Breve - Live at Plush

Jazz trio Breve features legendary pianist John Taylor, and two rising stars from New Zealand, saxophonist Hayden Chisholm and bassist Matt Penman.

Their debut live performances from the Music at Plush festival in Dorset (2007-8) are now available to watch and download.

John Taylor is one of a handful of British musicians who have helped define the sound of European jazz. Hayden Chisholm first met John at the Cologne Musikhochschule, where he was Professor for Piano, and over a decade later they came together at Plush to form this exciting new trio.

“Since first hearing John all those years ago in Cologne I had always dreamed of playing with him,” Hayden recalls. “We had often spoken of putting something together but never had a chance, so when Adrian Brendel, (festival Director) approached me to play at Plush in 2007, the perfect opportunity arrived.”

The recordings highlight Hayden Chisholm’s signature microtonal sound, achieved over ten years of experiment and research, and the hyper-accurate extemporisations of bassist Matt Penman. They reveal how John Taylor’s compositions, and elegant, often impressionistic tone, owe as much to classical and folk music as jazz. His distinctive style speaks more of depth and delicacy then showmanship.

These characteristics run through the group, as Hayden explains,

“The solos blend together and merge into the next solo…it is more of a chamber music approach; with a counterpoint to the main voice there is always something happening, but no overtly extrovert member of the trio…”

Recorded in the intimate venue of St. Johns, Plush, these concerts were two of the most profound experienced over fifteen years of the festival. The strength and clarity of Taylor’s compositions give the sessions their fire. Everyone can feel when a band lifts off, when that spirit of invention takes over a group of musicians. This shines through during Taylor’s final solo (2008 concert); the roar that greeted its finish indicated that everyone there appreciated that magic had made its presence audible.

“It is hard to reach that point where you really feel you’ve let go - it arrives when you’re not prepared…but all recognize when it happens…” John Taylor, Plush 2008

Live concerts - watch and download

Video Interviews - the musicians discuss the origins of the group, composition,  improvisation and snooker.

The magic of Huun Huur Tu

The Tuvans will ride into your brain and leave hoofprints up and down your spine.’ The San Francisco Bay Chronicle

To celebrate the new year we bring you the deeply spiritual music of Huun Huur Tu, rooted in the ancient culture of the Tuvans.

Situated north of Mongolia, Tuva is home to some of the worlds rarest instruments and oldest forms of music, including the phenomenon of xoomei, overtone or ‘throat singing’.

Plushmusic producer and saxophonist Hayden Chisholm first encountered Huun Huur Tu in the 90’s and met the group in 2007 at a festival in the Rift Valley, Kenya. “The first time I heard the music of Huun Huur Tu was a deep musical epiphany that resonates with me to this day.’ The experience of hearing the overtones sung out across the planes brought to light the “deep connectivity between their music and the open landscapes surrounding us.”

Now Hayden, together with Plushmusic, Fantasy Studios, and GreenWave films is proud to present an exclusive new recording and a stunning documentary bringing you closer to the Tuvans and their music.

Live recording

In 2008 Huun Huur Tu recorded their favourite songs at Fantasy Studios, California. The sessions were electric, and they decided to open their studio doors for an invitation only concert. This sublime performance captures a group at the height of their creative powers.

Feature: Documentary ‘Been Away a While’

Join Huun Huur Tu in their native land and discover unique insights into the origin of their songs, the workings of the shamans and the veneration of nature in Tuvan culture.

Breathtaking footage of the musicians follows them along mountain ridges, through rural farms and across the wild steppe in a journey of discovery to the source of Huun Huur Tu’s music.

Watch and download the Live concert and Documentary.

Madzar and Mehta at Wigmore Hall

The wonderful Serbian pianist Aleksandar Madzar takes to the stage at Wigmore Hall, London tonight for a solo recital of repertoire including the Beethoven Diabelli variations, Franck and Ravel. Watch him perform Ravel’s La Valse with profound sensitivity in a film we captured in the intimate venue of St. John’s, Dorset in 2008.

Tomorrow the Plushmusic team returns to Wigmore Hall to film the prolific American counter-tenor Bejun Mehta in concert with pianist Julius Drake. Olivier Award nominee Bejun is a regular at the major opera houses of America and Europe; this concert marks his Wigmore Hall recital debut.

‘You are conscious of being in the presence of greatness’ The Guardian

Coptic Dub

Plushmusic supremo Hayden Chisholm, along with long time Plushmusic friends Matt Penman and Jochen Rueckert, made a splash this week as part of The Embassadors. Their new release, entitled Coptic Dub, has been getting great reviews, including this one at the Milk Factory.

Watch in fullscreen to see in HD…

To your hands on a copy, head over to Amazon. Or check out Hayden, Jochen and Matt’s contribution to Plushmusic, performing Nearness or as part of Root70.

