01 Cadman Requiem - Requiem
02 Cadman Requiem - Caedmon Paraphrase (Bede) (John Potter, tenor)
03 Cadman Requiem - Agnus Dei
04 Cadman Requiem - Caedmon's ''Creation Humn''(Gordon Jones, bariton)
05 Cadman Requiem - In Paradisum

Hilliard Ensemble:
alto - David James
tenor - Roger Covery-Crump
baritone - Gordon Jones

Fretwork:
treble viols - Richard Campbell, Wendy Gillespie
tenor viols - Julia Hogson, Susanna Pell
bass viol - Richard Boothby
great bass viol – William Hunt

06 Adnan Songbook - Song I
07 Adnan Songbook - Song II
08 Adnan Songbook - Song III
09 Adnan Songbook - Song IV
10 Adnan Songbook - Song V
11 Adnan Songbook - Song VI
12 Adnan Songbook - SongVII
13 Adnan Songbook - Song VIII

Soprano – Valdin Anderson
Gavin Bruards Ensemble:
violas – Bill Hawkes, Andrew Parker
celo – Sophie Harris
double-bass – Gavin Bryars
electric and acoustic guitar – James Woodrow
bass clarinet and clarinet – Roger Heaton
conduktor – Dave Smith

14 Epiloque from Wonderlawn

Gavin Bruards Ensemble:
violas – Bill Hawkes
celloa – Sophie Harris, Ziella Bryars, Orlanda Bryars
double-bass – Gavin Bryars
bass clarinet  – Roger Heaton
guitar – James Woodrow

Cadman Requiem was written in memory of Bryars’s sound engineer, Bill Cadman, who was killed in the Lockerbie plane crash, and for the most part it’s a dark, harmonically bare piece. The vocal writing, which is often in unison, is perfectly offset by the plangent timbre of the viols. Bryars sets only part of the requiem text, and interpolates two settings of the seventh-century English poet Caedmon (pun intended): in these there is more rapid movement in the underlying texture, though the harmonies always change slowly. A near comparison might be Arvo Pärt, though Bryars is much more quirky, and you never encounter quite what you expect around the corner. You certainly can’t imagine Pärt setting the love poems in the Adnan Songbook – nor a more sensitive response than Bryars’s. The lyrical vocal lines (beautifully sung by Valdine Anderson) unfold with serenity over an accompaniment of low strings, clarinets and guitars, sometimes sustained, sometimes pulsing gently, sometimes moving rapidly, and always in a state of harmonic flux. Epilogue from Wonderlawn, a meditation for viola and small ensemble is harmonically the simplest work on the CD, but is no less affecting for that. In the booklet notes, Bryars writes of his care in choosing the sequence of music on the CD, and the natural progression from darkness into light makes this a totally satisfying listen from beginning to end. ---Martin Cotton, classical-music.com

I had written the Cadman Requiem in 1989 for the Hilliard Ensemble in memory of my friend and sound engineer Bill Cadman, who was killed in the Lockerbie air crash. His death affected me very deeply and, pending a recording of this piece, Manfred Eicher asked if I might like to develop an instrumental work from this, using the same instrumentation for accompaniment and retaining the same opening bars as part of a new ECM album. The piece is "after" the Requiem therefore in the musical sense of being based on it, in the chronological sense of following on from it, and in the spiritual sense of representing that state which remains after mourning is (technically) over. I wrote the piece in Venice in September 1990 and finished it in Oslo on the day of the recording, where I added the electric guitar of Bill Frisell. This, I felt, blended particularly well with low strings (originally 2 violas and cello; in live performance sometimes viola, cello and bass). Coincidentally, having used certain distortion effects on the guitar, we found that we were recording on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jimi Hendrix. Within the music I use one or two modified extracts from the Cadman Requiem itself, and from its common source Invention of Tradition, for which Bill Cadman had done the sound design.

