Klass-E

From the album "Ins stille Land" (PENTATONE)

SONGS AND QUARTETS OF FINAL JOURNEYS AND CONSOLATIONS

After their multi-award-winning album Aus der Ferne, the Signum Quartett continues their Schubert journey for PENTATONE with Ins stille Land, another recording that explores the fascinating connections between his string quartets and songs, the latter arranged for string quartet by Xandi van Dijk, the ensemble’s violist. The concept for this recording project grew out of the Schubertiad, where chamber music and vocal works would be heard side by side in an intimate setting. Many of the songs and quartets featured on Ins stille Land share a fascination for death, but death as a final journey that ultimately offers consolation. While the song Ins stille Land (Into the silent land) fully epitomizes this idea, the world famous “Death and the Maiden” quartet is the album’s centrepiece.

Franz Schubert: 3. Scherzo from String Quartet in d minor D 810 "Death and the Maiden"

Night in Russia - (Russian Folk Music)

Dvořák: Serenade in D Minor, Op. 44, B. 77 & Serenade in E Major, Op. 22, B. 52

Serenade for Strings in E Major, Op. 22, B. 52: II. Tempo di Valse

Serenade for Strings in E Major, Op. 22, B. 52: IV. Larghetto

Daddy

Lascia Ch'io Pianga (G. F. Händel)

Wanderer

Bach: Inventions & Sinfonias, BWV 772-801 & Toccatas BWV 910-916

Sinfonia No. 15 in B Minor, BWV 801

The feeling of walking through the beautiful city of Berlin at dawn. 

Berlin is one of my favourite cities and carries a lot of emotional weight for me - it never sleeps, it is artsy, alternative and culturally diverse.

Composer and Pianist: Shirley Ly
Violinist: Anya Birchall

© SHIRLEY LY

Impetus

Dawn in Berlin

Dawn in Berlin by Shirley Ly | Violin and Piano Duet

Sumie - Fortune

Graham Reynolds loves to explore narrative in his work. This tendency makes him a natural fit for the film, theater and dance work that form one of the cores to his composing career. In fusing a loose concerto format with the story of Charles Babbage and his invention the difference engine, Reynolds' composing voice finds itself in a work that is intense and driving, beautiful and intimate, personally expressive and broadly accessible all at the same time. Developed over a course of years, the initial ideas for each movement were introduced and inspired separately before being woven into this one piece.

The musical onslaught of the opening movement came to Reynolds during a lecture by LB Deyo on Babbage and his work, inspired by the ferocious pace of both Babbage's thinking and the calculating speed of his invention. The fourth movement was developed in a very different form for the Rude Mechs play "The Method Gun", now touring the country. The fifth movement started as a solo piano piece, an Austin Museum of Art commission, in response to the work of Sol Lewitt. Reynolds joins other alt-classical voices in a 21st century approach that is no longer in rebellion against tonality and melody, nor desperate to prove their validity through focus on a "unique" extended technique, while folding 20th century ideas from clusters to modal harmonies to polyrhythms into a broad vocabulary.

The completed concerto "The Difference Engine" premiered on February 6th, 2010 with a 35-piece string orchestra in a Golden Hornet Project performance at Ballet Austin’s Austin Ventures Studio Theater. Soloists Leah Zeger on violin, Jonathan Dexter on cello, and the composer himself on piano fronted the debut, with parts written specifically for their skill set and personal voices. Those voices were then captured for this CD. Not fully realized in his lifetime, the difference engine was the masterwork of 19th century inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage, an attempt to create the world's first computer. A remix of each movement forms the album's second half with contributions from DJ Spooky, Octopus Project, Grammy-nominated producer Adrian Quesada of Grupo Fantasma, Golden Hornet Project's Peter Stopschinski, and finally one from the composer himself.

04 Movement IV  Late at Night The Astronomer

Peyman Yazdanian - Elegy for a Little Heart

تمام شد.اما مگر می شود آن سه سرباز را فراموش کرد;یونس،یحیا،قباد را...
مگر می شود ترس از آسمون غرنبه ی قباد را فراموش کرد...مگر می شود غرق بی مزه بودن روزگارشان نشد...
تمام شد و دلشوره های فیروزه می ماند و نگرانی های جلال می ماند و اضطراب های ملاحت می ماند و خستگی های سامان می ماند و ...
بغض فریدون...
نور می آید...
-امیر بشیری
اول آذر 1397

One of the best experiences I've ever had was writing a short but deep and emotionally challenging theme for this incredible, award winning play, written by Mohammad Charmshir and directed by Amir Bashiri, one of the absolute talents in Iran.

