Description
Sadie Harrison's new album Return of the Nightingales features eight solo piano works composed between 2013-2017. The album is a celebration of four pianists with whom Sadie has collaborated extensively over the past decade - Philippa Harrison, Duncan Honeybourne, Ian Pace and Renée Reznek. The majority of the pieces were premiered by these pianists and the disc is a showcase not just of Sadie's music but also of each individual performer - from the hyper-virtuosity of Ian Pace in the title work to the quirky vivacity of Philippa Harrison in Four Jazz Portraits, from Renée Reznek's highly coloured interpretation of Par-feshani-ye 'Eshq to Duncan Honeybourne's sumptuously expressive renditions of Shadows and Lunae. As such, the disc offers a unique insight into a range of contemporary piano performances, an unusual contribution where the emphasis is as much on the players as the composer herself.
Sadie's piano works are performed and broadcast all over the world and are part of the core repertoire of many international pianists. Her music is joyfully multi-referential acknowledging Bartok, Berg, Chopin, Debussy and jazz greats such as Evans, Waller and Monk. Sadie's passion for the cultures of Persia and Afghanistan has also found expression in pieces which weave traditional folk music into starkly modernist pieces, finding news means to celebrate the diversity of musical languages across continents and centuries. The range of references in these works - boogie-woogie to 1920's Hollywood film scores, machine-gun rattle to British folksongs, Methodist hymns to an Afghan singer's chant - are threaded together by birdsong which features in almost every work on the disc, an eternal music around which the pieces revolve.
'Extraordinary power and clarity - sensitive and ardent' Tempo (2016)
Sadie was born in 1965 in Adelaide, Australia. Now based in Dorset, she works as a freelance composer across the UK and abroad. Her music has been performed internationally by some of the world's top musicians with numerous radio and television broadcasts. Several CDs of her music have been released to critical acclaim. Her works are published by UYMP, ABRSM and Recital Music.
Sadie is currently Composer-in-Residence with the American ensemble Cuatro Puntos and the first Composer-in-Residence with the Keunstler Bei Wu Sculpture Park, Wessenberg, Germany, a post supported by an Arts Council England International Development Grant and a PRSF Composers' Fund award.