Par BENJAMIN GEORGE. Picture a day like this is the fourth collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, whose acclaimed partnership produced Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence, and Into the Little Hill. The opera – “a kind of Alice in Wonderland, but for adults”, says Crimp – lasts just over an hour and is cast in seven scenes. It is scored for five voices (S-S-MS-CT-Bar) and…

Par GERSHWIN GEORGE. Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) and George Gershwin (1898-1937), two of the best known figures in American music, were good friends and often played together. Heifetz had urged Gershwin to write a violin concerto for him, but unfortunately Gershwin died before the project got off the ground. These transcriptions by Heifetz are the next best thing. The five excerpts from Porgy and B…

Par HILLBORG ANDERS. In his Kongsgaard Variations (2006), Swedish composer Anders Hillborg takes the Arietta-theme from Beethoven's last piano-sonata, #32 in C minor Op. 111 as the basis for an evocative 16-minute string quartet. Beethoven's sublime music drifts strangely through the centuries and is warped, vaporised, and refashioned as if, in the words of Hillborg, the Arietta 'is dreaming yet a…

Par RAWSTHORNE NOEL. / Recueil / Orgue

Par TOMASI HENRI. Composed in 1949 by Henri Tomasi, Complainte Du Jeune Indien is a piece for Clarinet and Piano accompaniment. This piece voices the lament of a young Indian, expressing nostalgia. It is quite sad with an Andante tempo and the harmonic motion is quite slow. Two cadenzas feature in this work, with the possibility to cut them out to make rehearsals easier. The piece finishes sadly o…

Five Early Piano Pieces. Par EOTVOS PETER. Peter Eötvös completed his early neo-classical Hungarian piano pieces at the age of 17. Now published in one volume, they were created when he studied composition at the Budapest Music Academy between 1959 and 1961, shortly before taking up a scholarship to study conducting in Cologne. A highlight is the witty three-movement Hommage à Haydn in which he hu…