SKU: BR.EB-9387

ISBN 9790004188576. 0 x 0 inches.

Commissioned by the Kolner Philharmonie (KolnMusik) for the non bthvn projekt 2020 and the Cite de la musique / Philharmonie de Paris Dedicated to Arditti Quartet Each movement of this quartet explores a single state, its lights and its shadows. Each movement, you could say, is a moment . And these moments could last for more or less time without compromising their essential nature. The processes could be extended or compressed, repeated or reversed, but the core ideas - if they are ideas, but maybe they are simply experiences? - are what they are. Despite this, the precise sequence of movements matters a great deal. Heard together they do articulate some kind of linear narrative, maybe even a metaphorical journey (albeit a circular one where the arrival might, who knows, prove to be a new departure). One situation gives way to another and instrumental relationships within the quartet vary, but ultimately the imaginative impulse behind the piece preferences states of unity. Whether or not this unity is expressed texturally - sometimes literal unisons pervade, but not always - there is generally a sense that even seemingly diverse aspects relate to a fundamental condition of concord: a conscious limitation in the pitch structure to spectral emanations of the root notes E-flat and C. At the opening this is unambiguously audible in the perpetual alternation of these two notes in the low cello register. Later the two spectra are woven into a micro-tonal 'double-spectral-mode' (derived from the first 24 partials of the C and E-flat fundamentals), which defines the subtle melodic inflection of the second movement, and the never-quite-chromatic ascending scales of the third. For now this feels like a rich source of melodic possibility, so far only just glimpsed... And why the insistence on E-flat? Probably by way of historical anecdote. Apparently Karl Holz (a member of the Schuppanzigh Quartet) said to Beethoven: We performed your Quartet in E-flat Op. 127 in his [Weber's] honour; he found the Adagio too long; but I told him: Beethoven also has a longer feeling and a longer imagination than anyone standing or not standing today. - Since then, even Linke (another member of the quartet) can no longer stand him: we cannot forgive him for this. Listening again to Op. 127, in light of these comments, I was struck by the opening moment: the unfolding of an E-flat 7th chord over the course of a few bars. Every time I hear it I find myself wishing that Beethoven would have lingered longer there, without resolution or progression, just enjoying that sonority. And maybe - why not? - tune the 7th naturally. And what would it be to stretch that moment into an entire piece? What would Weber think of that?! In the end I was not so extreme in my self-limitation, and other concerns took over, but it was from these thoughts that the composition process began... Lastly, about the title: it comes from a book called 'The Clock of the Long Now' by Stewart Brand, published at the turn of the millennium. It's about the creation of a thousand-year clock to embody the aspiration to thinking in terms of longer time-spans than are presently habitual. If the music of Beethoven embodied a 'longer' feeling and imagination than some of his contemporaries were able to appreciate, what is our relation to time now? Longer or shorter? Maybe it depends who you ask... It's probably more extreme in both directions: attention spans might be diminishing in the digital world, but conversely there is an awareness of distant pasts and potential futures which would have been inconceivable at the time of Beethoven. In any case, the interesting thing is to ponder how societal conditions, assumptions and expectations might - whether consciously or unconsciously - influence the time of art, for listeners and creators alike. And what if time is running out? (Christian Mason)

World premiere: Paris, Cite de la musique, January 14, 2020.

SKU: PR.44641326L

UPC: 680160643349. 11 x 14 inches.

In January, 2005 at Stetson University, the TARAB Cello Ensemble performed a new music concert that was suberb and exhilarating. To the audience's dismay, the ensemble had no encore prepared (do any even exist?). I later found out that the group was comprised of recent Eastman School of Music graduates, many of whom I had conducted during the end of my academic tenure in Rochester. I was struck by the ensemble's determination to remain together to make music and, with their blessings, set out to rectify this omission in their repertoire. BEGUINE AGAIN is a Latin-American echo consisting of three choruses (the third becomes a little mixed up—as if the dancers momentarily part ways...) plus a Coda, and is roughtly four minutes in duration. The piece was stolen— and extended— from an excerpt of my 12-year-old PARLOR PIECES (1993); the score was completed in May of 2005 in Ormond-by-the-Sea, Florida.

