Karel Janovicky, John Turner, Lesley-Jane Rogers, Joan Taylor & The Manchester Camerata Ensemble
Release Date: 16 March 2018
Label: Prima Facie
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 0607128998761
Genres: Classical Contemporary Classical
Description
'Rainsongs' is a collection of premiere recordings by Karel Janovicky featuring Lesley Jane Rogers (soprano), John Turner one of the world's leading recorder players and Joan Taylor (piano).
The album features the song cycle 'Rainsongs', settings of poems by George Szirtes which were written in 2010 in memory of the composer Matyas Seiber. A second song cycle, 'Passages of Flight', comprises five poems which were chosen by their author Richard Robbins himself out of some two hundred he had written under the title 'Passages of Flight'. The rest of the programme features instrumental works by Janovicky which are regularly played by performers worldwide.
Karel Janovický was born in 1930 in the west-Bohemian town of Pilsen (Plzen) in the then Czechoslovakia. In 1949 he left the country for Germany and a year later came to England to study and eventually to settle. He received a Master of Music degree from the Royal College of Music and had composition lessons with Matyas Seiber. In 1953 he was awarded the Dutch Gaudeamus Foundation prize and in 1957 won the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra 'Garland for Shakespeare' competition with his Variations on a theme of Robert Johnson, Op.17, premiered subsequently by the Bournemouth S.O. under Sir Charles Groves. In 1964 he took the post of producer in the BBC Gramophone Department and three year later moved to the BBC World Service where for the last ten years before retirement he directed the Czechoslovak Service. Throughout his career he continued to compose, much of it chamber music but also a one-act opera The Utmost Sail on a sci-fi subject. He also built up a reputation for coaching choirs, singers and opera in the Czech vocal repertoire. As a publicist he has written and broadcast on a number of related subjects and translated and edited Jaroslav Vogel's biography of Janácek.
Tracklisting
Xuefei Yang, Johannes Moser, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Or
Kenneth Hamilton
Michael Cretu
Laura Serra
Vladimir Miller, Neil Latchman, Keri Farish
Terence Charlston, Julian Perkins
John Turner & Neil Smith
I Solisti Di Londra & Aleksander Szram
Gavin Bryars
Nikolaus Heyduck
Ostrava New Orchestra, Owen Underhill, Ostravska Banda, Petr Kotik, Elision Ensemble, Arditti Quartet, Switch~ Ensemble, Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Gavin Bryars
Ilse Eerens, Tomoko Kasai, Mayumi Miyata, Masanori Oishi, Saori Oya, Naoko Yoshino
L'Itineraire, Leo Margue
Hashtag Ensemble
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Davis
