CTP Template: CD_DPS1
Compact Disc Booklet:
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
DCD34059
Pages (16, 1)
CTP Template: CD_DPS1
Compact Disc Booklet:
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
Pages (2, 15)
Notes from a Diary for viola and piano, Op. 33 (2005)
1. Andante – larghetto – tempo primo [5.51]
2. Andante [1.08]
3. Larghetto – largo – larghetto – largo [3.18]
4. Larghetto [1.56]
5. Largo [1.34]
6. Andante [2.26]
7. Largo [3.31]
8. Larghetto – allegro – larghetto – allegro – larghetto [2.38]
9. Larghetto [2.39]
10. Largo [1.49]
11. Largo [2.57]
12. Larghetto – andante – larghetto – andante – larghetto – andante – larghetto [2.49]
The Cold Dancer: Contemporary String Quartets from Scotland Edinburgh Quartet (DCD34038)
Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. Under their new leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet deliver blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.
‘…the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’ – The Herald, February 2007
Giles Swayne: Music for cello and piano Robert Irvine, cello Fali Pavri, piano (DCD34073)
Giles Swayne’s works for cello exhibit an astonishing array of moods and colours. The restless beauty of Four Lyrical Pieces and strident romanticism of the Sonata offer remarkable counterpoint to his Suite for solo cello. Canto seduces us with its symbiotic blend of African traditional and Western art music.
‘Swayne pushes at the boundaries’ – The Times, October 2006
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
New Music on Delphian
Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano
Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo
Abigail James, guitar
Dominic Saunders, piano (DCD34029)
Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world.
‘… this is quite simply beautiful music … Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on’
– Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Awards Edition 2006
Robert Crawford: Music for piano and strings
Edinburgh Quartet
Nicholas Ashton, piano (DCD34055)
The elder statesman in Scotland’s music scene, Robert Crawford has throughout his life lavished intense care over every one of his compositions. The Edinburgh Quartet and pianist Nicholas Ashton are intimately acquainted with Crawford’s music and mirror the composer’s attention to detail in a long overdue survey of this lovingly-crafted music.
‘Beautifully-crafted music’
– The Herald, February 2005
Pages (14, 3)
13. Andante [1.21]
14. Largo [2.20]
15. Largo [2.57]
Seven Epigrams for violin and cello, Op. 23 (1996)
16. A languorous window stands white (Homage to Boris Pasternak) [3.22]
17. Flight [3.36]
18. The captive spirit (Homage to Marina Tsvetayeva) [3.40]
19. Responsorium (Homage to Nadezhda Mandelshtam) [2.44]
20. Night train (Homage to D. Shostakowich) [2.59]
21. Mystical navigation (Homage to Anna Akhmatova) [3.28]
22. And a man left his house (Homage to Daniil Kharms) [2.22]
23. Metamorphoses for piano trio, Op. 16 (1994) [14.37]
Total playing time [73.04]
Recorded on the 26 April 2007 at St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, Scotland
Producer: Paul Baxter
Engineer: Adam Binks
24-Bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-Bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: Drew Padrutt
Piano: Steinway Model B, serial number 455808 (1978), prepared by Norman W. Motion, Consultant to Steinway & Sons
Photography © Delphian Records Ltd
Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks
Cover image by Hafliði Hallgrímsson
P
2008 Delphian Records Ltd
© 2008 Delphian Records Ltd
www.delphianrecords.co.uk
This recording was produced with assistance from Nordicon.
With thanks to Morag & Richard Michael and Tom & Bernie Morgan.
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
‘The best thing is not to say a word but just to write and play and let people listen.’
Haflidi Hallgrímsson’s initial response when asked to talk about his music reflects the composer himself: enigmatic, yet eloquent, inscrutable and self contained. It is a personality that finds voice in his highly individual music. Not for Hallgrímsson the bombastic statement or the needlessly grandiose gesture. ‘Loud music is not of interest to me,’ he says; ‘I think if you’re going to be very loud then you have to say something worthwhile – and that is not so easy.’