SKU: BR.PB-5432

World premiere of the orchestral version: Stuttgart, January 1, 2018World premiere of the piano version: Mito, June 17, 2017

Have a look into EB 9283.

ISBN 9790004212790. 10 x 12.5 inches.

Marche fatale is an incautiously daring escapade that may annoy the fans of my compositions more than my earlier works, many of which have prevailed only after scandals at their world premieres. My Marche fatale has, though, little stylistically to do with my previous compositional path; it presents itself without restraint, if not as a regression, then still as a recourse to those empty phrases to which modern civilization still clings in its daily utility music, whereas music in the 20th and 21st centuries has long since advanced to new, unfamiliar soundscapes and expressive possibilities. The key term is banality. As creators we despise it, we try to avoid it - though we are not safe from the cheap banal even within new aesthetic achievements.Many composers have incidentally accepted the banal. Mozart wrote Ein musikalischer Spass [A Musical Jape], a deliberately amateurishly miscarried sextet. Beethoven's Bagatellen op. 119 were rejected by the publisher on the grounds that few will believe that this minor work is by the famous Beethoven. Mauricio Kagel wrote, tongue in cheek, so to speak, Marsche, um den Sieg zu verfehlen [Marches for being Unvictorious], Ligeti wrote Hungarian Rock; in his Circus Polka Stravinsky quoted and distorted the famous, all too popular Schubert military march, composed at the time for piano duet. I myself do not know, though, whether I ought to rank my Marche fatale alongside these examples: I accept the humor in daily life, the more so as this daily life for some of us is not otherwise to be borne. In music, I mistrust it, considering myself all the closer to the profounder idea of cheerfulness having little to do with humor. However: Isn't a march with its compelling claim to a collectively martial or festive mood absurd, a priori? Is it even music at all? Can one march and at the same time listen? Eventually, I resolved to take the absurd seriously - perhaps bitterly seriously - as a debunking emblem of our civilization that is standing on the brink. The way - seemingly unstoppable - into the black hole of all debilitating demons: that can become serene. My old request of myself and my music-creating surroundings is to write a non-music, whence the familiar concept of music is repeatedly re-defined anew and differently, so that derailed here - perhaps? - in a treacherous way, the concert hall becomes the place of mind-opening adventures instead of a refuge in illusory security. How could that happen? The rest is - thinking.(Helmut Lachenmann, 2017)CD (Version for Piano):Nicolas Hodges CD Wergo WER 7393 2 Bibliography:Ich bin nicht ,,pietistisch verformt. Ein Gesprach [von Jan Brachmann] mit dem Komponisten Helmut Lachenmann, in: FAZ vom 7. Juni 2018, p. 15.

World premiere of the piano version: Mito/Japan, June 17, 2017, World premiere of the orchestral version: Stuttgart, January 1, 2018, World premiere of the ensemble version: Frankfurt, December 9, 2020.

SKU: PR.446413260

UPC: 680160643332. 9 x 12 inches.

In January, 2005 at Stetson University, the TARAB Cello Ensemble performed a new music concert that was suberb and exhilarating. To the audience's dismay, the ensemble had no encore prepared (do any even exist?). I later found out that the group was comprised of recent Eastman School of Music graduates, many of whom I had conducted during the end of my academic tenure in Rochester. I was struck by the ensemble's determination to remain together to make music and, with their blessings, set out to rectify this omission in their repertoire. BEGUINE AGAIN is a Latin-American echo consisting of three choruses (the third becomes a little mixed up—as if the dancers momentarily part ways...) plus a Coda, and is roughtly four minutes in duration. The piece was stolen— and extended— from an excerpt of my 12-year-old PARLOR PIECES (1993); the score was completed in May of 2005 in Ormond-by-the-Sea, Florida.

SKU: KU.GM-1911

ISBN 9790206202384. 9 x 12 inches.

