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Michael Nyman - War Work: Eight Songs with Film (2015)

Posted By: Designol
Michael Nyman - War Work: Eight Songs with Film (2015)

Michael Nyman - War Work: Eight Songs with Film (2015)
Michael Nyman Band; Hilary Summers, contralto

EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue&Log) ~ 397 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 181 Mb | Scans included
Genre: Classical, Minimalism | Label: Michael Nyman | # MNRCD138 | Time: 01:07:40

The 'Eight Songs' are essentially a song cycle presented in two groups of 4: the first group preceded by 4 instrumental movements and the second by 6. The texts were written by World War 1 poets all of whom, apart from the English painter-poet David Bomberg, lost their lives during the war. The songs take their starting point from the title of a series of poems by the French poet Gaston de Ruyter (who was shot down in his planes as late as 7 October 1918): ‘Chansons vieilles sur d’autres airs’ (‘Old songs to other tunes’). The ‘chansons vieilles’ are the poems by English, French, German and Hungarian poets (all sung in their original languages apart from ‘Csak Egy Eiszkara…..’ and the ‘autres airs’ are by English, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Polish and Italian composers of the 17th and 19th centuries.

Michael Nyman’s new film-and-music piece, inspired by the First World War, is a triumph

Is man an embodied soul or just a machine made of flesh? That was the uncomfortable question lurking behind Michael Nyman’s War Work, composed to mark the centenary of the First World War, which was given its UK premiere last night at the Barbican. It consisted of a film imaginatively assembled from archive footage projected on a screen above the platform, while contralto Hilary Summers below sang eight songs based on poems of the time, accompanied by the Michael Nyman Band.

It was bold of Nyman to approach the subject of the War from this unusual angle. A cynic might say that by focusing on the mechanical aspect of war – the ghastly new machine-guns, the sinister and unbelievably vast air-ships, the mechanical movements of the women in armaments factories – Nyman was simply adapting the topic to his own limitations as a composer.

This is, after all, the man who became famous in the 1980s as the British apostle of American minimalism. On his sound-tracks to films such as Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, the courtly phrases of Purcell or Mozart were chopped into fragments and obsessively repeated.

In many ways this new piece marked a return to Nyman’s roots. It was played by his own raucously loud band, in which the strings, as always, had to struggle mightily to be heard against the saxophones and brass. Hilary Summers had to struggle too.

The music often lay at a cruelly high altitude for her contralto voice, and not many of her words could be heard against the relentlessly amplified din. And the music borrowed heavily from the past. Every song was based on a recomposition of a well-known piece of classical music, including Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle and Franck’s violin sonata.

However, the spirit was entirely different. The insistent loudness was there, but the jaunty, heartless mechanised quality had gone. Nyman wanted to wring the pathos from his sources, and wind it up a notch by placing Summers’s voice against the original at a strange, uncomfortable angle.

The loudness and strain in the sound became expressive, and brought out the agonised quality in many of the images, especially those which showed mutilated soldiers being fitted with primitive prosthetics, or trembling uncontrollably with shell-shock.

Most of the pieces written to mark the centenary of the War have set out to wring our hearts, rather than make us think. Nyman’s does both, magnificently.

Review by Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph


Michael Nyman - War Work: Eight Songs with Film (2015)



Tracklist:

01. The Making of Faces (02:20)
02. Dreaming of Home (02:20)
03. The Engine Turns (03:05)
04. The Effects of Gas (03:21)
05. Song 1: 'Urtod' (04:22)
06. Song 2: 'What's Left of the Soldier-Man?' (02:52)
07. Song 3: 'Kinder vor einem Londoner armenspeise Haus' (03:39)
08. Song 4: 'Haidekampf' (03:30)
09. Puppenkorper (04:06)
10. Picabia's Pigeons (03:38)
11. The Dead are Sad Enough in their Eternal Silence (02:31)
12. Playing at Soldiering (03:08)
13. The Mechanical Horse (05:44)
14. A la Pensee des Absents (02:36)
15. Song 5: 'L'Adieu du cavalier/The Cavalier's Farewell' (03:25)
16. Song 6: 'For just one night' (04:23)
17. Song 7: 'Louse Hunting' (02:40)
18. Song 8: 'Abschied' (05:29)
19. 'Urtod' (re-recording) (04:22)


Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 4 from 7. December 2014

EAC extraction logfile from 2. April 2016, 11:13

Michael Nyman / War Work

Used drive : TSSTcorpDVDWBD TS-LB23A Adapter: 1 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 128 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : Yes
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\Flac\flac.exe
Additional command line options : -T "COMMENT=Ripped by GFox" -V -8 %source%


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 2:20.16 | 0 | 10515
2 | 2:20.16 | 2:20.31 | 10516 | 21046
3 | 4:40.47 | 3:05.19 | 21047 | 34940
4 | 7:45.66 | 3:21.28 | 34941 | 50043
5 | 11:07.19 | 4:22.73 | 50044 | 69766
6 | 15:30.17 | 2:52.24 | 69767 | 82690
7 | 18:22.41 | 3:39.39 | 82691 | 99154
8 | 22:02.05 | 3:30.64 | 99155 | 114968
9 | 25:32.69 | 4:06.51 | 114969 | 133469
10 | 29:39.45 | 3:38.42 | 133470 | 149861
11 | 33:18.12 | 2:31.11 | 149862 | 161197
12 | 35:49.23 | 3:08.44 | 161198 | 175341
13 | 38:57.67 | 5:44.22 | 175342 | 201163
14 | 44:42.14 | 2:36.36 | 201164 | 212899
15 | 47:18.50 | 3:25.53 | 212900 | 228327
16 | 50:44.28 | 4:23.19 | 228328 | 248071
17 | 55:07.47 | 2:40.59 | 248072 | 260130
18 | 57:48.31 | 5:29.11 | 260131 | 284816
19 | 63:17.42 | 4:22.38 | 284817 | 304504


Range status and errors

Selected range

Filename D:\Downloads\Michael Nyman - War Work.wav

Peak level 100.0 %
Extraction speed 1.8 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 3377DBFB
Copy CRC 3377DBFB
Copy OK

No errors occurred


AccurateRip summary

Track 1 not present in database
Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
Track 4 not present in database
Track 5 not present in database
Track 6 not present in database
Track 7 not present in database
Track 8 not present in database
Track 9 not present in database
Track 10 not present in database
Track 11 not present in database
Track 12 not present in database
Track 13 not present in database
Track 14 not present in database
Track 15 not present in database
Track 16 not present in database
Track 17 not present in database
Track 18 not present in database
Track 19 not present in database

None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

End of status report

==== Log checksum 15092FB7BA0933B34809524E89C872ADAABC0E2904F0F09B5D395B89C6F5E770 ====

foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2016-04-03 15:08:28

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Michael Nyman / War Work
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR10 -3.81 dB -18.52 dB 2:20 01-The Making of Faces
DR10 -3.66 dB -16.84 dB 2:20 02-Dreaming of Home
DR11 -0.70 dB -14.65 dB 3:05 03-The Engine Turns
DR11 -0.81 dB -15.29 dB 3:21 04-The Effects of Gas
DR8 -0.25 dB -10.00 dB 4:23 05-Song 1: 'Urtod'
DR9 0.00 dB -11.62 dB 2:52 06-Song 2: 'What's Left of the Soldier-Man?'
DR8 -0.22 dB -10.44 dB 3:40 07-Song 3: 'Kinder vor einem Londoner armenspeise Haus'
DR8 -0.23 dB -10.49 dB 3:31 08-Song 4: 'Haidekampf'
DR10 0.00 dB -12.29 dB 4:07 09-Puppenkorper
DR10 0.00 dB -12.33 dB 3:39 10-Picabia's Pigeons
DR10 0.00 dB -12.13 dB 2:31 11-The Dead are Sad Enough in their Eternal Silence
DR10 0.00 dB -13.95 dB 3:09 12-Playing at Soldiering
DR12 -0.59 dB -14.76 dB 5:44 13-The Mechanical Horse
DR10 -0.60 dB -14.81 dB 2:36 14-A la Pensee des Absents
DR9 -1.18 dB -12.34 dB 3:26 15-Song 5: 'L'Adieu du cavalier/The Cavalier's Farewell'
DR9 -0.16 dB -12.81 dB 4:23 16-Song 6: 'For just one night'
DR10 -0.17 dB -12.46 dB 2:41 17-Song 7: 'Louse Hunting'
DR8 -0.81 dB -11.13 dB 5:29 18-Song 8: 'Abschied'
DR8 -0.25 dB -11.36 dB 4:23 19-'Urtod' (re-recording)
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 19
Official DR value: DR9

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 766 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

Michael Nyman - War Work: Eight Songs with Film (2015)

All thanks to original releaser - GFox

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