Martyn Brabbins, Daniel Pioro, Anna Dennis, Andrew Gourlay, Elena Schwarz - Tom Coult: Pieces That Disappear [CD]

NMC RECORDINGS

£16.65

Cat. no: NMCD261
Format: CD
Barcode: 5023363026123
Release Date: 22 Nov 2024
Genre: Classical

On 22 November 2024, NMC Recordings releases Pieces that Disappear - the debut album from the composer Tom Coult performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Coult's playful and seductive music has been championed by many of the UK's major
orchestras and ensembles, and he was made Composer-in-Association with the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021. Coult has been commissioned by BBC Proms
(including St John's Dance for the First Night of the 2017 Proms), Aldeburgh Festival
(including pieces for Mahler Chamber Orchestra and for Marian Consort), and Lucerne
Festival. His frst opera, Violet, with text by Alice Birch, was premiered in 2022 at the
Aldeburgh Festival and on tour, and was described by The Telegraph as 'the best new
British opera in years'. It has already been staged in second and third productions in
Paris and Ulm, Germany, in 2022 and 2023. It has won or been nominated for: an
International Opera Award, a South Bank Sky Arts Award, a Critics Circle Award, an
IVORS Composer Award and a UK Theatre Award.

This debut album features Coult's violin concerto Pleasure Garden conducted by Elena
Schwarz with soloist Daniel Pioro and is the product of a fruitful relationship Coult
enjoys with the violinist. In After Lassus , Coult takes a number of the duets from
Orlando Lassus's Novae aliquot and reworks them for Orchestra and soprano solo,
performed here by Anna Dennis and conductor Andrew Gourlay. Dennis and Gourlay
return in Beautiful Caged Thing - a work that demonstrates the expressive idiom for
which Coult is renowned.

The title track, Three Pieces That Disappear, for orchestra and fxed audio, is one of
several works written for the BBC Philharmonic. Coult says: 'The three movements of
this piece are linked by a vague, loosely connected set of ideas about music being
remembered, forgotten, misremembered, imagined or deteriorating'. As well as music
disappearing, those ideas include the birth of Coult's child (resulting in a turn towards
sounds that signify childhood), his own health problems (making words and sounds
indistinct), and a dictaphone which misremembers sounds. The work is conducted by
Martyn Brabbins.

Tracks: Three Pieces that Disappear - I (Maestoso, lamentoso) / Three Pieces that
Disappear -II (Boisterous then placid) / Three Pieces that Disappear -III (Placid then
maestoso) / Beautiful Caged Thing - I (I have known everything) / Beautiful Caged
Thing - II (Monstrous marionettes) / Beautiful Caged Thing - III (I am tired of myself
tonight) / Pleasure Garden - I (Dyeing the canal blue for Queen Victoria) / Pleasure
Garden - II (Francesco Landini serenades the birds) / Pleasure Garden - III (The art of
setting stones) / After Lassus - I / After Lassus - II (Beatus homo) / After Lassus - III
(Occulus non vidit) / After Lassus - IV (Justus cor suum) / After Lassus - V / After
Lassus - VI (Sancti mei)