Monumentum, Music for String Sextet, was written in 2014 to a commission from the Moritzburg Festival, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center New York and the Kathe Kollwitz House in Moritzburg. It is dedicated to the cellist Jan Vogler. The world premiere took place on 19 August 2014 at the Moritzburg Festival, performed by Timothy Chooi & Mira Wang (violins), Roberto Diaz & Hartmut Rohde (violas), Jan Vogler & Harriet Krijgh (cellos). The American premiere took place on 7 May 2015 in the Lincoln Center with the Amphion String Quartet, the violist Yura Lee and the cellist Jan Vogler.

The String Sextet Momentum commemorates the outbreak of the First World War, the death of Peter Kollwitz – who died as a volunteer, aged just 18, in the early weeks of the war – and the manner in which his mother, the artist Kathe Kollwitz, mourned the loss of her son. The artist worked through her pain by creating her most famous sculpture, The Mourning Parents. It stands today at the German soldiers’ cemetery at Vladslo in western Flanders, where her son Peter also lies buried. During the 18 years that she worked on the Parents, Kathe Kollwitz attended several concerts at the Volksbuhne in Berlin, where from January to February 1927 she heard Arthur Schnabel’s cycle of all the Beethoven piano sonatas. Schnabel performed the Sonata op. 111 in c minor on 26 February 1927, and this work touched her in particular, as we can read in her diary: “The strange flickering notes turned into flames – a moment of rapture, taking one into a different sphere, and the heavens opened almost as in the Ninth (Symphony). Then one found one’s way back – but it was a return after having been assured that there is a heaven. These notes are serene – confident – and good. Thank you, Schnabel!” This encounter with Beethoven’s last sonata inspired the artist to take up work again on her sculpture after a long interruption and to consider different possibilities for arranging the two figures. For this reason, the first minutes ofMomentum are derived from this sonata by Beethoven – though without it being quoted in an audible manner – and they leave their mark on the form of the Sextet. The number 18 and the date of Peter Kollwitz’s death (23 October 1914) also have a direct impact on the work’s dramaturgy. This music is mostly calm in nature, but is time and again interrupted unexpectedly, being disturbed by unruly sounds and vehement eruptions until time itself seems to dissolve in an aleatoric passage. The work ends with an extended lament on “seed corn should not be ground”, a line from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Kathe Kollwitz often quoted this phrase to argue for peace, and also took it as the title for a lithograph that she made in 1942. - David Philip Hefti

SKU: SU.27120171

Set of Parts.Black Is the Color Variations is based on the classic American/Scottish folk song, discovered and then developed by John Jacob Niles. My first version of the melody and variations were completed on January 23, 1989, in San Francisco, and is scored for string quartet. On May 25, 2013, I also created a version for string orchestra. It’s dedicated to the memory of the remarkable American folk and blues singer, Odetta, who was a family friend and who sang for us when I was young. —PL Also available: FULL SCORE (Cat#27120170) String Orchestra Duration: 4' Composed: 1989 Published by: Lapis Island Press.

SKU: UT.NAP-11R

ISBN 9790215324459. 9 x 12 inches.

Performance Material on Hire

[Solo: SSATTB - Choir: SATB - 2.2.2.2 - 4.2.3.0 - Tp - Hp - Str]

Francesca da Rimini is a drama for music in two acts by Saverio Mercadante, libretto by Felice Romani; the text is freely inspired by the unfortunate events of the two lovers, Francesca and Paolo, of which Dante's Comedy (canto V) also narrates.
According to some scholars, the first performance of Francesca da Rimini took place in Madrid in January 1828; however, this date is not reflected in the Diario de Avisos de Madrid, a publication that daily reserved a conspicuous space for news on the shows staged in the Spanish city: the years between 1828 and 1831 in fact do not mention the work. Furthermore, no printed libretto of Mercadante's Francesca da Rimini is preserved today – an inexplicable fact, if one admits that the performance took place. The text of the opera can be largely traced back to the one prepared by Romani for the homonymous work by Antonio Carlini (Naples 1825), which Mercadante was able to know before his stay in Spain.
Following the missed Spanish premiere, the opera should then have been represented at La Scala Theater in a subsequent season, with reliability the imminent one of the 1831/32 carnival; but shortly thereafter the impresario died: thus the contractual obligations involving him were no longer fulfilled, and, for a second time, Mercadante was then forced to shelve the plans about Francesca da Rimini, put aside now for several months.
In fact, the scoring – very similar to that of the operas planned at La Scala in the same Carnival period – assumes that Francesca da Rimini was destined for a theatre of great means, like few others in Italy besides La Scala. But the failure of the opera may also have been due to the presence of the part of an amoroso en travesti, Paolo, to whom Mercadante assigns a prominent role also in terms of music: in 1831 and in Italy such a solution was no longer so frequent as a few years before or in provincial theatres, and so this condition may possibly have affected the fate of the negotiations in Milan, and may explain how the composer was then unable to have the score performed elsewhere.
This critical edition is based on manuscript copies conserved in the Museo internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna (autograph score) and in the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal in Madrid (score and separate parts).