The piece is dedicated to the two Bills (Cadman and Frisell). ---Gavin Bryars, gavinbryars.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex 4shared mega mediafire uloz.to cloudmailru gett

back

1 	After Handel's Vesper 	11:47
2 	Ramble On Cortona 	12:34
3 	Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal) 	28:21

Ralph van Raat - piano
Cappella Amsterdam (tracks: 3) 
Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic (tracks: 3) 
Otto Tausk - conductor 

This disc shows some of Gavin Bryars’ compositions for piano. The first two works are for solo piano, and the third is for piano, choir and orchestra.

After Handel’s Vesper, a 1995 work, is played here on piano, though it was written for harpsichord. There is some beautiful, subtle music at the beginning of this piece, with light melodic touches and a great deal of space, which would sound odd on the harpsichord with its quicker decay. The work has a number of discrete sections, some that recall a minimalist style, and others that hark back to the baroque with a fair amount of ornamentation. At times this piece almost sounds like an improvisation; the melodic material is simple and undeveloped, almost uninteresting.

Ramble on Cortona was Bryars’ first composition for piano, oddly enough, and was composed in 2010. Bryars, for some reason, has never written for this instrument before, and this piece is based on some themes from a recent vocal work of his, Laude, which is, in turn, based on some 13th century manuscripts discovered in Cortona, Italy. It is slow and melancholic, at first, featuring a simple right-hand melody over arpeggiated chords played with the left hand in a high register. The work shifts to other forms that all suggest simple song-like melodies at the high end of the scale, with varied accompaniments by the left hand. There are sections that are more minimalist, others more impressionist, but the work lacks any overall cohesion.

The Piano Concerto, The Solway Canal, is a large-scale piece for piano, choir and orchestra. The solo piano never takes on the role of soloist here, but rather, as the liner-notes say “takes on the unexpected rôle of a guide instead, soberly leading the orchestra and the choir into new territories of colour.” Early on, the choir comes in singing words from the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, with the music becoming layered: the piano as one layer, the orchestra another, and the choir above them. There is no solo-tutti structure in this work, but rather a flowing combination of the three. The work starts out with a slow, one could say “flowing” tempo, and slowly increases in speed after the first section with the choir. In this part, the interplay between the piano and orchestra is very attractive, yet unfulfilling; the music seems to have no clear direction. A long section for piano and orchestra goes by, then the choir returns, with a more romantic background. The piano plays constantly here, driving a rhythm that conflicts with the slow chanting of the choir. The music then becomes a bit confused - the liner-notes suggest that this is somehow “reminiscent of works by Charles Ives, or perhaps even Iannis Xenakis” - around the 18 minute mark, when each of the three elements - piano, orchestra and choir, seem headed in different directions. But that all stops, the piano comes back in control, with sweeping, romantic riffs. From here to the end, it’s piano and orchestra playing meandering melodies, with the exception of a brief return of the choir.

As much as I like Gavin Bryars’ music - I recently reviewed another disc of his, which contained a very moving work called New York (review) - I found it hard to get interested in these piano works. The solo works lack overall form, and sound like they each just contain a number of different, unrelated sections. In fact, if I listen to this disc without paying attention, it’s hard to tell where the first piece ends and the second begins. The Piano Concerto is more interesting, once one realizes that it is not a concerto, but something about it just doesn’t grab me. It has its attractive bits, and its being a concerto without the standard concerto form is interesting. But ultimately, there’s something missing; it just doesn’t have enough direction to keep my interest. ---Kirk McElhearn, musicweb-international.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex mediafire ulozto gett bayfiles

back

1. Sinking of the Titanic	60:19

Clarinet (Bass Clarinet) – Roger Heaton
Double Bass, Effects (Occationally With Octave Pedals) – Gavin Bryars
Effects (Sound Effects) – Paul Bull
Horn (Tenor Horn), Percussion (Woodblocks, Tam-tam), Keyboards (Korg M1) – Dave Smith
Percussion (Tam-tam, Woodblocks), Bells, Marimba, Cymbal, Bass Drum – Martin Allen
Viola – Alexander Balanescu, John Carney

Repackaged reissue of a 1990 recording originally released by Les Disques du Crépuscule (TWI 922-2).
This recording was made during a live performance in the Chateau D'Eau, Bourges (April 1990). 

