Joanna Bailie: Artificial Environments
Release Date: 27 September 2019
Label: NMC Recordings
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 5023363025225
Genres: Classical Chamber Music
Description
The chamber works on this portrait album, the latest in our Debut Discs series, demonstrate Joanna Bailie's distinct and powerful skill of mixing field recordings and other found audio material alongside partial transcriptions, which are played simultaneously on acoustic instruments. The effect is otherworldly and immersive.
In the three-part Symphony-Street-Souvenir Bailie pays homage to the Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925-2011). She borrows and twists one of Clementi's compositional techniques, and introduces some of his musical obsessions. 'Symphony' uses the opening of the C minor symphony of Brahms, one of Clementi's favourite composers; 'Street', a Copenhagen carillon (with accompanying ambient street sounds); and 'Souvenir' a music box. Over these a mixed chamber ensemble interweaves subtle layers and slow glissandi.
Trains features fragments of music on solo cello over a textural bed of radically slowed down audio material. In Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5 you hear the composer's voice, like a futuristic tour guide in a science fiction world with recorded sounds captured in locations around Europe – the hills of Umbria, Copenhagen, Malmö, London and Brussels and in Artificial Environments No. 8 the solo piano is paired with an urban soundscape, recorded whilst walking up and down a queue of tourists waiting to enter Notre Dame in Paris.
Tracklisting
Lisa Illean, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, GBSR Duo, Juliet Fraser, Explore Ensemble
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Davis
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, London Sinfonietta, Ryan Wigglesworth, Huw Watkins
Richard Baker
Mark Padmore, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta
Zubin Kanga
Thomas Simaku, soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain
Onyx Brass
Stephane Tetreault; Olivier Hebert-Bouchard
Torleif Thedeen (cello) & Marianna Shirinyan (piano)
Magnus Boye Hansen, Mathias Halvorsen
Rafael Catala, Musica Iberica
Carlotta Malquori, Andrea D'Amato
Ensemble La Francaise
Christoph Croise; Andrey Baranov; Alexander Panfilov
Trio Parnassus