SKU: BR.DV-9515A-16

ISBN 9790200490619. 9 x 12 inches. German.

In the latter half of the 18th and in the 19th century the Old Preface Testament Christmas prophecy (Isaiah 9, 1-6) formed the basis for numerous motetto- and cantata-like compositions originating from the Erzgebirge and the Vogtland of Saxony. From very early times, this text was included in Matins for Christmas day, hut until the period specified it was usually intoned on a reciting note. The present cantata is one of the few surviving testimonies to musical activity in the small Thuringian town of Schleiz. The prophecy Das Volk, so im Finstern wandelt was written - probably for performance at court services - in all likelihood by Johann Georg Reichard, a magistrate in the Grafschaft (County) of Reuss who later held higher judicial appointments. Reichard was born at Oels (Olefoica) in Silesia in 1710 and studied law at Leipzig from 1732. He then went to Schleiz and rose from the position of archivist to high legal office, at the same time succeeding Gottfried Siegmund Liebich (d. 1736) as director of the court chapel. He died in Schleiz on 2 June 1782. A few of his church cantatas and other pieces (serenades etc) written for the court at Schleiz once belonged to the Fursten- and Landesschule of St Augustine at Grimma whose music holdings are now preserved in Dresden. Some of Reichard's compositions are autograph, some in copies made by his son Heinrich Gottfried Reichard (1742-1801) who pursued an active career at Grimma both in music and ancient philology, first as cantor, finally as co-rector. The 'Prophecy' cantata survives anonymously in a score copied by Heinrich Gottfried Reichard who may well have sung it himself when he was fourteen, before bis voice broke - as the date Anno 17 56 suggests. He probably prepared the score in bis later years from the original parts, now no langer existent, as he did in the case of other works of his father's. Whether he revised the musical text, and to what extent, cannot now be established. This short and attractive work has all the lightness and exuberance of the rococo as well as genuine emotional depth. In addition, it is easy to perform and should prove very popular. Liturgically, it still occupies a place in Christmas matins or vespers. Permission for this publication was kindly given by Dr. Wolfgang Reich of the Sachsische Landesbibliothek Dresden, Musikabteilung. Wolfram Steude, Dresden, January 1972.

SKU: HL.51481223

UPC: 888680991654. 9.0x12.0x0.12 inches.

“The farewell / Vienna, May 4, 1809 / on the departure of his Imperial Highness the revered Archduke Rudolph” – Beethoven added this inscription to the manuscript of this sonata. It is today know by its French title les Adieux and numbers amongst the composer's best-loved piano works. The first movement of the sonata was presumably written directly before the archduke hurriedly left Vienna. Rudolph and other members of the imperial family fled to Hungary to avoid having to endure the French troops' siege and conquest. On his return in January 1810, Beethoven was able to present him with the complete sonata, having written not only the “farewell,” but also “absence” and “return.”.

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SKU: HL.268917

George Nicholson was born in County Durham in 1949 and studied at the University of York with David Blake and Bernard Rands, receiving his doctorate in 1979. For ten years he pursued a freelance career in London before being appointed Lecturer in Music and Director of Composition at Keele University in 1988. In January 1996 he took up the post of Senior Lecturer in Composition at Sheffield University.

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