SKU: HL.14008374

ISBN 9781846096150. UPC: 884088435202. 8.25x11.75x0.105 inches.

The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies' fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company, first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway, as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004, with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than its predecessor, an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560, now in Vienna), which had been the inspiration for my sixth Strathclyde Concerto, for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination, but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of the work. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog, bind the devil with a cord, truss, wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks, guess whom I shall choose, courting, odds and evens. The single movement juxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture, taking liberties which would never be present in, for instance, Brunelleschi architectural drawings, so here, with a constant sequence of transformation processes, I have distorted the neat, precise implications of modal progression, expressed in the unison opening phrase (from F to B through A sharp/B flat), so that the ear is led, en route, into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that I was reading into, and behind the games, adult motives and implications, concerning aggression and war, with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B progression underlying the whole construction derives from a passage in the development of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, and the opening of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. However, unlike in these models, here a real - if temporary - sense of resolution occurs at the close of the quartet: as when the curtain falls on the reconciled Count and Countess in 'Figaro' one wonders how long the F/B truce will hold, and games break out again. The quartet is dedicated to Giuseppe Rebecchini, Roman architect, and friend since the nineteen-fifties.

SKU: BT.MUSM570207299

English.

For 11 solo strings Published 2003 Commissioned by the Goldberg Ensemble First performance: Goldberg Ensemble, Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton, 5th February 2004 Score.

SKU: BT.MUSM570209248

English.

For string quartet. Published 2004. Second Prize of the 2005 Lutoslawski Award. First performance: Rubenstein Quartet, Warsaw, 14th February 2005.

SKU: HL.255632

9.0x12.0x0.1 inches.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Shades Of Silence was composed in 2012 for violin, viola, violoncello and harpsichord. Written for Nordic Affect. The first performance was given on 2 February 2013 at Kaldalon Hall, Harpa Centre, Reykjavik, Iceland.

SKU: HL.14030964

ISBN 9788759861455. English.

The Composer writes: 'In February 1987 I saw in the Tate Gallery in London a painting by the Victorian English painter John William Waterhouse. The painting kept haunting my memory, and as I at the same time planned to write a piece for solo Viola, my ideas for the music and the memory of the painting fused more and more. I decided, then, to let my piece borrow the title of Waterhouse's painting: The Lady Of Shalott. The picture of a mad-like, pale, and perhaps singing woman alone in a boat without sculls, which calmly slips out from the rush growth of the river is an illustration for the ending of Alfred Tennyson's poem by the same title, which again plaits into the old English legends about King Arthur. My piece tries to meander - like the river at Camelot - among these sources.' As suggested above the piece was originally written for Viola solo. This version for String Quartet is from 1993.

SKU: BT.MUSM570206889

English.

For Soprano and Piano. Published in 1977. First performed by Jane Manning and Richard Rodney Bennett, Royal Northern College of Music, 21st February 1979. Score.

SKU: HL.14028681

UPC: 884088810481. 8.5x11.0x0.094 inches.

Composer's Note Second Meeting was written in January 1992. The first performance took place in Stockholm in February (Bengt Rosengren, oboe and Stefan Bojsten, piano). The work belongs to a planned series of virtuoso duos, “meetings”. The first one (from 1982) is written for clarinet and harpsichord. Formally, Second Meeting is very close to a familiar “theme and variations” category, although there are seven themes, or melodies, all quite closely related. In the autumn of the same year I decided to write a version of the piece for oboe and a small orchestra, trying to remain reasonably faithful to the original (a la Ravel, perhaps). The orchestral version is called Mimo 1). Esa-Pekka Salonen.

SKU: HL.14043630

ISBN 9788759832448. UPC: 888680744182. English.

Bamberger Tanz for Orchestra by Hans Abrahamsen . Premiered by the Bamberger Symphoniker and Jonathan Nott February 7, 2015 in Bamberg.

SKU: BT.MUSM570200191

English.

For Soprano and Recorder. Published in 1992. Commissioned by Tracey Shawell and John Turner. First performed at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, February 1993. Score and Part.

SKU: HP.8204

ISBN 9780852498804.

The third collection of hymns by Alan Gaunt, bringing together 97 new texts written between November 1996 and February 2003. In addition, there are 22 translations from the Danish of N F S Grundtvig (1783-1872), and nine other translations, including six from the Welsh of William Williams (Pantycelyn). The Forward, by Professor Richard Watson of Durham University, places Gaunt's recent oeuvre in the context of his wide reading of other poets and Christian thinkers, and of the major themes and challenges of contemporary hymnody.

SKU: BT.MUSM570200771

English.

Commissioned by Northern Sinfonia. First performance: Adrian Clarke and the Northern Sinfonia conducted by Lionel Friend, Central Hall, York, 3rd February 1995.