Award-winning violinist Daniel Hope presents an eclectic and accessible mix of neo-Baroque, minimalist and soundtrack favourites, including works and arrangements by contemporary masters like Ludovico Einaudi, Arvo Pärt, Karl Jenkins, Max Richter, Gabriel Prokofiev, Alex Baranowski and many more. “Spheres” features a curated collection of repertoire celebrating the idea, first brought forward by Pythagoras, that planetary movement creates its own kind of music, bringing beauty, harmony and simplicity to our complex solar system. This idea has fascinated philosophers, musicians, and mathematicians for centuries. Featured as main soloist on Max Richter’s acclaimed “Vivaldi Recomposed”, Hope is known for an effortless classical sound and intriguing approach to repertoire. Music of reflection, contemplation and relaxation.

Michael Nyman came of age as a classical composer in the radical London of the late '60s. His work embraces multiple vernaculars (jazz, avant garde, conceptual art) and helped cement the foundation of what came to be known as minimalism. Decades into his career, Nyman's score to Jane Campion's film The Piano made him a star. The movie's themes of colonialism and silence (its protagonist, portrayed by Holly Hunter, cannot speak) were perfectly aligned with his longtime interests in world and ambient music. Horn players assist members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in fleshing out Nyman's stately, hymn-like motifs. On the more heavily orchestrated cues, sentimentality wins out over minimalist restraint; the best tracks feature Nyman on solo piano, playing the rudimentary, faux period repertoire of Hunter's character.

When Michael Nyman started reinventing the English baroque back in the 1980s, one critic described the result as pump- action Purcell. This recording combines these two singular musical styles through the stunning voice of countertenor Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork, serving as the bridge across three centuries. The programme combines bold harmonies, wondrous inventions, and melodies that will haunt your dreams whether from the 17th century or the 21st. Recorded following a concert tour of the programme, the release includes the premiere recording of a new commission from Michael Nyman, Music after a While based upon Purcells song, or more particularly upon its strikingly original bass-line, with its insidious rising chromatics.

Michael Nyman's three String Quartets were not conceived as a series, as they owe their origins to three very different sets of circumstances. However when the composer heard them together on the 1991 Argo recording featuring the Balanescu Quartet reissued here, he realized that the works had an unintentional but unmistakable consistency of compositional approach. Each work is built around the principle of conflict - not necessarily conflict between the instruments, as is the traditional view of the quartet medium, but conflict between sets of musical materials that appear to be at odds with each other. In the first, the conflict is between two 'found' musical objects, separated both by their cultural origins and by a distance of around 300 years. The conflict in the second is between Indian and European musical styles, while the third's comes from the process of adapting an earlier choral work into a string quartet, interspersing the original with Romanian folk music fragments.

This disc of the complete Piano Trios of Michael Nyman, performed by the Irish Fidelio Trio, is the first volume in a set of the composer's complete chamber music. Each of Nyman's trios has a programmatic element. Poczatek, a world premiere recording, contains five movements derived from Nyman's score to the film of the same name. Its musical material is inspired by classic Polish feature and documentary films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. The Photography of Chance, another world premiere, refers to the re-seeing of industrial reality in early Soviet photography. The trio Yellow Beach is a transfigured version of 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands', from Nyman's score to the film Prospero's Books. Time Will Pronounce was inspired by Joseph Brodsky's poem Bosnia Tune, which deals with the horror of the staggering daily death toll of the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

This brilliantly devised CD from Gerard McChrystal is a deeply personal album; at times mystical, the music is always beautiful and captivating. Indeed 'Aria' has similar qualities to Jan Gabarek's 'Officium' (which sold 1.4 million copies) and will appeal to this fan-base. Featuring soprano and alto saxophone with a colourful array of different ensemble accompaniments — string orchestra, choir, guitar, piano, solo, string quartet and electronics. Baroque music blends seamlessly with contemporary; Handel resolves into Michael Nyman, Debussy's Syrinx morphs into Ravel's Piece en forme de habanera. All the tracks lead to the next by key or by starting and ending on the same note. Other works include Philip Glass Façades, Faure Les Berceaux, Bozza Aria, as well as original works by Billy Cowie, Karen Tanaka, Andy Scott and Michael McGlynn (from the vocal group Anúna who featured in Riverdance). Accompanying Gerard on this album are some of the UK's finest classical musicians including the Smith Quartet and the No. 1 best-selling classical artist, guitarist Craig Ogden. Gerard McChrystal is a multi-award winning saxophonist who has performed as a soloist in over 30 countries with many of the World's leading orchestras and ensembles.

