World première recordings of works by John Tavener, Arvo Pärt, Valentin Silvestrov and Alexander Knaifel sit alongside pieces by Henryk Górecki and John Cage on the first recording from a new Irish label operated by noted concert promoters Louth Contemporary Music Society (LCMS). All of these very popular contemporary composers have in various ways been deeply influenced by profound spiritual, religious or cultural encounters, and the disc celebrates them in a moving, magical programme. A Place Between intersperses - to wonderful effect - beautiful works for string quartet (Silvestrov's meditative Ikon, Tavener's deeply moving Ikon of Joy/Sorrow, Pärt's reflective Da Pacem Domine) with two solo piano works (Pärt's uplifting Hymn to a Great City, and Cage’s melodic and expressive In a Landscape). Górecki's memorial for Michael Vyner, Good Night and Knaifel’s mystical O Heavenly King both feature the haunting voice of soprano Patricia Rozario. Silvestrov's 25.X.1893 lullaby is a melancholic and lyrical piece for violin and piano.

MacMillan’s viola concerto was written for Lawrence Power, who brings a unique authority to this, its first recording. The fourth symphony—a major addition to the repertoire—is a generous and appropriate coupling, both works incorporating and alchemically transforming musical elements from the distant past.

Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works.

The music of Peteris Vasks must be considered against the background of the socially and politically turbulent history of his home country Latvia. It frequently shifts through contrasting emotional states, with passages of sumptuous beauty sometimes followed by disjointed and dramatic sounds. According to Vasks, all three of the works for violin and orchestra featured here represent the polarity between optimistic hope for a better future and an anxious concern for the modern world. Included are the fantasia Vox Amoris, the concerto Tala gaisma (Distant Light), Vasks' first and most extensive work for violin and string orchestra and the tone poem Vientulais engelis (Lonely Angel). All are performed by the exceptional violinist Alina Pogostkina, superbly accompanied by the Sinfonietta Riga under the direction of Juha Kangas.

Just 26 years old, Nicola Benedetti has been making chart-topping recordings for 10 years. This album celebrates the best of those recordings, and her other successes – from winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, to her 2012 best-selling album ‘The Silver Violin’, the highest charting classical instrumental album in the UK of the last two decades. A collection of great violin music – from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending to the Tchaikovsky and Bruch violin concertos and Arvo Part’s Spiegel Im Spiegel. Featuring brand new recordings – Brahms’ invigorating Hungarian Dance no. 5, Monti’s ever-popular Czardas, and Chopin’s emotional Nocturne in C# minor. The album includes Nicola performing with leading orchestras and conductors, as well as some of her favorite chamber players. This album showcases the incredible range of Nicola’s playing and demonstrates her wide appeal. In January 2013 Nicola was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to music and charity.

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev is one of the most widely performed of all living Russian composers. Each of his new compositions constitutes a milestone in contemporary musical history. His ability to imbue his music with profound religious content, to unite diverse cultures and styles, to invent new ways of musical expression while remaining faithful to the centuries-old classical tradition, and to utter most profound themes using a simple and comprehensible musical language, singles him out among present day composers. His most widely performed work, the St Matthew Passion (2006), has received worldwide recognition. Following its premiere in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in March 2007, it has been performed more than seventy times in different countries by the most distinguished soloists, choirs and orchestras. Invariably it receives standing ovations from audiences at each concert. This SACD features five works by Metropolitan Hilarion that were produced over a thirty year period and performed by the excellent Russian National Orchestra.

Call it postminimalist, totalist, or maximalist, the orchestral music of Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon is big, loud, frenzied, and assertive, jam-packed with stylistic references, dense with inventive orchestration, and overflowing with virtuoso activity. Dystopia, performed by David Robertson and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the city of Los Angeles, created in collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison. This live recording of the work's premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, January 12, 2008, captures the energy and spontaneity of the music, which at times is quite reminiscent of the hubbub of the Shrovetide Fair in Stravinsky's Petrushka, though one must imagine that the listening experience with the film was overwhelming. In contrast, Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not so much a wall of sound as a multi-layered gloss on its original material, an echo of Beethoven's music warped and reshaped through glissandi, microtones, clusters, montage, and other modern techniques.

