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Métier presents a landmark 4-disc box set from pianist Ian Pace in commanding performances of music by composer Michael Finnissy (b. 1946). Finnissy is widely regarded as one of Britain's most important living composers. Pace, one of the leading interpreters of Finnissy's work, presents an album focused around Finnissy's epic cycle for piano, The Verdi Transcriptions, alongside the second complete recording (after the composer's own) of the iconic English Country-Tunes, and works inspired by music of the late-18th and 19th centuries. The result is a broad view of Finnissy's extensive output of piano music in relation to Romantic aesthetics. The album is released in anticipation of the Métier tag's upcoming celebrations of Michael Finnissy's 80th birthday in 2026. Finnissy's four-book cycle of Verdi Transcriptions reimagines Verdi's operas through a modern lens. As Finnissy states in his liner notes InchTranscribing sound into a written form (notation) involves making significant choices. The choices can color the ongoing exploration of that sound as 'composition.'Inch The result of those choices is a monumental, late-Romantic epic. Finnissy's English Country-Tunes has long been considered one of his signature and most technically demanding cycles. There is a similar line of composition through transcription as The Verdi Transcriptions, only in these works the source material is English folk music. Written in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, the work can also be seen as a commentary on the spirit of British patriotism at the time. Ian Pace's readings reflect decades of study he first performed English Country-Tunes in the 1990s and has played Finnissy's complete piano oeuvre in cycles (1996 and 2016). The set includes extensive liner notes by both Pace and Finnissy, offering rare insight into the compositional ideas and performance choices behind t