Khanevadeh Mohtaram Ardekani

Main Theme

Alexandros II

Your route

Alexander Tsfasman. Suite for piano and orchestra (1945)
1 1. Snowflakes
2 2. Lyrical Waltz
3 3. Polka
4 4. Rapid Movement
Dmitri Shostakovich. Concerto No. 1 for piano, trumpet and string orchestra in C minor, Op. 35
5 I. Allegretto
6 II. Lento
7 III. Moderato
8 IV. Allegro con brio
Nikolai Kapustin. Concerto No. 2 for piano and orchestra, Op. 14
9 I. Allegro molto
10 II. Andante
11 III. Rondo-toccata
Total time: 53.43

Dmitry Masleev, piano
Leonid Gourjev, trumpet (5–8)
The Siberian State Symphony Orchestra
Conductor – Vladimir Lande

Recorded in 2019.
Sound engineer – Alexey Barashkin
Project supervisor – Andrey Krichevskiy
Label manager – Karina Abramyan
Release editor – Tatiana Kazarnovskaya
Project manager – Marina Bezrukova
Design – Grigory Zhukov
Photos by Dmitry Masleev, Daniil Rabovsky, Nikita Larionov
Translation – Nikolai Kuznetsov
Digital release: Dmitry Maslyakov, Roman Tomlyankin
MEL_CD_1002624

06. Shostakovich: Concerto No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35 - II. Lento

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 - I. Allegro molto appassionato

Glenn Gould was born in Toronto in 1932, and enjoyed a privileged, sheltered upbringing in the quiet Beach neighborhood. His musical gifts became apparent in infancy, and though his parents never pushed him to become a star prodigy, he became a professional concert pianist at age fifteen, and soon gained a national reputation. By his early twenties, he was also earning recognition through radio and television broadcasts, recordings, writings, lectures and compositions.

Early on, Gould's musical proclivities, piano style and independence of mind marked him as a maverick. Favoring structurally intricate music, he disdained the early-Romantic and impressionistic works at the core of the standard piano repertoire, preferring Elizabethan, Baroque, Classical, late-Romantic and early-twentieth-century music; Bach and Schoenberg were central to his aesthetic and repertoire. He was an intellectual performer, with a special gift for clarifying counterpoint and structure, but his playing was also deeply expressive and rhythmically dynamic. He had the technique and tonal palette of a virtuoso, though he upset many pianistic conventions - avoiding the sustaining pedal, using détaché articulation, for example. Believing that the performer's role was properly creative, he offered original, deeply personal, sometimes shocking interpretations (extreme tempos, odd dynamics, finicky phrasing), particularly in canonical works by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

Gould's American début, in 1955, and the release, a year later, of his first Columbia recording, of Bach's Goldberg Variations, launched his international concert career. He earned widespread acclaim despite his musical idiosyncrasies, while his flamboyant stage mannerisms, as well as his hypochondria and other personal eccentricities, fuelled colorful publicity that heightened his celebrity. But he hated performing – "At concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian" – and though in great demand, he rationed his appearances stingily (he gave fewer than forty concerts overseas). Finally, in 1964, he permanently retired from concert life.

Gould harbored musical, temperamental and moral objections to concerts, and aired them publicly: "The purpose of art," he wrote, "is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." Even before he retired, he was not satisfied with being a concert pianist; he made radio and television programs, published writings on many musical and non-musical topics, continued to compose. After 1964, this work away from the piano only intensified. He liked to call himself "a Canadian writer, composer, and broadcaster who happens to play the piano in his spare time."

His retirement was also fuelled by his devotion to the electronic media. Gould was one of the first truly modern classical performers, for whom recording and broadcasting were not adjuncts to the concert hall but separate art forms that represented the future of music. He made scores of albums, steadily expanding his repertoire and developing a professional engineer's command of recording techniques. He also wrote prolifically about recording and the mass media, his ideas often harmonizing with those of his friend Marshall McLuhan.

Though he never became the significant composer that he longed to be, Gould channeled his creativity into other media. In 1967, he created his first "contrapuntal radio documentary," The Idea of North, an innovative tapestry of speaking voices, music and sound effects that drew on principles from documentary, drama, music and film. Over the next decade, he made six more such specimens of radio art, in addition to many other, more conventional, recitals and talk-and-play shows for radio and television. He also arranged music for two feature films.

Gould lived a quiet, solitary, spartan life, and guarded his privacy; his romantic relationships with women, for instance, were never made public. ("Isolation is the one sure way to human happiness.") He maintained a modest apartment and a small studio, and left Toronto only when work demanded it, or for an occasional rural holiday. He recorded in New York until 1970, when he began to record primarily at Eaton Auditorium in Toronto.

In the summer of 1982, having largely exhausted the piano literature that interested him, he made his first recording as a conductor, and he had ambitious plans for several years' worth of conducting projects; he planned then to give up performing, retire to the countryside, and devote himself to writing and composing. But shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Gould died suddenly of a stroke.

Since then, he has enjoyed a remarkable posthumous "life." His multifarious work has been widely disseminated. He has been the subject of an enormous and diverse literature in many languages. And he has inspired conferences, exhibitions, festivals, societies, radio and television programs, novels, plays, musical compositions, poems, visual art and a feature film (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould).

Moreover, his ideas – like McLuhan's – still resonate strongly today in the world of digital technology, which was in its infancy when he died. His postmodernist advocacy of open borders between the roles of composer, performer and listener, for instance, anticipated digital technologies (like the Internet) that democratize and decentralize the institutions of culture. There is no question that Gould, more than any other classical musician, would have understood and admired digital technology – and would have had fun playing with it.

- Kevin Bazzana

Sinfonia No. 15 in B Minor, BWV 801

Glenn Gould

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