Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert – Ghost Stories for Christmas (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 33:45 minutes | 354 MB | Genre: Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rock Action Records
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! And in the old tradition, Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert invite you to gather round the fire for Ghost Stories for Christmas. The album began with an idea for a song – forthcoming single A Ghost Story for Christmas. Originally intended as a one-off, seasonal release, it proved such fun to write that soon they had enough songs for an EP. “Then, on a nice, sunny, summer morning, I phoned Hubby and suggested we just do a whole album,” says Moffat. The album also features their cover of Yazoo’s synth classic Only You, already a popular number in their live set and the cover versions is topped off with a sombre rendition of Mud’s 1974 hit, Lonely This Christmas.
Read moreAida Garifullina, RSO-Wien, Cornelius Meister – Aida (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:51 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.
Aida Garifullina’s debut album is one of the most eagerly awaited operatic events of the year! Since her triumphant win at Plácido Domingo’s Operalia 2013, the young star soprano from Kazan has become the hottest newcomer of the opera world – winning audiences over with stand-out performances at Vienna State Opera and Mariinsky Theatre, recitals at the Wigmore Hall and Vienna Musikverein and a US tour with Andrea Bocelli. Boosting a unique media profile Aida has made her feature film debut in Florence Foster Jenkins alongside Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant. She has appeared on German, Austrian, French and Russian TV multiple times, including televised performances at Vienna and Dresden Opera Balls, Rolando Villazon’s Stars von Morgen on ZDF, and the 2016 Bastille Day Concert in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, watched by millions. Aida has duetted with some of opera’s greatest stars, including Plácido Domingo, Andrea Bocelli, Juan Diego Florez, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Rolando Villazón.
Read moreOsmo Vänskä – Kalevi Aho: The Chamber Music for Clarinet (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:15:10 minutes | 678 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Renowned for his rich production in the field of orchestral music, Kalevi Aho is also a prolific composer for chamber forces. Here three works spanning two decades have been combined, with the Sonata for two accordions originating in 1984 as a Sonata for solo accordion described by the composer in his own liner notes as ‘comparable in aspiration with Liszt’s most virtuosic piano works’.
Completed five years later, the duo version exploits to the utmost the unique possibilities offered by the accordion and remains highly virtuosic. It was premièred as late as 2002 by Veli and Susanne Kujala, who also perform it on this recording.
Read moreChamber Orchestra of Lapland, John Storgards – Kalevi Aho: Rituals (2009)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:19:34 minutes | 671 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
In 2003 Kalevi Aho received the unusual commission of composing a complete concert programme. Kysymysten kirja, a meditative, philosophical song cycle using the Finnish translation of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s posthumous collection ‘The Book of Questions’. The poems included are made up exclusively of questions, of which Aho has chosen a number, combining them into eleven sets to be performed without a break. The concert leads immediately into the Viola Concerto, and ends with Symphony No.14, ‘Rituals’, scored for sixteen string players, wind quintet and two percussionists.
Aho, who this year celebrates his 60th birthday, is increasingly recognized as one of today’s leading orchestral composers.
Read moreSonja Fräki – Aho: Piano works (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:22 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS Records AB
Known particularly for his orchestral output – 16 symphonies and 21 concertos to date! – the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho was recently described in Gramophone as having ‘a strong claim to the title of greatest living symphonist’. But as followers of the ongoing releases of his music on BIS will know, Aho has also composed a large number of works for smaller forces – quartets and quintets, duos and solo pieces. On the present disc, the Finnish pianist Sonja Fräki presents his output for solo piano, comfortably fitting on one disc, but nevertheless spanning some 30 years of a long career. The disc in fact opens with Aho’s earliest published work, the Nineteen Preludes from 1965-68, written before the composer had begun any formal studies of either composition or the piaNo.There is even a first version of Prelude No.8 dating from 1963, when Kalevi Aho was in his early teens and was just beginning to teach himself the piano, writing music intended mainly as practice pieces for his own use. Since then Aho has composed for other budding pianists – the Two Easy Piano Pieces for Children and the Sonatina – but as in much of his other music, the works for piano display his characteristic fascination with the virtuosic and technically brilliant side of music-making. On the present disc, this quality comes to the fore in the Sonata, with its sparkling first movement and percussive, toccata-like second movement followed by a searching Tranquillo molto, characterized by a trill which continues almost without interruption throughout the movement. Commissioned as a set piece for a piano competition, Solo II is likewise a challenge for any pianist, and forms part of a series of big (roughly ten-minute) solo works for various instruments, of which several have been recorded by BIS.
