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Howard Skempton: Bolt from the Blue

Daniel Becker (piano)

Exaudi, James Weeks

You hear, you enjoy, and then think about how more cavalier composers freeload off the surface of jazz...Skempton sounds like the future to me.

Howard Skempton: Bolt from the Blue

Daniel Becker (piano)

Exaudi, James Weeks

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You hear, you enjoy, and then think about how more cavalier composers freeload off the surface of jazz...Skempton sounds like the future to me.

About

Howard Skempton is a professional composer whose works have been published by Oxford University Press since 1994. His best known work is "Lento" (1990), commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Much of his music is available on CD. The OUP website includes discography, a biography and details of recent compositions.

Howard's string quartet,Tendrils, written for the 2004 Huddersfield Festival, won the Royal Philharmonic Society award for chamber-scale composition. Tendrils also won the Chamber Music category in the BBC Radio 3's British Composer Awards. 'The Moon is Flashing' won the 2008 award in the vocal category. This CD of miniatures intersperses choral works with solo piano pieces. The texts for the choral works come from Mary Webb, Edward Thomas, Emerson, Judith Cramond and Longfellow. Liner notes by the composer, who also supervised the choral recording sessions.

Exaudi was proclaimed by Gramophone magazine as “…one of the most sensationally gifted vocal groups performing in the UK at the moment”. James Weeks founded EXAUDI in 2002, and maintains a busy international touring and recording schedule with the group. He was appointed Musical Director of the New London Chamber Choir in 2007.

Pianist Daniel Becker has built a reputation for insightful interpretations of 20th and 21st century music. He was first prizewinner at the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2003, where he also won the Sonic Arts Network Prize for his performance of Jonathan Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen.

Contents and tracklist

No. 1, To Life
Track length1:32
No. 2, Reflections
Track length1:25
No. 3, The Spirit of Earth
Track length1:49
No. 4, Safe
Track length1:29
No. 5, To the World
Track length2:08
No. 1, Music
Track length2:05
No. 2, Brahma
Track length1:40
No. 3, Pan
Track length1:36
No. 4, Xenophanes
Track length2:46
No. 1, —
Track length3:27
No. 2, —
Track length1:44
No. 3, —
Track length1:49
No. 1, Two Pewits
Track length1:36
No. 2, Sowing
Track length1:33

Awards and reviews

May 2011

You hear, you enjoy, and then think about how more cavalier composers freeload off the surface of jazz...Skempton sounds like the future to me.

March 2011

The care taken over the selection of pieces makes this anthology a representative one: never in doubt are the variety and depth of his thinking within its chosen limits...Skempton invariably 'explains' his texts as effortlessly as EXAUDI renders his settings.

23rd December 2010

Skempton is the master of the unassuming miniature, and each of these tiny pieces says more in just a couple of minutes (or just seconds in some cases) than many composers manage in 10 times as long...his choral writing is exquisite, too, sometimes intricately chromatic, sometimes blamelessly diatonic
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