Louis brings audience to their feet at QEH

On Monday evening we joined standing ovations at QEH, Southbank for Louis Lortie’s impressive performance of Chopin’s études. Returning to the repertoire for the first time in over twenty years, virtuoso pianist Lortie never let technical bravura or sentimentality smother the poetry in these great works.

Read Paul Gent’s excellent review of the concert in the Daily Telegraph, and discover more about Louis’ approach to Chopin in an in-depth video interview with Ivan Hewett.

Watch Louis performing the complete études in a new film created at the Britten Studio, Aldeburgh in September 2009. A Plushmusic co-production with Chandos, the film finds a musician at the height of his artistry, returning to master these intimate and technically challenging works on a Fazioli piano. Drawing on the (famously) inspiring surroundings of  Aldeburgh, film-maker Bjorn Ventris captures the essence of Louis’ performance with a beautifully shot, minimal aesthetic.

The etudes are now available to watch and download, in sections or in their entirety at Plushmusic.tv

Chopin études to audiences of 3000? Lortie knows how

Paganini started it. From the moment he took the stage in La Scala, virtuoso performers have been urged to play up to their “dark powers”, as though they were somehow in league with the Devil. Louis Lortie will cheerfully play along with this idea – but only up to a point. With Chopin in mind, he points out that the performer as circus animal is a relatively recent phenomenon, ‘because of what the music world has become’.

How, then, to play Chopin’s études to a packed concert hall – pieces that were intended primarily for home study? Restraint is hardly the first word that springs to mind when listening to Lortie’s recital of Chopin’s études. And in front of audiences that are sometimes 3,000 strong, Lortie cannot afford to be tentative. The point he’s making is rather different: that each étude has a built-in personality – an architecture that an egotistic performer can miss. ‘Chopin did not have the means that Liszt had to explode his personality all over a performance. The études, I think, were his response to that.’ So whatever the circumstances, whatever the temptations, Lortie factors in ‘a certain amount of introversion’.

Born in Montreal, Louis Lortie made his debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at the age of thirteen and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra three years later. Soon after he performed an historic tour of the People’s Republic of China and Japan. He keeps a home in his native Quebec, but these days he’s based primarily in Berlin. Following dates in the USA and France, he struck up a particularly close relationship with Kurt Masur, with whom he will perform in the coming seasons in Rome, Dresden and Leipzig.

Lortie turned 50 this year, and though his active repertoire extends from the 18th to the 21st century, from all the Mozart piano concertos to the piano music of Thomas Adès, he is more and more drawn to Chopin, and to Liszt. ‘One of the things about turning 50 is that you realise that you have to devote time to the things that matter to you. There is a lot of virtuoso repertoire – say the Saint-Saëns piano concertos – that I used to enjoy working at, but now I prefer to focus on music that I find more deeply satisfying.’

Louis Lortie plays the complete Chopin études at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, 23 November 2009.

Following the concert, Plushmusic releases Louis Lortie’s Aldeburgh recital in HD video and audio, along with a video interview of Louis Lortie in conversation with Ivan Hewett of the Telegraph.

Plushmusic reveals Lortie’s dramatic approach to Chopin

Fryderyk Chopin, born 1810, never had the physical strength to become a recitalist in the modern sense of the word. Liszt and the younger Beethoven were quite happy playing for two or three hours at a time before a knowledgeable and critical audience. Chopin’s health was so frail, he was constantly having to deny rumours of his own death. Needless to say, he had to find some other way to be extraordinary: he become inimitable.

Louis Lortie is performing all Chopin’s études at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall next Monday, and Plushmusic’s film of the same programme is being released directly after the concert. In conversation with Ivan Hewett, Lortie discussed the musical motives behind the youthful works of a man who, even in his teens, was reinventing piano technique.

The études were an innovation waiting to happen, of course: ‘The whole idea of the etude developed from the fact that the piano we know today was a relatively new invention, and more and more of the bourgeoisie were learning to play the instrument. Besides,’ Lortie adds, with a grin, ‘it was a good way for composers to earn a bit of money. Of course Chopin, being Chopin, was developing his artistic personality at the same time.

‘Chopin is an artist in an all-embracing sense. He’s one of the few genuine colourists in music. With his particular combination of immediacy and vulnerability he can be very elusive, and he’s an exceptionally difficult composer to record. He gets you to sing in the bel canto manner, inspired by the operas of Bellini, but his love of Bach’s and Mozart’s counterpoint means you have always to be aware of the possibilities for polyphony. And all that’s before you consider his harmonic explorations, which pull his music into the era of high Romanticism.’