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.

Inspired early on by the experimental pieces of Krzysztof Penderecki, Radiohead's guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood has pursued the idea of shaping orchestral sounds in enexpected ways to produce startling and innovative works. Just as Penderecki wrote for conventional instruments and turned dense bands of microtonal dissonances and extended techniques into the agonized cries of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and the pulsating roars and shrieks of Polymorphia, Greenwood achieves comparable effects in his multilayered and highly varied orchestral music. The massed harmonies and swooping glissandi of Popcorn Superhet Receiver owe a considerable debt to Threnody, which Greenwood would gladly admit; because the title 48 Responses to Polymorphia openly acknowledges the connection to that work, it is easy to identify Greenwood's raw materials and how he brilliantly reworks them to his purposes. This 2012 release from Nonesuch consists of recordings made with the Aukso Orchestra in Kraków, Poland, with Penderecki conducting his own works and Marek Mos conducting Greenwood's compositions.

Following the success of the Grammy award-winning album ‘The Goat Rodeo Sessions’, Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile return with their sensational new album ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’. ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’ combines the talents of the four solo artists, each a Grammy Award- winning talent in his own right, to create a singular sound that’s part composed, part improvised, and uniquely American. The music featured in this stunning album is so complex to pull off that the group likens it to a goat rodeo — an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster. Both the first album and the new recording also feature the voice and artistry of singer-songwriter and fellow Grammy Award-winner Aoife O’Donovan, who joins the group as a guest on ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’.

The guitar can cross musical boundaries like no other instrument, its shape-shifting qualities conveying it instantly, from biting twang to gentle iridescence. A guitar quartet performing Australian contemporary works may seem one-dimensional on paper, but this is a truly thrilling and beautiful album. It helps, of course, that Guitar Trek’s skill and musicianship on each of their myriad instruments is staggering—Nigel Westlake’s cinematic 6 Fish shimmers on the group’s steel-stringed instruments, while Richard Charlton’s Guitar Quartet No. 8 “Five Tails in Cold Blood” inspires ensemble work of mesmerizing precision with fizzing, jazz-inspired licks. Phillip Houghton’s kaleidoscopic, emotive Opal explores every inch of the guitars’ musical potential. Ending the album, Elena Kats-Chernin’s “Bleached Memories” pays a lighthearted, ragtime homage to the guitar’s Baroque heritage.

Timothy Kramer has recorded and released a full album of his orchestral works with Navona Records. The result: SENTINELS, an evocative representation of Kramer’s compositions that span several decades, with influences ranging from Baroque to rock.

“Portrait is a string of recordings presenting contemporary composers with a unique musical signature. Ludovico Einaudi is one of them. A music that captivates the listener, a sonic landscape to discover!” Angèle Dubeau. Driven by the works of this grand and prolific Italian composer, the internationally renowned violinist shares once again her passion with the excellent musicians of her string orchestra, La Pietà. Angèle Dubeau offers a unique revisit to Ludovico Einaudi’s music, “changing its texture, rethinking its character, while bringing a new sonic dimension.” After three critically acclaimed albums in the Portrait series devoted to Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and John Adams, Angèle Dubeau delves into another distinctive minimalist universe. She chose 13 works arranged by François Vallières and herself that put in light the multiple facets of the popular composer. His refined and diverse works are present on the soundtracks of various celebrated movies such as Mommy (2014) by Xavier Dolan, Untouchables (2011) by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, as well as This is England (2006) by Shane Meadows.

Deutsche Grammophon is set to issue the world premiere of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s 12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann on 20 September 2019. The album will be released a day after the future-embracing Icelandic composer would have turned 50.

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.