Description
On 30 October 2026, NMC Recordings will release Daniel Kidane: FAST/SLOW, the composer's debut portrait album bringing together six works written between 2016 and 2025. Featuring performances by the BBC Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Present Music, BBC Singers, the Carducci Quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra under conductors including Sir Simon Rattle and Andrew Gourlay, the album presents one of Britain's most compelling compositional voices. Across these works, the opposing forces of speed and stillness become a lens through which Kidane explores memory, grief, transformation and renewal. Sirens is a dazzling orchestral showpiece that channels the energy of Manchester nightlife through glittering textures and a fearless fusion of orchestral writing with the pulse of jungle, dubstep and R&B. Be Still offffers a personal elegy whose trembling string textures create extraordinary emotional tension, revealing movement and life within apparent stillness. In Winged, the hypnotic choreography of starling murmurations inspires music of great flfluidity scored for electric guitar and strings. Kidane set a deeply moving text by poet Simon Armitage to music for The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, illuminating the strangeness of everyday life during Covid-19. Quatre Tableaux is a luminous string quartet inspired by the changing light of Florence, unfolding as four vividly coloured musical "paintings" that revel in the expressive possibilities of the ensemble. Finally, Sun Poem presents a radiant meditation on "endings and beginnings", inspired by the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and the death of Kidane's father and birth of his son. With over thirty published works now to his name, FAST/SLOW offffers the fifirst opportunity to hear six defifining works together, providing a portrait of Kidane's artistic journey to date and a glimpse of a creative path that will surely continue to surprise and compel.