Instead Hallgrímsson writes exquisitely crafted, jewel-like pieces, often short and, yes, predominantly quiet. Even in larger-scale works (there has been one symphony to date) his music invites the listener in rather than forcing itself on an audience. It will perhaps not come as a surprise to those who know Hallgrímsson’s output that this composer is also a painter; his music seems to speak of an aesthetic understanding that goes beyond the score to the canvas.
Hallgrímsson’s artistic identity was shaped by his homeland; the landscape around the small town of Akureyri on the north coast of Iceland
where he grew up doubtless influencing his visual appreciation of the world. His is not specifically the music of an Icelandic composer, however; ‘I don’t consider myself as Icelandic but primarily as a human being,’ he says. ‘A northerner I suppose, a northern European even, but to be nationalistic goes against the grain completely.’
One of Hallgrímsson’s earliest musical influences was his mother, whom he describes as ‘very sensitive, very musical’. She sang in various local choirs and also sharpened her son’s musical appreciation by pointing out when any particularly beautiful music was being played on the radio. ‘The violin above all was the instrument she loved the most,’ recalls Hallgrímsson; ‘through her I heard all the great violinists: Oistrakh, Heifetz, Szigeti.’
The young Hallgrímsson wanted to become a violinist but it wasn’t possible; his father had died when he was nine and his mother didn’t have the money to buy an instrument or pay for lessons. Instead, he was given the opportunity to learn the cello at the local music school, which had been given an instrument. ‘I think I would have been happier as a violinist,’ he reflects; ‘my obsession with clarity and agility was never realised on the cello, the lower
Pages (4, 13)
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
Fidelio Trio
Darragh Morgan violin
Robin Michael cello
Mary Dullea piano
Following their South Bank debut at the Purcell Room, the Fidelio Trio have become highly sought after performers of contemporary music, performing throughout Europe, Asia and South Africa as well as broadcasting regularly for BBC Radio 3. The trio are also recipients of prominent awards from PRSF, the Arts Council of Ireland and are regular artists with Music Network performing throughout Ireland.
As part of their busy schedule the trio have appeared at FuseLeeds; the Reggello Festival; West Cork Music; Belfast Festival at Queens; Royal Opera House, London; and Casa da Musica, Porto. Since 2005 the trio have enjoyed a close working relationship with the historic Wilton’s Music Hall, London where they are artists-inresidence, and in 2006 the trio undertook a prestigious Aldeburgh residency.
The Fidelio Trio have given many composition workshops and performance masterclasses at a number of higher education institutions, including Birmingham Conservatoire, the Royal Welsh
College of Music and Drama, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Ulster. In 2006 they were also ensemble-in-residence at both the Irish Composition Summer School and CoMA Summer School.
Among the many premieres the trio have given are works by Michael Nyman, Salvatore Sciarrino, Toshio Hosokawa, Edison Denisov, Toru Takemitsu, Howard Skempton, Kevin Volans and Beat Furrer. They have also commissioned a number of important new works for piano trio by Deirdre Gribbin, Rolf Hind, Donnacha Dennehy, Ed Bennett and Jonathan Powell. Recent recording projects have included a portrait of Joe Cutler for NMC and a disc of piano trios by Irish composers Deirdre Gribbin, Ed Bennett, Donnacha Dennehy and Kevin Volans (NMC D147).
An important other dimension to the Fidelio Trio’s constantly expanding repertoire is their pop archive, which includes works inspired by Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Cocteau Twins, Brecker Brothers, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell. A recording of pop-influenced works is to be released soon on their own FT Label.
www.fideliotrio.com
register always worried me because of its muddy sound.’
Whatever his reservations about the cello, Hallgrímsson’s lifelong affinity with string instruments, reflected in this recording, has always been apparent in his own music. ‘One rule I’ve always kept to is that I only write music that fits in with what I want to do,’ he says. ‘I love writing for string instruments and ensembles; being a string player it comes more or less naturally.’
