CLASSIQUE MODERNE

SKU: HL.50601001

UPC: 888680707118. 8.25x11.75 inches.

Commissione d work by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the BBC Proms.

“'The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie' is a symphonic fantasy for solo violin, choir, and orchestra. Violinist Vadim Gluzman performs the lead role of a traveling musical storyteller who introduces a collection of wondrous tales by the mysterious author Erroneous Anonymous. The Infant Minstrel guides listeners in a voyage of imagination. Auerbach's new composition speaks to the young and the young at heart with child-like, yet enigmatic and humorous poems in the tradition of 'nonsense' authors such as Edward Lear, Lewis Carol, Hilaire Belloc, and Mother Goose, as well as Edith Sitwell, Shel Silverstein, Edward Gorey, and Tim Burton. The text is relevant, yet timeless; absurd, yet profound; simple, yet multi-layered. We meet characters such as the Common Corporant, the Moon Rider, and the Flying Pig that enjoys sitting on a cloud watching the crowd. The work embraces with humor the traditions of the British and Gaelic bard and the troubadour, whose songs told embellished and exotic tales. It also finds inspiration in the menagerie – a diverse collection of creatures and curiosities – and the sideshow presentation of oddities and the bizarre.” (Lera Auerbach).

SKU: HL.48024477

ISBN 9781540037992. UPC: 888680885397. 9.0x12.0x0.061 inches.

Written in 2010 for violinists Todd Reynolds, and the sky was still there tells the story of an old friend, Amber Ferenz, and the epiphany that led her to embrace her true self, confront the US Army, and accept a dishonorable discharge under the Army's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Amber tells her own story in this work, while the violin plays along, providing a sometimes-somber, sometimes-whimsical sub-text. Amber's story, though unique, represents a struggle we all face on some level, whether to confrom to cultural expectations, or defy them in pursuit of greater truths. -- David T. Little.

SKU: HL.48025206

UPC: 196288133346.

To mark the 100th birthday of Ursula Mamlok (1923 - 2016), Boosey & Hawkes Bote & Bock, in collaboration with the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation, is publishing a series of works from the composer's estate that were not published during her lifetime. Mamlok wrote Daybreak in New York in 1944, based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from his 1858 collection Birds Of Passage. By setting the work of this US-American national poet to music, the young immigrant embraced her new homeland, as it were. As in most of her song compositions, Mamlok chose verses about nature and our existence in relation to it - here an invocation of the wind in its various varieties, whose power only fades away at the end in a gentle sigh in the cemetery.

SKU: HL.48024601

ISBN 9781540050663. UPC: 888680933807. 9.0x12.0 inches.

Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player, was commissioned by the Julian Bream Trust and first performed at St John's Smith Square by Andrey Lebedev in 2014. This substantial addition to the advanced solo guitar repertoire reflects and expands upon an earlier miniature from 2007: Guitar and White Hand, Birtwistle’s first piece for the instrument. Both pieces draw artistic inspiration from the artist Pablo Picasso: the smaller piece written for Forbes Henderson and sharing a title with the 1927 painting of the same name. The larger piece was composed in the centenary year of Picasso's Construction with Guitar Player after which the piece is named and the sculpture Guitar.Picasso made about a dozen 'sculptural' constructions’ during 1912-1914, many of which employ recycled or carved elements. A good number of these were destroyed and only one, Still Life was shown publically during his lifetime. Picasso's own Construction with Guitar Player was an installation of a partially drawn and painted figure to which he added arms made of newspaper that fold away from the wall to embrace a real guitar. In the foreground stands a table with a bottle of wine and this was photographed by Picassoin his studio in 1913. Musically, Birtwistle’s Construction is a large scale, dense work of sixteen minutes’ duration. It does not develop linearly, but presents fragments of detail, interruptions, digressions and loops as a “deconstructed guitar” in sound.