Our latest CD featuring the chamber songs of Andrew Schultz was released on May 1 by Tall Poppies (TP250). You can buy it from Tall Poppies or Halcyon and other outlets.
To celebrate this release and give you a chance to get better acquainted with some of this great music, for a limited time you can listen to a selection of tracks here drawn from the three major works on the album: To the Evening Star (winner of the 2009 Paul Lowin Song Cycle prize) for soprano and piano, Paradise for soprano, cello and piano (runner-up for the 2016 Lowin prize) and I am writing in this book for soprano, mezzo-soprano, cello, double bass, percussion, harp and piano.
Our first composer feature album since Cool Black in 2008, it is well worth taking the time to get better acquainted with Andrew's music.
Our thanks to all those involved in the disc: the artists; Luke Spicer conductor, Alison Morgan soprano, Jenny Duck-Chong mezzo-soprano, Jason Noble clarinet, Geoffrey Gartner cello, Anna Martin-Scrase cello, Jennifer Druery double bass, Kirsty McCahon double bass, William Jackson percussion, Rowan Phemister harp, Chris Cartner piano, Sally Whitwell piano; those behind the production; Trackdown Scoring Stage, Daniel Brown, Evan McHugh, Utopia Audio, Tall Poppies and Elizabeth Duck-Chong. And especially the composer Andrew Schultz for composing so many wonderful chamber songs.
Andrew is one of the composers we caught up with last month as part of our ongoing In Conversation With… series so you’ll get to hear him talking more about his work and ideas soon.
A special note on the cover art. Linden Gledhill is a biochemist-artist who is internationally renowned for his extraordinary images which draw our eyes to the detailed and eye-catching patterns that exist in the world around us often at a macro level. You can see thousands of his images on his flickr page here. But this image has a particular significance to the title. One of the areas Linden specialises in is cymatics, capturing images of sound waves on the surface of water. You can see more images like it here and read an article on the process here. The image on the album cover is one sound wave at nine different parts of its cycle, each image representing a unique moment in time.