Nyman: Six Celan Songs & The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi

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The Six Celan Songs… bring forth a stark grandeur from Nyman unmatched by anything else in his output, impressively captured by singer Hilary Summers and the Michael Nyman Band. — BBC Music Magazine, September 2006, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 24th Jul 2006
Catalogue No: MNRCD108
Label: MN Records
Length: 53 minutes

Nyman: Chanson einer Dame im Schatten

Work length7:13

$1.50

$2.10

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: Es war Erde in ihnen

Work length4:59

$1.00

$1.40

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: Psalm

Work length3:44

$1.00

$1.40

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: Corona

Work length7:10

$1.50

$2.10

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: Nächtlich Geschürzt

Work length6:49

$1.00

$1.40

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: Blume

Work length6:12

$1.00

$1.40

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

Nyman: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi

Work length17:45

Album only

Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, Sarah Leanard

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Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper. Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The songs, individually and collectively, express both the horror, the emptiness of the writer in exile and are cast in a musical language which attempts to 'reinvent' an imaginary emotional world related to the Romanian background in 1920s Bukovina, where Celan was born. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, unlike the Six Celan Songs, deals directly with a war situation – an 18-month-old Kosovan boy left for dead during the Kosovo war, found and re-named by the Serbs and 6 months later reunited with his parents. It is the most recent in Nyman's series of collaborations with visual artists, in this case the American feminist/conceptualist Mary Kelly. Kelly provided the composer with a complex text in a simple ballad form which Nyman brilliantly subverts in his continuous 18-minute piece, written for Sarah Leonard and the Nyman Quartet and first performed surrounded by Kelly's visual representation of the text in the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2001.

Reviews

September 2006

The Six Celan Songs… bring forth a stark grandeur from Nyman unmatched by anything else in his output, impressively captured by singer Hilary Summers and the Michael Nyman Band.

November 2006

…settings of poems inspired by the consequences of genocidal conflicts. …they demonstrate that Nyman produces his most affecting and most substantial music when his heart is engaged as much as his intellect or his curiosity. His characteristic constructional methods are embedded in a more lyrical context, and there are even echoes of Wolf and Mahler. Summers, Leonard and the Nyman band and quartet perform with considerable feeling, realising grief, betrayal and compassion with equal conviction.

Nyman: Six Celan Songs & The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi

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