Yamauchi / Uchimoto - 24 Preludes from Japan - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Thomanerchor Leipzig - Choral Music for Christmas [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/24/2006

The composer, violinist and conductor, Hugo Alfven (1872-1960), is a kind of national composer in Sweden. His tonal language is very much romantic nationalism and his period of glory ranges from the late 1890s until the mid-1920s. He was active in all imaginable genres, such as symphonic works, chamber music, choirs, solo instruments, and his many songs are still widely performed today. Several songs are available in different arrangements, partly for voice and piano, partly with orchestra in different settings. The great majority of the orchestral song versions presented on this album are first recordings, performed by a dream team of singers Kerstin Avemo and Sabina Bisholt, sopranos; Tobias Westman, tenor; Karl-Magnus Fredriksson, baritone. The Goteborg Opera Orchestra is conducted by one of Sweden's foremost conductors, Patrik Ringborg.

John Burge (b. 1961, Dryden, Ontario) is a Canadian composer who has been teaching at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario since 1987. He has written a large body of vocal, chamber, and orchestral compositions, and received the 2009 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Some critics have likened his compositional style to that of Benjamin Britten and Maxwell Davies. Philip Chiu is acclaimed for his brilliant pianism, sensitive listening, and a stage presence that eschews the hermit-pianist image in favour of openness, authenticity, and connection with audiences. Inaugural winner of the Mecenat Musica Prix Goyer, Chiu has become one of Canada's leading musicians through his infectious love of music and his passion for creation and communication. Given the number of precedents in the world of Classical music, it is fair to state that there is a long traditional of composing a set of Twenty-Four Preludes for solo piano. John Burge's preludes draw their primary influence from Chopin's Opus 28 set in that Burge also composes one prelude in each major and minor key, employing the exact same ordering of keys used by Chopin. While Chopin was writing music in the highly chromaticized harmonic language of the early 19th century, in 2015, the year that Burge completed his set, the concept of tonality has undergone so many developments since Chopin's time that there are now whole schools of musical techniques that produce music that is quite atonal. As an all-governing principle for his set of preludes though, Burge made it a personal requirement that each prelude had to embrace it's tonic key in a decisively audible fashion.