One of the two works for which composer Gavin Bryars is best known (the other being "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet"), his epochal "The Sinking of the Titanic" had been recorded three times in the 25 years since its creation. The first, for Brian Eno's Obscure label, was a landmark recording, but went swiftly out of print and became a much sought after collector's item, while the third, a relatively bland performance on Point, was widely distributed in the late '90s. In between, on the independent Belgian label Les Disques du Crepuscule, Bryars recorded what is possibly the definitive version though again, it is a difficult disc to locate. The composition is an attempt to metaphorically replicate the disaster of 1912 utilizing various elements associated with it, including the songs and hymns reported played on board that evening both before the iceberg was struck and as the ship was sinking. It's structured as an "open" piece, in that material subsequently uncovered may be added and information that becomes discredited may be discarded. The overall mood is, befittingly, sub-aqueous with long sustained tones on the strings, bass clarinet, and horn written to give the impression of sounds traveling great distances beneath the sea. This album was recorded in a large, abandoned water tower that adds enormously to its reverberative nature. The hymns used (particularly "Autumn," which modern listeners will recognize as being very similar to "Amazing Grace") take on a remarkably plaintive and ethereal character as the image of an undersea orchestra takes form. Bryars also incorporates taped narration from survivors and various underwater sounds, including the forlorn pinging of sonar, carrying the enormous and melancholy weight of searchers for the wreckage. Indeed, much of the great success of this work is its combination of minimalist compositional technique, the emotional impact of the hymns, and the scientific examination of the event from a distance over time. Always in the background is Bryars' romantic notion of the sounds of the drowning orchestra still reverberating beneath the waves. The Sinking of the Titanic is arguably one of the signal compositions of the 20th century and an extraordinarily beautiful work. While the performance on the Point label is serviceable, the interested listener is well advised to search out either this recording or the original on Obscure. ---Brian Olewnick, AllMusic Review

What began in 1969 as an attempt to find the musical equivalent of a work of conceptual art is now established as one of the classics of British experimental music. Gavin Bryars made his first performing version of The Sinking of the Titanic three years after that initial sketch, and has regularly returned to the indeterminate score ever since. This year's centenary of the tragedy on which the piece is founded has prompted him to go back to it once again, with his own ensemble and the experimental turntablist Philip Jeck, and specially commissioned visuals from film-maker Bill Morrison and multimedia artist Laurie Olinder.

Bryars's starting point was the eye-witness report that the Titanic's dance band continued to play as the ship sank, and that the hymn Autumn was the last thing to be heard before it disappeared. Fragments of the hymn and transformations of it form the musical basis, while other sound material – some musical, some documentary – is added to the collage. The first realisation was scored for ensemble and tape; the latest 70-minute incarnation derives essentially from the version on which Bryars and Jeck collaborated and recorded in the 1990s. Jeck's sampled sounds provide an aural backdrop, sometimes brooding and hypnotic, sometimes profoundly threatening, to Bryars's musical meditation, in which middle and low-pitched instruments – cellos, basses, bass clarinet, tenor horn – predominate.

It's a sombre processional, a frieze of musical fragments in which ideas evolve and revolve. It's a strange work, but because of the way the musical processes distance the material, one that's never quite as moving as it might be, even though in this Birmingham performance Morrison and Olinder's projections — scraps of decaying film footage; stiff, posed portraits of Titanic passengers and crew — did provide a melancholy visual counterpoint. ---Andrew Clements, theguardian.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex mediafire uloz.to gett

back

1 	After The Requiem	15:48

Cello – Tony Hinnigan
Electric Guitar – Bill Frisell
Viola – Alexander Balanescu, Kate Musker

2 	The Old Tower Of Löbenicht	16:00

Bass – Gavin Bryars
Bass Clarinet – Roger Heaton
Electric Guitar – Bill Frisell
Horn [Tenor Horn], Piano – Dave Smith
Percussion – Martin Allen, Simon Limbrick
Violin – Alexander Balanescu

3 	Alaric I Or II	15:15

Alto Saxophone – Ray Warleigh
Baritone Saxophone – Julian Argüelles
Soprano Saxophone – Evan Parker, Stan Sulzmann