Though the cello eventually became Hallgrímsson’s instrument, his first cello lessons with an alcoholic Norwegian violin teacher were not a huge success. ‘He didn’t know how to teach the cello and anyway I didn’t understand what he was saying,’ Hallgrímsson recalls. He soon stopped playing and didn’t take up the instrument again until he was seventeen and went to the music school in Reykjavik, where he had to begin again almost from scratch. Despite this delay he progressed quickly, spending four years at the music school and subsequently going to the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome to continue his studies.
It was here that he began to have doubts about pursuing a career as a cellist. ‘I wanted to be a virtuoso cellist but I realised this was not going to happen,’ he says. It was also in Rome that he began to expand his artistic horizons, getting to know visual artists studying in the city and himself becoming interested in painting, enjoying ‘the freedom to do something that was entirely one’s own rather than performing other people’s work.’ The urge to compose was also there, although he resisted its lure; ‘composing seemed unattractive to me because of the loneliness, the lack of money and the difficulty in getting performances,’ he says.
Gradually Hallgrímsson developed his career as a freelance cellist with a small quantity of composition on the side. It was an arrangement that proved increasingly unsatisfactory though it wasn’t until he was in his early 40s that he made the break and become a full-time composer, ensuring there was no going back by selling his prized cello ‘I needed to find out if there was any music in me or not,’ he says.
By this time, Hallgrímsson was living with his family in Edinburgh, having moved from London five years earlier to become the first full-time principal cellist of the recently formed Scottish
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
Chamber Orchestra. The Scottish capital, which has been his home ever since, was the first foreign city he ever saw, when as a teenager bound for a youth orchestra in Sweden the ship taking him from Iceland to Copenhagen called in at Leith. ‘Edinburgh seemed an incredibly romantic place; very dark, dirty and smoky but romantic nevertheless,’ he says. ‘I never forgot it and when I was working in London it kind of drew me back.’
The earliest of the pieces recorded here reflects Hallgrímsson’s links with Scotland. The piano trio Metamorphoses (1994) was written as a memorial for the violinist John Tunnell the founder leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra until his sudden and untimely death. The piece was commissioned by the Young Musicians’ Trust set up by Tunnell’s widow Wendy and was written for the KalichsteinLaredo-Robinson trio of violinist Jaime Laredo, his cellist wife Sharon Robinson and pianist Joseph Kalichstein, all of whom had known Tunnell well.
Hallgrímsson drew on his own memories of the violinist in writing this single-movement work.
‘He was very keen on walking in the hills; when we came to a nice town somewhere when the
orchestra was on tour he would always try to get out, climb a hill and have a good view,’ he remembers. ‘The sense of space and calmness in the work comes from that.’
The title, which for a musician almost inevitably evokes Richard Strauss’ monumental wartime memorial work for strings, Metamorphosen , grew out of the resonance of memory and of the idea of the continuous transformation of material throughout the piece. Hallgrímsson says that everything in the work comes from the opening bars; the material being gradually and gently transformed as the music progresses. The piece unfolds slowly and quietly, a gesture of inward-looking personal remembrance rather than a public memorial. The only explicitly extrovert moment arrives in the final third of the piece where a unison passage for violin and cello underpinned by tolling piano chords grows louder and ever more insistent until it reaches a mournful, wailing climax which just as abruptly ceases. It’s a section that Hallgrímsson likens to the Via Dolorosa ‘someone struggling along and reaching a certain highpoint then just withering away.’
Pages
Matthew JonesWinner of the prize for the most promising British entrant in the 2003 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, Matthew Jones’s recent recital and chamber music schedule has included performances in the Wigmore Hall; Carnegie Hall; Purcell Room; St Martin-inthe-Fields; St John’s, Smith Square; St David’s Hall, Cardiff; the CBSO centre, Birmingham; the Wales Millennium Centre and live on BBC Radio 3. Recent performances abroad include China, Japan, Australia and South America as well as throughout Europe.
Matthew was born in Swansea and studied mathematics at the Universities of Warwick and Bologna, Italy, graduating with one of the highest first class marks of his year. He was then awarded a Senior Exhibition to study at the Royal College of Music, and began to study privately with Rivka Golani. He was awarded the first ever Walton fellowship from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2007.
