“Portrait is a string of recordings presenting contemporary composers with a unique musical signature. Ludovico Einaudi is one of them. A music that captivates the listener, a sonic landscape to discover!” Angèle Dubeau. Driven by the works of this grand and prolific Italian composer, the internationally renowned violinist shares once again her passion with the excellent musicians of her string orchestra, La Pietà. Angèle Dubeau offers a unique revisit to Ludovico Einaudi’s music, “changing its texture, rethinking its character, while bringing a new sonic dimension.” After three critically acclaimed albums in the Portrait series devoted to Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and John Adams, Angèle Dubeau delves into another distinctive minimalist universe. She chose 13 works arranged by François Vallières and herself that put in light the multiple facets of the popular composer. His refined and diverse works are present on the soundtracks of various celebrated movies such as Mommy (2014) by Xavier Dolan, Untouchables (2011) by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, as well as This is England (2006) by Shane Meadows.

"This compact disc presents all the studio recordings that remain from a time when, as a twenty-five year old champion of the avant-garde, I had to seek for every possible occasion of playing the new works of our composers. In those days, they were hounded and ripped apart by ideological critics; now they are recognized as the masters of new music. Audiences today need to realize with how much excitement and trust people discovered and took over the new currents seeping in from Europe through the Iron Curtain. These works represent and symbolize a marvelous epoch of friendship, a time when we came to know new horizons and discovered ourselves in the Soviet Union's huge, heterogeneous spaces." (Alexei Lubimov. May 2003)

Over a period of five years, Swiss directors Norbert Wiedmer and Peter Guyer documented the activity of legendary producer Manfred Eicher, the founder and driving force behind ECM Records, whose advocacy of progressive jazz and of classical composers like Arvo Pärt, Meredith Monk, Valentin Silvestrov, and György Kurtág changed the landscape of contemporary music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The film Sounds and Silence: Travels with Manfred Eicher was released in 2009 and this 2011 soundtrack album is made up largely of tracks taken from previously released ECM albums that Eicher produced, some from as early as 1980. Most of the pieces are low-key and understated and feature chamber ensembles, although there are several piano tracks and several featuring orchestra or chorus. The album has a mix of selections from ECM's classical and jazz repertoire, and from the label's specialty, the many pieces that lie somewhere in between the two.

The title of ECM's release of works by three composers born in the former Soviet Union perfectly captures the mood of the CD – it is truly mysterious. Although more than half a century separates the first of these pieces from the most recent, they share a sense of otherness that defies easy explanation. The pieces are not so much mysterious in the sense of being eerie (although there are several moments that might raise the hairs on the back of your neck if you were listening alone in the dark); they are unsettling because they raise more questions than they answer.

Estonian composer Helena Tulve (born 1972) is one of the brightest musical lights to emerge around the turn of the millennium. The first collection of her work was a remarkable debut, and its centerpiece, the massive Sula, deserves to be counted among the most monumental and original orchestral works of the first decade of the 21st century. While none of the pieces on this album quite match the impact of that piece, they each reveal a very fine musical intelligence and imagination and an ability to evoke a sense of the unpredictable, primordial processes of nature, particularly in frozen and desolate landscapes. Her works unfold with an organic logic that defies easy analysis but that feels inexorable and true. Each of these pieces lasts about 10 minutes. À travers, for chamber ensemble, and abysses, for flutes and chamber ensemble, do not use large forces, but both conjure up a sense of immense space, and like Sula, sound very, very cold. Much the same is true of Lijnen, which adds voice to the ensemble with aphoristic texts by Belgian poet Roland Jooris that confirm the tone of nature's icy and impersonal power that is evident in the music.

Recorded by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and various soloists and ensembles in churches in Tallinn as well as the Estonian Concert Hall, the five compositions heard on Arboles lloran por lluvia (Trees cry for rain) give deeper insight into the unique sound-world of Estonian composer Helena Tulve, into music that is nourished by both contemporary and ancient currents. Tulve draws upon a wide-range of inspirational sources. She explores the raw fabric of sound and the nature of timbre in both analytical and instinctive ways, in compositions that are unmistakably her own, yet her work is inclusive - here incorporating aspects of Gregorian chant, melody from Yemenite Jewish tradition, and texts from Sufi, Sephardic and Christian mystic poetry. Reyah hadas 'ala (The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises) unites the ensemble of the Gregorian chant and the early music instruments. This is the only work in which Tulve has used a pre-existing melody, a song of the Yemenite Jews. Extinction des choses vues (The Extinction of the Things Seen) is an orchestral piece in which the musical ideas are derived from a text by the Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau called Extase blanche (White Ecstasy).

Nonesuch Records releases The Art of Instrumentation: Homage to Glenn Gould, by violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra, on September 25, 2012, which would have been Gould’s 80th birthday. The album comprises 11 pieces and arrangements by contemporary composers that quote from or are inspired by works, mostly by Bach, that Gould famously recorded during his career; two Arnold Schoenberg pieces also are drawn upon in one piece.

