SPONSORED: CD Spotlight. Masterful Handling - Volume 3 of James Brawn's Beethoven, praised by Andrew Schartmann.
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SPONSORED: CD Spotlight. Most Remarkable - Jamaican pianist Orrett Rhoden, heard by Bill Newman.
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VIDEO PODCAST: Slava Ukraini! - recorded on the day Europe woke up to the news that Vladimir Putin's Russian forces had invaded Ukraine. Also features Caitríona O'Leary and Eric Fraad discussing their new film Island of Saints, and pays tribute to Joseph Horovitz, Malcolm Troup and Maria Nockin.
Andrew Smith, born in Liverpool in 1970, is a British-Norwegian composer with a growing international reputation for choral and vocal music that links tradition with a contemporary idiom. In the words of Alexandra Coghlan, '... Smith's compositions incorporate medieval textures and chant, which are reflected and inflected through [his] own contemporary idiom, blurring the modal clarity of plainchant with vivid cluster-chords and dissenting moments of chromatic or dissonant color. The effect is at once familiar and unsettling in its strangeness - a distorted and original viewpoint on the past.'
Smith read Music and English at Oslo University. His composing, a hobby since the age of eight, began in earnest in the late 1990s when he wrote a piece for Norway's newly-formed Trio Mediaeval. The subsequent recording of this and other music for the trio brought Andrew to the attention of the American audience and led the way to collaborations with American groups such as New York Polyphony - two of whose discs, to which Andrew contributed pieces, were nominated for Grammy awards - and The Girl Choristers of Washington National Cathedral, as well as many performances by American ensembles.
Andrew Smith's Requiem was first performed in 2012 and was released on CD in December 2018 on the Norwegian record label 2L.
Profile. Big Roles - Ron Bierman talks to American soprano Michelle Bradley