Collection includes: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Nobuyuki Tsujii, Makoto Ozone, Nobuyuki Nakajima, Fazil Say, Takashi Kako, Michel Camilo & Moriya Saito.

The Essential Michael Nyman Band is a studio album featuring a collection of music by Michael Nyman written for the films of Peter Greenaway and newly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. It is the seventeenth album release by Nyman. The album features liner notes by Annette Morreau, who describes the album as "a summation and digest of ten years of progress in the performance of music by a composer – a composer with whom, so evidently, a group of friends and expert musicians intimately identify their total commitment, virtuosity, and joyous enthusiasm."

A coming together of two artists with enormous followings – Valentina Lisitsa, with her dazzling artistry and hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, and Michael Nyman, with his hugely popular film soundtracks. This release, in the year of Nyman’s 70th birthday, features tracks from his multi-award-winning score for the 1993 smash hit film The Piano. Acclaimed for his music’s innovation, punchy simplicity and universal appeal, Nyman, during his career as a music critic, coined the term ‘minimalism’ for an emergent musical genre – one to which he would make extensive contributions in many of his early scores and inspire a vast global audience. The disc is packed full with 77mins of material, full of irresistible energy. The album includes all ten solo piano transcriptions from The Piano, together on one album for the first time.

With a captivating collection of lush new arrangements for violin and orchestra of film and TV scores, classical music from the movies, anime hits and new compositions by Oscar-winning composers, the album Cinéma showcases Esther Abrami’s versatility, musical sensitivity and technical mastery. Available on CD, Cinéma features unique new arrangements of blockbuster hits such as ‘Naruto’, ‘Demon Slayer’, ‘The Witcher’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ alongside iconic French music such as ‘Amélie’ and ‘Les Choristes’ as well as beloved classics by Pjotr Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Astor Piazzolla.

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.

For this, his seventh soundtrack for director Peter Greenaway, Nyman deftly orchestrates a mix of strings, horns, and voices to produce another of his fetching and romantic minimalist backdrops. The opening "Memorial" is the highlight of the lot and drives along with stuttering saxophones, an insistent string arrangement, elegiac brass solos, and the soaring vocals of soprano Sarah Leonard (Leonard would be featured on a large part of the Prospero's Books soundtrack). The piece was originally inspired by a 1985 Belgian soccer match tragedy, in which 39 Italian fans were killed. Nyman utilized a death march in his earlier Greenaway collaboration, Drowning by Numbers, and revives the scheme to great effect here for what would become the main theme of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Nyman contrasts the piece's climatic quality with two relatively sedate yet brooding numbers.

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.

Celebrated for his modular, repetitive style, minimalist composer Michael Nyman was among experimental music's most high-profile proponents, best known in connection with his film scores for director Peter Greenaway. Born in London on March 23, 1944, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London, under communist composer Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, a musicologist specializing in the English Baroque. Under Dart's tutelage, Nyman was introduced to 16th- and 17th-century English rounds and canons, their repetitive, contrapuntal lines highly influencing his own later work; Dart also encouraged him to travel to Romania in the interest of seeking out the country's native folk music traditions.

Released shortly after the composer's 60th birthday, this album from The Zoo Duet presents works that deserve to be better known. Taking a line for a second walk is vintage Nyman, conceived originally as an orchestral work for Houston Ballet in 1966 and transcribed for two amplified pianos without any loss of its hypnotic intensity. Water Dances began life as music for Peter Greenaway's film Making A Splash and receives its premiere recording in its five-movement form on this disc. (Music Week)