If this is beginning to sound like the musical equivalent of the chicken tikka pizza – and it is – well, that’s why colour metaphors and architectural metaphors – so carelessly used elsewhere – are pretty much vital in any discussion of Chopin’s art. To these, Lortie adds an organising principle of his own: dramaturgy. ‘Playing the études in concert, I’ve developed any number of possible dramatic lines between the pieces, to the point where I now find it poetically unsatisfying to play individual études.’ The approach carries one obvious risk: ‘With Chopin, as soon as you become too extrovert you find yourself outside his style.’

Best show, not tell: Louis Lortie’s website has some magnificent video examples of his ‘dramaturgy’. These films also give us a glimpse into the other sides of Lortie’s career, most especially as a teacher. (He’s much in demand at Italy’s renowned piano institute at Imola.) ‘I learn a great deal from teaching students. For instance, I’ve found that the current approach to Chopin is becoming maybe more percussive, less obviously bel canto. Students are on a voyage of discovery, finding out what motivates them, but as we get older we can start to get very set in our ways. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we are the ones who always know better,’ Lortie sighs. ‘We need to learn to accept that the new generation can discover as many truths as we did.’

Louis Lortie plays the complete Chopin études at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, 23 November 2009.
Following the concert, Plushmusic releases Louis Lortie’s Aldeburgh recital in HD video and audio, along with a video interview of Louis Lortie in conversation with Ivan Hewett of the Telegraph.

Plushmusic films Lortie’s return to Chopin’s etudes

‘I try always to take a naive attitude towards a recording session like this,’ says the celebrated French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie. ‘I could feel some kind of weight on my shoulders but it was only as I sat down to play that I realised that returning to Chopin’s études was a big, big challenge.’

After a ten-year break, Lortie has returned to the Chandos label. He first recorded Chopin’s études for Chandos more than 20 years ago; it was named as one of the ‘50 great performances by superlative pianists’ by BBC Music Magazine. Since then he’s enjoyed an exceptionally rich performing and recording career. He won First Prize in the Busoni Competition in 1984. He was also a prize-winner at the Leeds Competition. He’s been named an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec – and he’s made over 30 recordings on the Chandos label, exploring a repertoire that extends from the 18th to the 21st century; from all of Mozart piano concertos to the piano music of Thomas Adès.

No part of this repertoire, you would imagine, would pose quite the level of technical challenge set by the études, never mind that Lortie is touring the lot of them in recital – a feat described by a wag at the Washington Post as ‘equivalent in its physical demands and terrifying exposure to running a marathon and posing for a Vanity Fair cover shoot on the same day’.

Incredibly, Lortie approached the recording of Plushmusic’s forthcoming film with a certain equanimity. The setting helped. The brand-new Britten Studio – cobbled together from a kiln, a dovecote and a ruined granary – is a 340-seat haven of golden wood, old brick and concrete, and boasts an acoustic ideally suited to Louis Lortie’s approach on the exceptionally sensitive and balanced Fazioli piano. The engineer helped: it turned out that Chandos’s Peter Newble has known Louis Lortie for years. When push came to shove, though, it was up to Lortie to help himself: ‘I’m fortunate in that I learned the études early in my life,’ he explains. ‘The built-in technique that I learned from this music is something to be treasured.’

Lortie’s technical surety gives him the confidence not to prejudge the changes 20 years have wrought on his style. ‘I would rather trust that the interval has given me a conscience,’ he laughs. ‘A conscience, I mean, concerning style. When you’re young you’re playing so much repertoire that you confuse everything a little bit: your Brahms has a little bit of Chopin in it, and your Schumann has a little bit of Beethoven. If I’ve been doing my job, what I play now should be fresher, purer. Of course, the best compliment a pianist could ever get is ‘I thought Chopin was playing’. But one has to be realistic. Liszt himself said, I can imitate anyone, but Chopin - that is impossible.’

Rather than strive to achieve an impossible ideal (he has said, on another occasion, ‘As we get older we can start to get very set in our ways – it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we are the ones who always know better’) Lortie prefers to explore the challenge the études set a body in constant transition. ‘Chopin started writing them around 18, 19 years of age, and finished them in his early twenties. Keeping them fresh is a challenge, of course, but that’s only the beginning. The études confront you with the way your own body is changing and evolving. And, yes, you have to confront your own decay.’

Louis Lortie plays the complete Chopin études at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, 23 November 2009.
Following the concert, Plushmusic releases Louis Lortie’s Aldeburgh recital in HD video and audio, along with a video interview of Louis Lortie in conversation with Ivan Hewett of the Telegraph.

Louis Lortie interview with Ivan Hewett

Ahead of Louis Lortie’s concert in London this Monday, the pianist discusses the challenge of performing Chopin’s fiendishly difficult etudes in an interview for the Telegraph.

Louis Lortie brings Chopin and a Fazioli to the QEH

Monday’s recital by Louis Lortie at the Queen Elizabeth Hall promises to bring a bell-like clarity to even the most fiendish of Fryderyk Chopin’s 27 études.

