Michael Nyman, Hilary Summer Nyman & Sarah Leanard - Nyman: Six Celan Songs / The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2006)

Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are two new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter. Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper. Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The songs, individually and collectively, express both the horror, the emptiness of the writer in exile and are cast in a musical language which attempts to 'reinvent' an imaginary emotional world related to the Romanian background in 1920s Bukovina, where Celan was born. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, unlike the Six Celan Songs, deals directly with a war situation – an 18-month- old Kosovan boy left for dead during the Kosovo war, found and re-named by the Serbs and 6 months later reunited with his parents. It is the most recent in Nyman's series of collaborations with visual artists, in this case the American feminist/conceptualist Mary Kelly. Kelly provided the composer with a complex text in a simple ballad form which Nyman brilliantly subverts in his continuous 18-minute piece, written for Sarah Leonard and the Nyman Quartet and first performed surrounded by Kelly's visual representation of the text in the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2001.

Personnel:
Michael Nyman, conductor
Gabrielle Lester, violin
Catherine Thompson, violin
Kate Musker, viola
Tony Hinnigan, cello
Nick Cooper, cello
Chris Laurence, double bass
Martin Elliott, bass guitar
David Roach, soprano and alto saxophones
Simon Haram, soprano and alto saxophones
Robert Buckland, soprano and alto saxophones
Andrew Findo[n], baritone saxophone, flute, piccolo
Andrew Sparling, bass clarinet
Steve Sidwell, trumpet
Nigel Barr, bass trombone, euphonium
David Arch, piano
Hilary Summers, contralto
Sarah Leonard, soprano
Produced by Michael Nyman
Recorded, mixed and edited by Austin Ince
Assistant engineer (Six Celan Songs): James Stone
Assistant engineer (The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi): Matthew Bartram
Mixed at Abbey Road Studios 26 and 27 March 2006
Assistant engineer: Robert Houston
Mastered by Peter Mew at Abbey Road Studios

Tracklist:
1. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Chanson einer Dame im Schatten (07:13)
2. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Es war Erde in ihnen (04:59)
3. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Psalm (03:44)
4. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Corona (07:10)
5. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Nächtlich Geschürzt (06:49)
6. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – Blume (06:12)
7. Michael Nyman, Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers & Sarah Leanard – The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (17:45)