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2012 marks the 15th anniversary of the first release from the leading independent classical label Signum Records. Beginning life as an early music specialist (with a landmark release of the Complete Works of Thomas Tallis with Chapelle du Roi), Signum has grown since 1997 to a catalogue of over 300 releases across a wide range of genres. The piano collection collects performances from John Lill, James Rhodes, Jill Crossland, Jeremy Filsell, Alessio Bax, Llyr Williams and Ana-Maria Vera. -
The new recording from percussionist Joby Burgess includes ambient electronics fused with mellow vibraphone, explosive cinematic drumming and the delicate muted sounds of 1960’s New York.Psappha Iannis Xenakis
Psappha is an archaic form of Sappho - a great Greek poetess from the Island of Lesbos, born in the 600's BC. Composed for six groups of instruments (of wood, skin and metal) Psappha is muscular, abrasive and often violent - an intensely masculine work in contradiction to its title. The inspiration comes from Sappho's poetry, whose rhythms appear constantly in both small cells and the large scale over arching structure. Instrument choice is left to the performer, Xenakis writes ‘timbre serves only to clarify the rhythmic structures’ - my performance seeks maximum range and colour, with a nod to touring practicalities.
Ekstasis Linda Buckley
A ‘leading figure in the younger generation of Irish composers’ Linda Buckley combines medieval harmony, ambient electronic music and the hypnotic atmosphere of Javanese Gamelan in her commission for Pioneers of Percussion. Referring to the Greek term for ‘trance, to stand outside oneself, rapture’ Ekstasis is composed for vibraphone, Thai gongs and electronics. Premiered by Joby Burgess in 2016, Ekstasis was commissioned using funds from Arts Council England.
The late musicologist Bob Gilmore writes: ‘Buckley engages with an area of experience that new music is generally shy of, which, simplified and reduced to a single word, I’d call ecstacy. Not the drug-induced euphoria of dance music, but exultant, heightened states of being that are the product of an excitable sensibility, of an emotional response to the world that sees the bright places of life as clearly as the dark.’The King of Denmark Morton Feldman
Feldman’s reply to Stockhausen’s Zyklus is the great early anti-percussion composition, where a collection of soft sounds, twinkle like stars in the night. In The King sounds move without weight as dust through a gentle breeze, to create a deep seemingly disconnected sonic canvas. Feldman captured the muted soundscape of New York from Coney Island on a summer afternoon in 1964.
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This new recording for Signum Records includes silvery vibraphone with live looping, a quasi rock n roll documentary exploring censorship and a musical picture of the subtle shifts in our changing Seasons.
The Filthy Fifteen Nicole Lizée
Montreal based composer Nicole Lizée has been called a musical scientist, with a body of work inspired by the glitches of outmoded and well-worn technology. The Filthy Fifteen is a quasi rock n roll documentary taking a satirical look at censorship and the PMRC. Formed in 1985 the ‘Parents Music Resource Center’ was a committee of ‘Washington wives’ including Tipper Gore, which led to the labeling of albums with ‘Parental Advisory’ stickers. The live percussion - which includes a 'censorship kit' (typewriter, books, papers) - meld and intermingle with the rhythmic and pitch inflections of voices taken from footage and recordings related to the hearings. Premiered by Joby Burgess in 2016, The Filthy Fifteen was commissioned using funds from Arts Council England.
Can’t Sleep Rebecca Dale
Hailed by Classic FM as "one of today's most exciting young composers" Rebecca Dale is a London based composer, working most often with large orchestral and choral forces in the worlds of cinema and theatre. Written for solo vibraphone and live looping Can’t Sleep explores the moments around sleep, where our brains fire ideas around to keep us from resting. Premiered by Joby Burgess in 2016, Can’t Sleep was commissioned using funds from Arts Council England.
Seasons Tōru Takemitsu
Tōru Takemitsu is one of the most influential Japanese composers of the 20th Century. Combining traditional Japanese music with ideas from the American experimental and European Avant-Garde, Takemitsu created a sound uniquely his own for both the concert hall and film scores. Seasons (1970) is a 16 minute exploration of the sounds between our Seasons, using only metallic materials to describe the subtle shifts and changes. At the heart of my performance is the Canna Sonora (Aluminium Harp) - a Capone-era friction instrument, designed and built in Chicago - this replaces Francois and Bernard Baschet’s instrument of glass bars ‘Trombone’, which featured in the early performances of this work. Seasons is notated graphically, with an echo effect applied to this generally soft music, a response to statements of an almanac, atmospherics and astrology.
