early films by Peter Greenaway such as "Bird Anthem" (Act Of God) and "Bird List Song" (The Falls). The album also includes his first concert work for the band, "In Re Don Giovanni" which was released as a single on Les Disques du Crepuscule (home of Cabaret Voltaire, Durutti Column and Josef K amongst others) under the title Mozart. The most groundbreaking track on Michael Nyman, however, is "Waltz in F", a piece Nyman wrote for art students whilst teaching at Trent Polytechnic in 1977, Nyman subsequently commandeering two modern jazz improvisers, Evan Parker and Peter Brotzman, to "destroy" this piece. Ultimately, Parker and Brotzman ended up playing over and around ten separate tracks whilst Nyman and Cunningham mixed in their Waltz.


Bird Anthem

https://mnrecords.greedbag.com/buy/symphony-no-11-hillsborough-memo-0/ 

Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial represents the culmination of Michael Nyman's thinking around the tragedies connected with Liverpool Football Club. 25 years after the Hillsborough disaster, he says that he hopes it will make a small but significant contribution to the healing process still necessary for the families of the lost fans.

Trailer for Michael Nyman's Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial

Two pieces by Michael Nyman
From the concert of 2 July 2014 at Carpenter street in Providence

Chris Erway -- electric piano
J. P. A. Falzone -- Rhodes piano, triangle
Brendan Glasson -- Hohner Cembalet, bells
Liz Isenberg -- Wurlitzer piano
Sakiko Mori -- Crumar Roadrunner 2, percussion
Scott Reber -- Casio, percussion
Florence Wallis -- Hohner Pianet

Michael Nyman - Bell Set No 1 (Live)

Artist:  Michael Nyman
Song: Memorial
Film:   The Cook,The Theif, His wife and Her Lover


m n

Aleksandar V Veljkovic