Another Timbre TimHarrisonbre
Ensemble Grizzana Concert at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Thanks to everybody who came to hear Ensemble Grizzana play two beautiful new works by Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey. The concert was presented twice, first at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2017, then again at a special Music We’d Like To Hear concert in London in March 2018.
There were three very positive reviews of the Huddersfield concert, which you can read
here (the Financial Times), here (The Spectator), and here (5:4 blog)
Here are some photographs of Ensemble Grizzana rehearsing at St Paul’s Hall, where the Huddersfield took place.
Thanks to Faith Wilson at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and to Graham Hardy, who took the photographs.
Wire review of February 2024 batch of releases
The profile of the Another Timbre label has developed so consistently over the past decade that there seems to be a well defined concept underpinning the catalogue. Simon Reynell, its curator, may be reluctant to formulate such a statement of intent, or so narrowly to define the label’s orientation, but the identity of Another Timbre is projected not only through the elegant uniformity and typographic precision of its folded card sleeves, but also from the music within, which tends to be quiet, subtle and gradual, inclined to glow rather than glare.
Nonetheless, Another Timbre invariably manages to deliver surprises and revelations within those undemonstrative parameters. This latest batch of releases all exhibit those anticipated qualities of unhurried exposition and finely nuanced restraint, yet the musical content is strikingly varied. Performances are almost exclusively by members of Apartment House, that exciting and resourceful ensemble which contributes so much to Reynell’s project.
The selection of five small group compositions by New Yorker Paul Paccione date mostly from the 1980’s, but their diagrammatic clarity seems to grant them a timeless quality. A Paccione string trio, quartet for violins or duo for flutes may seem on paper to be an exercise in minimalist frugality, but as these realisations illustrate so well, his scores can generate an aura of luminosity, and the sensuousness of his music’s harmonic motion far transcends its structural geometry.
Marco Baldini’s chamber music is often harmonically redolent of Baroque and Renaissance antecedents. A legacy of spacious architecture, slowly evolving patterns and stained-glass echoes are filtered through the Florentine composer’s contemporary sensibility, recollections of formative musical experiences, refreshed and energised by his own imagination.
The work of Boston based Nomi Epstein is, on the other hand, almost calligraphic in nature, with intersections of curving glissandi, faint traceries of undulating lines and wispy glimpses of fleeting gestures. Epstein’s scores embrace indeterminacy, yet these three delicately poised pieces share an austere, fragile beauty that clearly arises from her cohesive and firmly coordinated compositional orientation.
The music of Londoner Paul Newland is more vibrantly embodied, more openly receptive and involving. Starting with Monotonous Forest, scored for piano, cello, vibraphone and cowbells, each of these five pieces unfolds like a sonic meditation on the terms of continuity and change, of being in place and setting in motion. Listening to Newland’s music is not a detached activity, but an acceptance of the gentle grip of its structural tensions, and willing entry into an exhilarating condition of interdependence.
Julian Cowley, The Wire, May 2024
Price Reductions on early Another Timbre CDs
We have substantially reduced the cost of the early Another Timbre CD and CDR releases. From now on releases from the first four years of the label’s existence are available for only £5 (CDs) and £4 (CDRs). This applies to CDs that were released in jewelcase covers, at01 to at46. For more details, go here
Last Copies of CDs…..
TheWandelweiser undso weiter box set and several other CDs have recently sold out. Others are now running low: we have just 3 copies left of Isaiah Ceccarelli’s excellent disc ‘Bow’ and less than 20 copies left of other albums below. If you want a CD copy, please order quickly. You can buy downloads of CDs that have sold out on our Bandcamp page here