ECM’s ongoing series of recordings with the Munich Chamber Orchestra continues with an intriguing album of new and recent pieces by Japan’s leading composer Toshio Hosokawa. Amongst the compositions are Sakura für Otto Tomek and Cloud and Light, both written in 2008, and Ceremonial Dance (2000). These 21st century pieces are brought together with Landscape V (originally from 1993 and for string quartet, meanwhile expanded into an orchestral version). Three of these feature the shô, a traditional Japanese instrument played by its leading exponent, Mayumi Miyata. Born in Hiroshima in 1955, Hosokawa was initially inspired by Western art music from Schubert to Schoenberg. He went to Germany in the 1970s to study with Isang Yun and Klaus Huber. As he strengthened his standing in European avant-garde he also put down deeper roots in Japanese traditional music. His work increasingly suggests a dialogue between East and West, between the archaic and modern, between ceremonial music and concert music.

This programme brings together composers who, for the most part, were compelled to flee their homeland. In 1920, Ivan Wyschnegradsky took refuge in Paris, where he wrote for a quarter-tone piano at a time when, in Russia, the slightest dissonance was considered a political provocation. Andrzej Panufnik left his native Poland in 1954. Alfred Schnittke settled in Hamburg in 1990, eight years before his death, having spent most of his life in the Soviet Union. Although Schubert never moved away from Vienna, the pain and solitude of his inner exile are palpable in his music. Finally, the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe emigrated on account of the First World War and it was in the United States, in 1917, that he wrote the melancholy musical poem recorded here, which he called Exil! Is exile nothing but pain and isolation, or also a source of inspiration which, with music, expresses what words cannot say, acting as the ultimate refuge?

Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem is an extremely prestigious project, the result of a commission from major cultural institutions in the US, UK, and Europe. This world premiere recording features a new composition by the legendary, Grammy-nominated musician, who has collaborated with the who's who of the pop music world. With narration by Meryl Streep.

This debut album of the young Trio Contrasti takes us on a journey through time with a mosaic of sounds in which epochs and cultures enter into dialogue. Romanticism gave the art world a new paradigm of thought, when music took the leading position among the arts and the freedom of formal design, initiated by the content, unfolded. The quest for national self-identification and the rapid development of national styles in art began. Romanticism opened the way for a dialogue between epochs and cultures that continued into the 20th century. Three works that have no direct connection to each other nevertheless share a common context. When viewed through the prism of a Romantic paradigm, they can be seen as milestones on the path through epochs and cultures.

For it's first recording for BIS Records, the Marmen Quartet tackles three major works from the twentieth-century string quartet literature. The two quartets by Gyorgy Ligeti belong to two different periods in the composer's output. Written before Ligeti left Hungary and emigrated to the West, the First, subtitled 'Metamorphoses nocturnes', represents the peak of his 'Hungarian' period. Regarded as a virtuoso exercise, the work reveals the influences of Bela Bartok, particularly from his Third and Fourth Quartets.

This Deutsche Grammophon release marks the debut of the pianist Yunchan Lim, who won the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (he was the second winner in a row from South Korea) and has been called classical music's answer to K-pop. In several ways, he has the right kind of unconventional, unassuming attitude to stand out from the crowd, beginning with that shown by this album itself. Where anyone else would have issued a solo album or, at the least, an album of high-profile concertos with a major orchestra, Lim chooses a live performance with a regional South Korean orchestra on an album with several wholly orchestral pieces. (This, of course, makes him stand out all the more.)

The collection includes piano works composed over the past 30 years from "Piano Media" (1972) to "Piano Poem" (2003), selected by composer Toshi Ichiyanagi himself, a master pianist who has earned the composer's great trust. Ami Fujiwara performs with deep understanding and empathy various types of music, from difficult pieces that push the pianist to his or her technical limits to pieces that focus on issues of expression, such as poetry readings. Please listen to these contemporary masterpieces by a virtuoso pianist who has earned the composer's great trust.

Emmanuel Pahud and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande begin this new album of compositions by Éric Montalbetti with his Flute Concerto Memento vivere, conceived in one movement as an ode to breath and life. Duncan Ward and the Gürzenich Orchester Köln have recorded the final and definitive version of Montalbetti’s Ouverture philharmonique, a mini-concerto for symphony orchestra that invites the listener to immerse themselves into the heart of each of the orchestra's sections, and to revel in the work’s multiple combinations of timbres. Finally, Kazuki Yamada and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo perform the composer’s great symphonic fantasy Éclair physionomique, inspired by Paul Klee’s fascinating painting Physiognomischer Blitz, a self-portrait of the artist illuminated by a flash of lightning. Each of these pieces unfolds like an extensive daydream, a journey across interior landscapes that the composer would like to share with the listener.