Habemus Quartet WHISPERING COLORS

 

WHISPERING COLORS

Tamara-Anna Cislowska ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Butterflying

 

BUTTERFLYING

 

Acacia Quartet ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Blue Silence

Blue Silence is the first ever recording of the complete works for string quartet by Elena Kats-Chernin. Elena Kats-Chernin is possibly Australia's most popular composer. In a recent public poll of music from the past 100 years conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, her Eliza Aria was one of the highest-ranking Australian compositions. Eliza Aria is included on this new release. In the UK, it is particularly well-known as the theme music for Lloyds TSB's television campaign For The Journey that began in 2007 and continues today. As you can hear on this album, Elena's tuneful music combines lightheartedness with melancholy, blended with elements of cabaret, tango, ragtime, klezmer and Bach.
Acacia Quartet met Elena at a concert in 2011 and a great rapport was struck up. Acacia decided to learn all of Elena's quartet music (so far about 90 minutes, and counting), rehearse it extensively with her and perform it in concerts, then recording it under her supervision. Blue Silence was nominated for an APRA-AMCOS Art Music Award in 2013.

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Wild Swans

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, but moved to Australia in her teens and settled there after studying and working for over a decade in Germany. She has a knack for creating skillfully composed works with an immediate appeal to a broad range of audiences. She typically draws on a variety of musical traditions for her inspiration, and the suite from her ballet Wild Swans is a case in point. The fairytale of 11 brothers turned into swans whose sister saves them elicits an eclectic score of great delicacy, transparency, and inventiveness. The composer uses a solo soprano voice instrumentally in a wordless vocalise in many of the movements, to a lovely effect. Several movements of the score recall Philip Glass' music, from around the time of La Belle et la bête, and some parts have a Prokofievian sound, but Kats-Chernin's light and delicate touch is always evident. Jane Sheldon has a pure, supple voice that's ideal for the music. Ian Munro is the soloist in Kats-Chernin's lyrical Piano Concerto No. 2, a work with the same kind of stylistic diversity as the ballet suite. Mythic, a large-scale orchestral piece, has a dark, meditative character that sets it apart from the other works on the disc, and overall, it's less distinctive than the others. Ola Rudner conducts the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in a polished reading of the scores. Kats-Chernin is rightfully becoming more recognized in the West, and this collection of three of her large scores makes a compelling introduction to her work. (Stephen Eddins)

Tamara-Anna Cislowska ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Unsent Love Letters - Meditations on Erik Satie

After the death of Erik Satie, dozens of unsent love letters were found in his Paris apartment. Now composer Elena Kats-Chernin and pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska send those letters off, in 26 meditative and passionate piano miniatures inspired by Satie’s extraordinary life and music.

The album is a musical memoir from one composer to another, from the Uzbekistan-born Australian to the French composer whose eccentricities are legendary and music timeless. “Satie’s life was a fascinating, fervoursome affair,” says pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska, “from the first strike of love and then lifelong estrangement with artist and muse Suzanne Valadon, to the unexpected celebrity and conflict of his last ten years. After he died, friends gaining access to his apartment, for the first time in almost three decades, found conditions both perplexing and romantically fastidious in their own way: two grand pianos one atop the other, one chair, one table, seven velvet suits and the love letters – many, many unsent love letters.”

The album reflects on idiosyncrasies and anecdotes from Satie’s life, with music that ranges from seductive orientalism to hypnotic melodies reminiscent of the ground-breaking, transcendent beauty of Satie’s own piano pieces: ‘imaginary building’ reflects on his sketches of imaginary buildings (which he even advertised in the newspaper for rent and purchase); ‘very shiny’, one of his characteristically opaque performance directions; ‘postcard to a critic’, after Satie’s explosive response to a negative review (leading to a spell in gaol). The buoyant rhythms and rhapsodic harmonic style that have brought Kats-Chernin a reputation as one of the best-loved composers of her generation provide the perfect lens to reflect on a musical great of the previous century.

"If Elena Kats-Chernin had married Erik Alfred Leslie Satie, their musical children would have sounded like the 26 little piano pieces on this beguiling album... Deceptively simple and unadorned, they trickle off the nimble fingers of Tamara-Anna Cislowska... This is the kind of music that could exist at various levels ... all the way to late-night cabaret acts in Spiegeltents, best accompanied by exotic libations... it is hard to argue with its sincerity, wit and charm." (The Australian, April 2017)