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Michael Finnissy was born in Tulse Hill in 1946. He studied at the Royal College of Music with Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Seale, and in Italy with Roman Vlad. Much of his early work was first performed in France and the Netherlands, while he was working as a freelance repetiteur and pianist for dance-classes. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music, at the universities of Sussex and Southampton, and at the Katholiek Universiteit in Leuven. He has also given summer courses at Dartington, and been resident artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne (Australia). He has been featured composer at the Huddersfield Festival several times, at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and many other places across the world, most recently at SICPP in Boston USA. Here, The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge perform Finnissy’s deep, rich and fulfilling music in what has been a four year process. It has taken Conductor and Director Andrew Nethsingha, four years to gradually become acquainted with the pieces on this recording. He says it “has been a deeply enriching experience which I want others to share”. All downloads include booklets. RUNNER UP - Contemporary: Gramophone Recordings of the Year 2021 "Nethsingha’s choristers and supporting players do Finnissy’s music proud" - Classical Source -
The King’s Singers explore the folk songs and melodies of the world in a new programme entitled Postcards. In their own words: “In our travels we have amassed a wonderful collection of folksongs and popular songs from numerous countries, many of which we use as encores when we visit. The influences and sources are extraordinarily far-ranging, and each song has its own local characteristics. To celebrate the diversity of music that we perform and the numerous countries we visit each concert season, we have recorded an album of some of our favourite folksongs from around the world.” Typically immaculate performances of songs collected by the King's Singers on their global travels, and used as encores. Velvet vocal blending is a given, and mellifluous arrangements - BBC Music Magazine -
Poulenc was a skilled pianist, cultivating a style of playing characterised by colourfulness and clarity, possessing an ear for melody that distinguished him as France’s finest song composer since Fauré. ★★★★★ Lucille Chung proves a fantastic Poulenc advocate... A release to savour - Classical Ear For me the most attractive piece here is Poulenc’s own arrangement for two pianos of his Concerto for two pianos. The slow movement alone is worth the price of this exceptional disc - Classic FM A very special disc indeed - MusicWeb International -
Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalization, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. This second release in a new series charts the complete songs of Francis Poulenc, performed by some of the greatest singers of the day and accompanied by the exceptional Malcolm Martineau. Praise for the first disc includes: "Lisa Milne performs wonderfully throughout this Poulenc disc. She really sings the French as to the Manoir born … A nicely balanced and arranged recital for all of these voices, so a promising start to this new Poulenc series." Hilary Finch and Andrew McGregor, CD Review, BBC Radio 3 -
Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalization, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. This is the third release in our series that will build to encompass the complete songs of Francis Poulenc – performed by some of the greatest singers of the day and accompanied by the exceptional Malcolm Martineau. Praise for the first disc includes: "Lisa Milne performs wonderfully throughout this Poulenc disc. She really sings the French as to the Manoir born … A nicely balanced and arranged recital for all of these voices, so a promising start to this new Poulenc series." Hilary Finch and Andrew McGregor, CD Review, BBC Radio 3 -
Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalization, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. This is the fourth release in our series that will build to encompass the complete songs of Francis Poulenc – performed by some of the greatest singers of the day and accompanied by the exceptional Malcolm Martineau.
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Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalization, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. The final disc in Signum’s series of The Complete Songs of Francis Poulenc features a cast of the finest singers of our generation, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau as well as additional instrumental soloists for Poulenc’s larger-ensemble settings of his songs. Featured works in this final volume include Rapsodie Negre, Le Bestiaire, Quatre poe?mes de Max Jacob, Vocalise, Quatre poemes d’Apollinaire, Banalite?s and Le Bal Masque?. -
Hymns are a living link with the past, yet they still find freshness and relevance in the twenty- first century. Saint Thomas Aquinas comments that ‘hymns are the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice’ and this explains neatly the vital place that hymnody has enjoyed throughout the ages, and continues to do so today. Praise my soul celebrates this glorious tradition of hymnody and showcases some of the hymns heard in Jesus College Chapel in their own regular pattern of choral services. Some of these, including Drop, drop, slow tears and Glory to thee, my God, this night have been sung regularly for hundreds of years. Others such as All my hope on God is founded or Christ Triumphant have become classics over the last half-century.
The Choir of Jesus College Cambridge return to disc on Signum with their seventh release, and their first under choral director Richard Pinel.
