KITCHEN. LABEL presents haruka nakamura PIANO ENSEMBLE’s new album entitled “Hikari” in a special 2CD box set edition to be released on 8th August 2017. “Hikari” is the final set of the trilogy of albums (Ongaku No Aru Fuukei and CURTAIN CALL) to feature the current PIANO ENSEMBLE lineup before they go on a indefinite hiatus after their last show at the grand St Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo on 21st July 2017.

The Elbphilharmonie, the “hall of wonders” (The Guardian), is undoubtedly the new landmark of Hamburg, a monumental synthesis of breath-taking architecture, a unique location and a world-class concert hall. In varying instrumentation the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under the baton of Principal Conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and several top-class soloists explores in the opening concert the possibilities of the Elbphilharmonie’s Grand Hall and ist acoustics with an exciting programme that spans across all musical eras, from the Renaissance to the present. It culminates in a brand-new commissioned work, created especially for this occasion by the most important living German composer, Wolfgang Rihm.

Philippe Hersant is a French composer. He studied at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique, Paris. From the 1960s onwards he was one of the leading European composers who contributed to a profound renewal of contemporary musical creation during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Violinist Tim Fain has worked extensively with minimalist composer Philip Glass in performances and in the preparation of new pieces, and the most impressive result of their collaboration may be the Partita for solo violin (2010), a seven-movement suite written especially for Fain. Associations with Johann Sebastian Bach's violin partitas are inevitable, and it's clear that Glass has had them in mind while composing in what can be described as an aspirational, rather than a merely imitative, manner. Glass has for the most part avoided his customary ostinatos and static sections, and his use of broken chords only suggests counterpoint, rather than propulsive rhythmic patterns. He has also eschewed any direct references to Bach or Baroque style, yet the Partita's kinship with the older models is certainly felt, and Fain's playing has a lot to do with it. The ebb and flow of tempos and the expressive use of rubato give the Partita an introspective feeling, and the freedom of individual expression is quite removed from the locked-in, high-energy ensemble playing that was Glass' early trademark style.

We’ve got a real treat here for Marc Almond fans – the last of his very limited edition Against Nature collaboration with Jeremy Reed and Othon. Against Nature is said to be the seminally decadent novel of 19th Century fin de siècle Paris. It explores the central character of Des Esseintes who, as Jeremy Reed explains lived, “a life governed by deviated aesthetic obsessions and the desire to subvert…. nature through artificial pursuits. Endemically bored, wealthy, disillusioned, acutely refined, phobic and neurotic and singularly disgusted by humanity he withdraws from Paris as a middle-aged sensualist to live with servants as a recluse”.

Jaakko Kuusisto is one of Finlands most versatile musicians, a quality demonstrated by his rich discography on BIS in which he appears as violinist (in chamber music, as soloist and as concertmaster), conductor, arranger and composer. In the latter capacity, he made his mark on disc in 2013, with the release of his violin concerto (on BIS-2020) a work which received great acclaim in international media, including American Record Guide.

TRANSITS: Minimal to Mayhem, his fifth full Navona Records release, is an abridged sequence of five works from a set time and concrete place that maps composer Sergio Cervetti's creative progression over four decades of composing. Written in 2013, Concertino for piano, woodwinds and timpani is a rowdy and raucous array of South American rhythms tempered by a tender quote from Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.

This new setting of the Stabat mater was commissioned by The Sixteen, whose director, Harry Christophers, contributes an enthusiastic booklet essay in which he numbers Scottish composer James MacMillan among "a trio of truly great composers of sacred music," the other two being Victoria and Poulenc. This will certainly come as news to Bach lovers, but the performance benefits from sheer commitment.

The music of contemporary French composer Karol Beffa takes us through the mirror into a dream world that is at once strange and intimately familiar. It invites us to explore inner harmony and rhythm. This new recording includes 'Into the Dark', 'Rainbow', 'Dédales' for piano and string orchestra and 'Nuit obscure' for string orchestra and voice. Gorgeously executed by Ensemble Contraste under the direction of Johan Farjot, this recording features mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes, harpist Emmanuel Ceysson, violist Arnaud Thorette and the composer on piano.

In March 2005 Eleni Karaindrou presented what she called “a scenic cantata” at the Megaron in Athens, a tour through her music for film and theatre, with musical themes newly combined and contrasted. A live audio recording, “Elegy of the Uprooting”, was issued in 2006: “The two-CD set interweaves excerpts of her music from 13 different scores spanning more than two decades, although the irresistible congruence of the music is such that newcomers to Karaindrou’s oeuvre would be forgiven for thinking this is newly composed. The music seduces by its profound beauty, tenderness and candour.”. – International Record Review. Here is the video and audio document of the event.

Creation is a 2001 album by Branford Marsalis and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Unlike what he is primarily known for as a jazz musician, this is a classical album and was released by Sony Classical.

Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music—particularly the worlds of opera and choral music—significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess.

In an era where many feel that classical music may ultimately be at its scariest "standstill", Mr. Eggert commits himself to writing high quality art-music that not only satisfies some sort of asoteric aesthetic code with which we evaluate "classical music", but his music also exemplifies his personality.

Alexander L'Estrange, medieval French name and all, is a contemporary English composer of mostly vocal and choral music, much of it accessible and appealing. A song cycle on the historical development of the bicycle is part of his catalog. On Eagles' Wings is a group of sacred pieces seemingly suited to English collegiate choirs' unquenchable thirst for new repertoire, but L'Estrange benefits here from performances by Tenebrae and director Nigel Short, as crack a choral ensemble as there is anywhere.

London-born composer Tarik O'Regan was only 30 when the second CD devoted to his choral music, Threshold of Night: Music for Voices and Strings, was released. The works collected here show him to have an assured, individual voice; consummate technique as a choral composer; and an ability to create complex music that's not "difficult," that has an immediately sensual appeal. O'Regan's harmonic language is rooted in tonality, but it is richly saturated with chromaticism. He uses dissonance in the old-fashioned way, creating tension that finds satisfying, if unconventional, resolution.