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CD
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HVALUR 042CD
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Manchester Collective announce the release of their second full-length album, Shades. Following their debut The Centre Is Everywhere in 2021 (HVALUR 038LP), Shades is available on CD. Featuring Edmund Finnis's first and second string quartets -- the latter commissioned and premiered by Manchester Collective -- Shades marks the next chapter of the Collective's ongoing collaboration with the British composer. Composer Edmund Finnis: "'String Quartet No. 2' (2021) begins and ends with musical ideas that were in the back of my mind in some form or other since my teens. In the process of moving house during 2020, I rediscovered some old minidiscs containing rough demo recordings I'd made nearly two decades before. At that point I didn't yet know how to realize these ideas, but listening back much later I found the seeds of what has now developed into the two outer movements of the piece. Between them come the flowing interwoven patterns of the second movement and the slow third movement, which is a lament. The piece is dedicated to my friends Rakhi Singh and Adam Szabo from Manchester Collective. It has been a joy and an inspiration for me to be able to build such a close and fruitful musical relationship with the musicians of Manchester Collective over the last few years. Something of their spirit fed into the writing of this piece. I wrote the penultimate movement of 'String Quartet No. 1' (2018) first. It is a reflection on William Byrd's setting of the fifth century hymn 'Christe, qui lux es et dies'. That ancient melody is a prayer for Light within the darkness of night. The falling and rising contours within it became integral to my work on the remaining four movements of the quartet, as did the mental image of the setting and rising of the sun. I think of these two quartets as some of the most personal and intimate pieces I have written. They are outcomes of my enduring need to communicate something that I'm incapable of fully expressing with words. I would if I could. I know that it has something to do with love." Manchester Collective's relationship with Edmund Finnis has been developing over a number of years -- Finnis's piece The Centre Is Everywhere was at the heart of the Collective's debut album and their first appearance at the BBC Proms. The musical partnership continues later in 2022 in This Savage Parade (June 16-24) featuring the world premiere of a new song cycle by Finnis set to the words of British poet Alice Oswald.
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LP
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HVALUR 038LP
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The Centre Is Everywhere is the Manchester Collective's first album. They created it in rather extraordinary circumstances, at a time when we were all slowly sinking into the banal dystopia of a pandemic-stricken world. Their lives, it felt, had slowed to a crawl. Normally the group are fueled by their audiences, but touring was off the menu. So, they made this record. In such an uncertain time, the group wanted to play music that they loved. They ended up with a set of work written over a 120-year period -- weightless and transcendent new music alongside Schoenberg's anguished fin de siècle storytelling. Edmund Finnis's work in particular (the titular "The Centre Is Everywhere") is important to them. He's a friend and a colleague of the groups, and it's been a profound experience for them to live with this piece, to tour it, and to make the first ever recording. Somehow in the writing of it, Edmund seems to have prefigured the lack of certainty that has been one of the defining characteristics of this period. His music spins freely through time and space, wraithlike and beautiful. Whilst recording both "Company" by Philip Glass and "Transfigured Night" by Arnold Schoenberg, the group found themselves drawn to a pervading sense of wildness and nature. The hypnotic rise and fall of the rhythms and textures in Glass's quartet (presented here in an arrangement for string orchestra) feel quite separate to industrial, man-made structures and forms. Like Edmund's work, these short movements feel out of time and cyclical, like eternally repeating tides or moon-phases. Schoenberg's masterpiece for string sextet opens on a moonlit forest scene, two lovers venturing through a bare, cold grove. The group tried to create a recording that paints the violent contrasts of this piece as vividly as possible, from the claustrophobic confessions that open the work through to the gleaming sound world of the second half. As the piece closes, the group's wooden, earthbound instruments seem to have been transmuted by the glamor and glow of Schoenberg's music. Clear vinyl.
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