Vox Meunier - Ein Deutsches Barockrequiem - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Music created by veteran Danish composer and keyboardist Anders Koppel has been the mainstay of several successful Dacapo releases over the past years. Now, Still Life joins them as a documentation of a new endeavour of his, a vibrant music-making in duo with cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen, whose far-reaching musical creativity matches Koppel's own. Still Life is a meeting of kindred spirits - yielding 15 impressions of life as captured in a dimly lit night. Anders Koppel is classically trained as a clarinetist and pianist, but for several stormy years from 1967 until 1974 he mainly worked with experimental rock music. With his brother Thomas (born 1944) he formed Savage Rose, which became Scandinavia's leading experimental rock group. After the break with Savage Rose Anders Koppel's musical career has been very broad. He has composed music for over 150 films and 50 plays and ballets, and for almost 25 years he has played Balkan-inspired music in the trio Bazaar. Since the mid-1980s he has increasingly worked with classical genres and forms. This has led to several instrumental concertos and a string quartet, and here too one hears Anders Koppel's love of music-making and eclectic idiom. In 1998 he was awarded a lifetime grant from the National Arts Foundation, and in 1999 he won yet another honour, when he was asked to compose the music for the first new ballet production in decades for Tivoli's historic Pantomime Theatre, to celebrate it's 125th anniversary.

Andreas Hammerschmidt is undoubtedly the most unjustly neglected composer of seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany. Very few recordings have been devoted to him, even though his music was widely published during his lifetime. The fifteen or so published collections offer a great variety of works, which, like those of his famous contemporary Heinrich Schutz, illustrate the fusion between the Lutheran polyphonic tradition and the various stylistic influences of the Italian Baroque. For this musical portrait of Hammerschmidt, Vox Luminis has drawn on several of these collections in order to offer as rounded a picture as possible of the variety of the composer's styles. The entire programme is structured around texts for Passiontide and Easter, introduced by an intensely moving madrigalian motet on the death of Christ, Ach Jesus stirbt.

A Study Of Losses is the seventh studio album from Beirut, the musical project of Zach Condon. The project originated in spring 2023, when Viktoria Dalborg, director at the Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, reached out to Condon, asking if he would be interested to provide the music for their next project, a show based on an adaptation of a novel by German author Judith Schalansky. The main themes in Schalansky's book and in the adaptation for the circus show deal with the concept of loss and the impermanence of everything known to us from extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures to more abstract concepts of loss through the process of aging. In close collaboration, A Study Of Losses, turned into a rather unexpected piece of music-at 18 songs and nearly an hour long, it is by far the largest album Beirut has ever done, and amongst some of their most beautiful work to date.