Never mind, for the moment, the French-Canadian pianist’s global reputation; never mind his early induction to Chopin, or his previous recordings. (We’ll come on to all of that in subsequent posts) Let’s kick off this discussion, instead, with his not inconsiderable choice of piano.

Lortie’s by no means the first to bring a Fazioli to the South Bank (Angela Hewitt’s love of the upstart furniture-maker’s painstakingly handbuilt instruments was getting the more staid reviewers’ backs up in 2006). Still, the marriage of Lortie, Chopin and Fazioli promises to further entrench the reputation of the world’s most expensive piano (about $2,300 per key, since you were wondering – the bench is extra).

Louis Lortie’s enthusiasm has done the Venetian workshop sterling service in interview: he told one TV station “the action is so fluid, so even, it’s almost like a massage for the pianist”. Much more important, Lortie has put his money where his mouth is in both the recording studio and the concert hall. His recent recording of Chopin’s Etudes – a poignant return to the recording territory of his youth – sold 50,000 copies. A couple of months ago Plushmusic, in association with Chandos, was given the chance to take over the brand-new Britten Studio at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh, to record and film Lortie performing Chopin’s ground-breaking studies. Monday’s recital of them at the QEH’s International Piano Series is the first concert in Lortie’s world tour. All three performances were or will be assayed on a Fazioli. A minor point, you might think – until you witness for yourself the alchemical marriage of Lortie and the Fazioli mechanism.

“It’s a peculiar piano,” piano technician Oliver Esmonde-White, told the Montreal Gazette. “It’s like a really good sound system, where you hear the warts and all. The touch makes a huge difference. It shows up all kinds of things.” Cheap comparisons between Fazioli and Ferrari litter the piano maker’s press cuttings file. Cheap as it is, though, the comparison does make a sort of sense: Faziolis are as unforgiving as any high-performance machine. How else can they reveal a great player’s subtlest intentions? With September’s Snape Maltings recordings behind us, we’re confident that Monday’s concert will be a revelation.

Dilettante’s Digital Composer-in-residence Competition

Matt and Kat from Plushmusic joined Dilettante for the live finale of a groundbreaking new contest.

Composers from around the world submitted entries in a quest to clinch the first year long ‘digital residency’. Three finalists were picked by a team of judges before the winner was elected by a global public through the classical music hub.

Last night the virtual community came together in person at Wilton’s Music Hall to hear the cracking London Sinfonietta musicians perform an impressive programme of finalists’ entries, alongside works which have inspired them.

Charles Hazlewood was on hand to announce the winner - NYC based composer and percussionist David T Little for 1986, a string quartet based on the tune ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’.

The general consensus was that all three composers had submitted fantastic pieces, each highly individual and a winner in their own right. Those who questioned why holding a live event was necessary for a digital competition were silenced as the difference between hearing the pieces online and seeing them live became clear. To hear the inspiration behind the compositions (including some of the most assailing flute playing we had ever heard in Jonathan Harvey’s The Riot) showed just how mature the competitor’s entries were.

To hear all finalists’ pieces and discover more visit the the Digital Composer in Residence page.

And be sure to catch this remarkable competition in 2010!

The Leopold Trio visit Loughborough University on Wednesday, November 4, playing at the Cope Auditorium http://bit.ly/1dYJTq. Since forming in 1991, the ensemble – Isabelle van Keulen (violin), Lawrence Power (viola) and Kate Gould (cello) – has become firmly established at the forefront of the international chamber music scene. Look out for Plushmusic’s forthcoming release of their Beethoven trios.

Matthew Barley performs for charity

with BRIT-winner Alison Balsom and others, as War Child hosts a ‘classical meets contemporary’ evening at London’s Bloomsbury Ballroom on 28 November 2009. Colin Currie, Barry Douglas and Pekka Kuusisto are performing, while theop artists confirmed so far include Just Jack and Fyfe Dangerfield, front man of Brit and Mercury nominated Guillemots.

Doors open: 7pm
Drinks Reception: 7.30pm-8.30pm
Show starts: 8.30pm
Ticket price: £50 
Visit http://www.warchild.org.uk/

This is where it all began…

The church in Plush, Dorset.

MJ

The Virtual Cellist - world firsts

Hats off to Matthew Barley and the team for the staggering ‘Virtual Cellist’ at Kings Place last week. People tuned in to watch the live stream from all over the world - US, Africa, NZ, Bristol - and the plaudits have been flowing.

This performance had several firsts - the first time that motion capture was used in a live concert, the first live-streaming from Kings Place, the first live-streaming of a concert to Iphone, and world premieres of pieces by Nitin Sawhney and Duncan Bridgeman!

Selected clips will be up soon for you to enjoy. In the meantime Matthew’s website will keep you updated with his next moves and projects.