Read moreJohn-Edward Kelly, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Stefan Asbury, Jean-Jacques Kantorow – Kalevi Aho: Chamber Symphonies Nos 1–3 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 56:40 minutes | 506 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The focus of Kalevi Aho’s output lies on large-scale orchestral works, and his work-list includes fifteen symphonies to date, composed between 1969 and 2010. Although the Finnish composer is famously lavish as an orchestrator, and often invites rare guests such as the heckelphone into his orchestra, the scores of Aho’s three chamber symphonies are much more economic in scale. Although composed for some twenty strings in all, they bear eloquent proof of the composer’s aim of exploiting to the full the expressive capabilities of a string orchestra. Consequently these works are highly demanding for the players, not because virtuosity has been an end in itself, but for reasons of maximum expressivity.
Read moreAhmed El-Salamouny – Rio Rhythms (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 59:23 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Latin Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Acoustic Music Records
In his album, “Rio Rhythms”, Ahmed El-Salamouny, the specialist for Brazilian guitar music, lets listeners experience the magic of Brazil. The seventeen pieces on the CD are an exciting mixture of Brazilian rhythms delivered in a manner that is at times poetic and dreamy and at times highly virtuosic.
Read moreSinfonia Lahti, Okko Kamu – Ahmas: Symphony No. 1 (2001–02) (Music Finland) (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:43 minutes | 632 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS Records
Harri Ahmas is a bassoon (Fagott) player in the Lahti SO, and, as such, he has participated in countless recordings for us. He has also aranged a lot of music included in that orchestra’s records of Finnish Psalms without singing – an as surprising as overwhelming sales success story). Not content with that, he is also a composer in his own right, and we are proud to be able to present to you his First Symphony, lovingly played by his orchestra under no less than Okko Kamu. This is, for the time being, a digital-only release, so this is the only chance you have to buy it until further notice.
Read moreAhmad Jamal featuring Yusef Lateef – Live at the Olympia – June 27, 2012 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:46:18 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Jazz Village
Olympia, Paris, 27 June 2012. In this mythical concert hall, the Ahmad Jamal quartet played in telepathic mode to reinvent the Blue Moon repertoire. Then, before giving the audience a transformed rendering of Poinciana, a hit from the Chess era, the pianist brought on stage Yusef Lateef who played with him in the glory days of the Atlantic label. The pioneering world fusion wind player then conjured up some magical moments and took us on one of those mystical journeys to which he has the key. This recording offers the entire historic concert, illuminated by these two jazz greats inspired by groove and the spirit of the sacred.
Read moreAhmad Jamal – Carpeta Ahmad Jamal Trio Argo Sessions Vol.1 1956-1962 (2010/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 09:25:20 minutes | 5,28 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Verve Reissues
“When I listen to these records now… when I listen to the Pershing, it’s phenomenal, I must say. What they were doing, phenomenal, the lines and the purity. It’s so pure … It was sheer joy working with these two individuals. Master musicians,” writes pianist/bandleader Ahmad Jamal in the liner notes to this collection.
Read moreAhmad Jamal – Saturday Morning (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:14:23 minutes | 1,40 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Jazz Village
Following on from Blue Moon, Ahmad Jamal and his dream team are back with a joyful album made up of the kind of ballads to which only he holds the key. Each one is a moment of grace, shining like a star in the sky of American Classical Music it also features one wonderful Duke Ellington cover and a tribute to Horace Silver. With his light-fingered but rhythmic style, he sends us into a sensuous trance and leads us to a musical climax: a sound which is pure groove.
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