Errollyn Wallen CBE is a Belize-born British composer. She studied composition at the universities of London and Cambridge. She founded her own Ensemble X, and its motto ’We don’t break down barriers in music… we don’t see any’ reflects her genuine, free-spirited approach and eclectic musicianship. She has been commissioned by outstanding music institutions from the BBC to the Royal Opera House and performed her songs internationally.
Album of the week: All things are quite silent, by The Choir of Pembroke College & Anna Lapwood
Happy listening!
About the album:
This album is the first commercial release for these choirs and Anna Lapwood as a conductor. It is a recording of some of the Choirs’ favourite music. Some of the composers are @lauramvula, Imogen Holst, Eleanor Daley, Amy Beach & Anna Lapwood.
This album is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world, performed by English vocal ensemble Gallicantus led by Gabriel Crouch with the libretto by Nathaniel Bellows.
Butterflying, by Elena Kats-Chernin and Tamara Cislowska
Happy listening!
About the album:
Butterflying is the first major survey of the piano music of Elena Kats-Chernin. Ever since her childhood in Uzbekistan, the piano has been - in her own words - Kats-Chernin's 'best friend'. Butterflying presents the full range of Kats-Chernin's extraordinary compositional palette Many of the pieces are performed solo by Tamara-Anna Cislowska. Others are presented in versions for piano four hands, with Elena joining Tamara-Anna to resume their long-standing friendship and collaboration.
Alexandra Oehler, based in Leipzig, is a prizewinner of several piano competitions, including the Franz Liszt Competition Weimar. Concert tours have taken her to North America, Mexico, Chile, The Philippines, and South Africa. She has performed at prestigious festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, MDR-Musiksommer, Heidelberger Frühling, Mendelssohn Festival Leipzig, Budapest Spring Festival, Music Festival Tropea and the Cervo Music Festival in Liguria.
The beauty and peculiarity of Memory Game is that it is built entirely from new arrangements of Monk’s music. Arrangements are, effectively, time machines: they begin as a conversation between the composer and the arranger—or between the composer and a previous self. They carry the potential for both affirmation and change in the re-interpretation of the piece. To a composer, an arrangement can mean a circling-back, a chance to try new procedures on a familiar set of materials, or a chance to re-examine ideas a second (or third, or fourth) time. Arrangements aren’t merely a re-figuring of the same pieces into a different structure; they carry with them all of the knowledge and experience from the intervening time between the work now and the work then, from the composer now to the composer then.
Errollyn’s music is both immediately familiar and entirely original. She combines popular styles, aspects of minimalism, baroque counterpoint, modernist rhythms, and lush romantic textures and draws on influences around her. Many of the works on this album have personal associations and are written for long-standing musical collaborators and friends who appear on this recording.
The Cello Concerto combines passion and beauty with a fearless, rigorous technique. It fuses the cello tradition of Bach to Britten with bluesy ostinatos, angular modernist jolts and an immersive string texture. Bach is also the influence in the 4-movement work Photography, with the second movement quoting Sinfonia No.14 (BWV 800).
If Bach provides one of the mainstays of Errollyn’s kaleidoscopic idiom, the other most obvious one is Purcell. The final track In Earth eerily adapts and distorts Dido's famous lament, using popular music delivery with Errollyn on vocals and jazz musician Tim Harries on bass guitar, accompanied by Quartet X.