Matthew formed The Bridge Duo with pianist Michael Hampton in 2002, and together they have performed around the world to wide
critical acclaim, as well as releasing a disc of English viola music attracting further praise. Matthew is also violist with The Badke String Quartet and The Debussy Ensemble.
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
Pages
Like the Seven Epigrams, the most recent work on this recording has a literary connection. The germ of the idea for Notes from a Diary (2005) was planted when Hallgrímsson visited the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, the house where she and her family hid from the Nazis for over two years during the Second World War until they were betrayed. As he himself describes it, the place itself was something of a let down. ‘As so often in buildings where something momentous happened it seemed rather unreal. Going into a house where a famous artist lived always turns out to be disappointing because it’s like a shell; the real thing isn’t there. I was in Anne Frank’s house and I wasn’t feeling anything at all when suddenly a bell was struck, giving me something of a shock.’
Nothing happened at the time, but a couple of days later back home in Edinburgh Hallgrímsson started working on a commission from Icelandic viola player Thórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir when the memory of that bell returned and he found himself being drawn to it. From this beginning he created what he describes as his own diary of sounds stemming from that moment in the museum. The connection with Anne Frank’s own diary is remote, intangible;
the visit no more than a place and an event that sparked the compositional process.
Notes from a Diary is a large picture made up of many smaller interrelated ones. Hallgrímsson describes it as opening with the sound of a bell being struck, a sound which then reverberates throughout the fifteen short movements. There are many ideas connected with resonance, especially the use of piano pedal sometimes for an entire movement to make what the composer terms sonic halos. ‘The sounds hang in the air for a long time taking on a certain colour as they disintegrate,’ he says. The piece is also an exercise in variation; though much of the basic material is the same, Hallgrímsson is constantly reworking it in different ways, seeking endless variety from limited means.
If Metamorphoses is a private memorial to a friend and colleague then the Seven Epigrams for violin and cello represents a collective testimony to an entire generation of Soviet artists. The inspiration behind the work was Boris Pasternak’s autobiographical sketch An Essay in Autobiography which first appeared in Icelandic translation in 1964 and made a huge impression on the young Hallgrímsson. It was, he says, the book that really sparked his interest in poetry and introduced him to figures such as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. ‘I began to look them up and I became fascinated with this world that Pasternak describes,’ he says. The Soviet poets of the era of the Stalinist terror continue to inspire Hallgrímsson; particularly because of the way they seemed to live their lives so fully in the face of the terrible suffering they endured because of their chosen path.
When Hallgrímsson was asked by his violinist friend Terje Tønnesen, the director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, to write a violin and cello duo for himself and his recital partner Aage Kvalbein, he found himself writing a series of short pieces in memory of these great Soviet artists and thinkers. ‘I don’t need a poem or a name, or someone’s death to write music,
but it gives it a different flavour,’ he explains. ‘This piece ended up being very serious music, but then I prefer serious music.’ More remarkable given the subject matter is that it is also beautiful music. It is atmospheric and frequently has a yearning quality but is seldom harsh or angry. ‘But then,’ says Hallgrímsson, ‘I wasn’t trying to describe individual events in which these artists were involved, rather just remembering these people who seem to have become almost a part of my inner life.’
The first of the seven movements pays homage to Pasternak himself, the title not a direct quotation but Hallgrímsson imagining the writer’s environment in his country house and his way of describing nature. The following movements are dedicated to poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva, writer Nadezhda Mandelstam (Osip’s wife), composer Dmitri Shostakovich, poet Anna Akhmatova and finally the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, who was imprisoned in a Leningrad mental asylum where he died of starvation during the Nazi siege of the city. Hallgrímsson has subsequently used his work in a more substantial work, the music theatre piece Die Wält der Zwischenfälle, which was premiered in Lübeck in 2004.
CTP Template: CD_DPS1
Compact Disc Booklet:
Customer : Tintoy
Catalogue No. : DCD34059
Job Title : Metamorphoses
Pages (8, 9)