A magnificent disc of fine hymn tunes and outstanding music making - MusicWeb International -
This programme explores that vast twentieth-century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘partsongs’. It is an extraordinarily rich repertoire to which almost all the famous composers contributed. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided “cow-pat” school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime twentieth-century madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. However, this programme has another particular theme: how poets and composers reflect upon the natural world as a metaphor for our own emotional experience. At the heart of this programme is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, and both with intimations of mortality. ★★★★★ This is a simply gorgeous CD, superbly executed - Choir and Organ ★★★★ The Gabrieli Consort, conducted by Paul McCreesh, sings Stanford’s The Blue Bird with such abstracted beauty that enchantment sets in from the opening minutes. Their collection of English part-songs mostly inhabits a dreamy, pastoral world, the home ground of Howells, Warlock and Vaughan Williams, though Elgar’s bleak Owls (loneliness or foreboding of death?) goes further. Outgoing narrative settings by Jonathan Dove and Grainger add story-telling and a dash of bold colours - Financial Times ★★★★ The effect is arresting, and typical of the attention to text and score demonstrated by Paul McCreesh and his singers. These miniatures are rich, each in need of proper savouring - The Observer ★★★★ The selection of pieces is evocative and thoughtful… Stanford’s The Blue Bird is concentrated and controlled, with a lovely clarity of line and a fine-grained elegance of sound. This song exemplifies the many virtues of the performances on this disc - Planet Hugill The result is a clever mixture of moods – a disc that takes the part-song into the 21st century not only in repertoire but also in style - Gramophone Successful and very cherishable… The key to its success is the gorgeous attention to detail which draws the most exquisite sounds from the choir - Music Web International -
Following an acclaimed debut recording of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with the Philharmonia in 2020, Santtu-Matias Rouvali returns with a recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s iconic Symphony No. 5. Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 was first performed in 1944, 14 years after his previous symphony. Prokofiev described his Fifth Symphony as a “hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit,” explaining that, “I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul.” ★★★★★ "It is a magnificent achievement on everyone's part; the conductor, the players and, not least the outstandingly brilliant sound achieved in what is generally a dry acoustic…[Santtu] judges the finale perfectly too allowing the slow introduction to lead to an exhilarating conclusion" - Musical Opinion ★★★★ Performance ★★★★ Recording "The mildly resonant acoustic allows details of orchestral colour to emerge that I do not recall in other recorded accounts Santtu-Matias Rouvali also draws fascinating parallels between the fifth and the eerie third symphony created by Prokofiev" - BBC Music Magazine ★★★★ "The live recording here plays to the performance's strengths; a recording that promises new ideas from the Philharmonia's new conductor" - AllMusic -
Simon Desbruslais leads the performances on this disc of world premiere recordings from some of the UK’s leading composers. Seeking to expand the trumpet’s repertoire of concerto and orchestra works, Simon Desbruslais was inspired after performing Robert Saxton’s Psalm to help comission the three new works on this programme: Saxton’s Shakespeare Scenes, Deborah Pritchard’s Skyspace and John McCabe’s La Primavera. Four vibrant, attractive concertos – three written within the past three years – by three of Britain’s brightest and best, and performed with dazzling virtuosity and musicianship by Simon Desbruslais and the Orchestra of the Swan ... The concluding held note for the trumpet unaccompanied is just one sign of his consummate mastery. A hugely enjoyable disc, strongly recommended - Gramophone Desbruslais's immaculate playing and faultless musicality serve all these works well. I do not think that his playing in these works could be bettered although I sincerely wish that these works were avidly seized upon by any adventurous trumpet player - MusicWeb International Four new British trumpet concertos, brilliant, seductive and engrossing - Planet Hugill -
Bernard Herrmann was perhaps one of the greatest musical all-rounders of the 20th Century. Although he is best known for his scores to perhaps some of the most iconic films ever made ('Vertigo', 'Citizen Kane', 'Psycho'), he was also a talented composer for the concert hall, with an early career marked out by his skill as a conductor - praised by Stravinsky amongst others, who autographed Hermann's score for his Symphony in 3 Movements with "To the excellent musician and conductor, Bernard Herrmann. Cordially, I. Stravinsky." The Tippett Quartet capture the energy and musical finesse of Herrmann's works in this recording, accompanied for Souvernirs de Voyage by the clarinetist Julian Bliss and featuring a new arrangement of his score for 'Psycho'. Chillingly delivered … it is impossible to imagine more expert renditions than these - GramophoneClarinettist Julian Bliss plays with exquisite restraint, as though wanting not to disturb the intimate conversations of the Tippett Quartet - The Independent
Splendid - The Sunday Telegraph
This album is an engaging, suspenseful adventure through Herrmann’s life and career, bound by short themes, an emphasis on effect rather than melody, and a sense of unease. I highly recommend this album! - The Clarinet Online -
In Puccini’s anniversary year, Chief Conductor of Welsh National Opera Carlo Rizzi has created new, purely orchestral versions of some of his most well-known and beloved works. Staying pure and faithful to Puccini’s original orchestration without anything added to ‘cover’ any perceivable lack of vocal line, the brilliance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Tosca, and other works shine through in this album of world premiere recordings. “I hope that those who already love Tosca and Butterfly will enjoy the opportunity to focus wholly on the orchestra as they listen, and that people who are usually more drawn to the concert hall than to the opera house will be rewarded by exploring something new. In the end my only aim is to share and celebrate Puccini with all of them” – Carlo Rizzi“Carlo Rizzi, one of The Metropolitan Opera’s often under-appreciated maestros in the Italian repertoire, conducted both “Ballo” (with steady drive) and “Bohème” (with sumptuous clarity).” - New York Times "It [Capriccio sinfonico] is well played here, with spruce attention to detail, and the orchestral playing sounds excellent in the resonant acoustic of Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall. This was a thoroughly enjoyable wallow...the orchestra remains on excellent form." - MusicWebInternationalPerformance ★★★★ Recording ★★★★ - BBC Music Magazine