4 	Allegrasco	19:46

Bass – Gavin Bryars
Clarinet – Roger Heaton
Electric Guitar – Bill Frisell
Percussion – Martin Allen, Simon Limbrick
Piano – Dave Smith 
Violin – Alexander Balanescu

After the Requiem continued Gavin Bryars' journey away from the more experimental work that made his reputation early in his career toward pieces possessing a more melancholic and romantic quality. In two of the works herein, "The Old Tower of Lobenicht" and "Allegrasco," one can hear echoes of his brilliant composing on the Hommages album. But where the romantic elements were stricter and more crystalline on the prior effort, here there is an expansiveness that sometimes succeeds and at other times verges on kitsch. Guitarist Bill Frisell performs on three of the four compositions, but his creamy, sustained chords tend to sound somewhat bland and occasionally subvert some otherwise very attractive melodic material. The standout track is a saxophone quartet number, "Alaric I or II," featuring the surprising presence of Evan Parker. In fact, Bryars' earliest musical ventures were as a member of the British free improvisation community, so the inclusion of Parker has some historical background. The composition is a very enjoyable melange of minimalist technique and references to Gershwin that manages to cohere into a satisfying whole. Fans of Bryars' more substantial work from the '70s or his improvising skills in groups like Joseph Holbrooke may find After the Requiem a little too sweet for their tastes, while listeners who are looking for something a bit meatier than Arvo Part or Henryk Gorecki may find their appetite satisfied. ---Brian Olewnick, Rovi

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex 4shared mediafire cloudmailru

back

1. Incipit Vita Nova, for male alto, violin, viola & cello  (6:07)
2. Glorious Hill, for 4 voices  (11:39)
3. Four Elements, ballet  (28:53)
4. Sub Rosa, for recorder, clarinet, violin, double bass, vibraphone & piano  (9:57)

Performers:
David James – alto, countertenor (1,2,3)
Annemarie Dreyer – violin (1)
Rebecca Firth – cello (1)
Ulrike Lachner  - viola (1)
John Potter - tenor  (2)
Rogers Covey-Crump – tenor (2)
Gordon Jones – baritone (2)
Tim Payne – bass, drums (3)
Glen Martin – guitar (3)
Richard Martin – flugelhorn (3)
Henrik Sienkiewicz - french horn (3)
David Whitson – trombone (3)
Christopher Swithinbank – piano (3)
Gruffydd Owen - electric keyboard (3)
Keith Bartlet – percussion (3)
Chris Brannick – percussion (3)
S. Alan Taylor - double bass (3)
Jamie McCarthy – recorder (4)
Roger Heaton – clarinet (4)
Alexander Balanescu – violin (4)
Martin Allen – vibraphone (4)
John White – piano (4)
Gavin Bryars - double bass (4)

Vita Nova includes four pieces by Bryars in which ECM appeared to be, at least partially, attempting to cash in on the new age-y vogue of the early '90s for the sort of quasi-medieval music made relatively popular by assorted singing monks, Arvo Pärt, and the Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Garbarek. Indeed, that latter group is on hand here to perform "Glorious Hill," and the results are as blandly attractive as the listener might guess given the following recipe: Take a mushily mystical text (in Latin), set to vaguely medieval sounding music, and spice with a dash of chromaticism and a pinch of minimalism. It's all handsomely produced and sung but terribly precious and overly palatable. How far Bryars had come from the rich reality of the tramp singing "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" in his masterpiece from the '70s. Unfortunately, the remainder of the disc also fails to deliver much more than prettiness. The longest composition, "Four Elements," falls into the same gauzily impressionistic, rudderless rut of much of his '90s work, and the introduction of David James, the same countertenor used in "Incipit Vita Nova," seems tacked on just to fit in with the ostensible "medieval" feel of the album. The same applies to the use of a recorder on the final piece, "Sub Rosa." That work, however, does contain glimmers of the unique beauty and clarity of Bryars' earlier work as found on Hommages. But those instances are far too meager to be able to recommend this recording to anyone but listeners attempting to slowly crawl their way out of the new age morass. ---Brian Olewnick, Rovi

download:    4shared gett

back