Composers
Barney Byron - plays drums, bass, guitar and keyboards in various rock bands as well as writing songs and composing orchestral music. He teaches and publishes music professionally. Al Rakis - Meaning The Dancer, Al Rakis was named after a star in the northern constellation of Draco. In 2005 Al Rakis won the ‘best quartet’ and ‘overall piece of the year’ prize in an international competition. Meditation is a deliberately simple and sparse piece, and was composed for this CD. It was written almost entirely over the course of an evening in the old fashioned way with a piano and manuscript paper.
Mikala Bromley is a composer, flautist and teacher of music. She has achieved performances of her work by various respected ensembles and performers, including the BBC Singers and mezzo-soprano Sarah Walker. She studied composition with Alan Bullard, Simon Bainbridge and Robert Saxton. Asperity was composed specifically for this recording project.
David Tompkins has been composing for 20 years, covering a variety of genres. This piece (originally scored for strings) is from his latest albumRestoration Works, the result of his recent work with Faryl Smith, and is primarily inspired by the classic OMD album Architecture & Morality.
John F Wilson's pieces are from a set of variations for piano written 'in the styles of the masters' on the theme of 'Three Blind Mice'. The composers represented are Dvorak and Debussy, but they are just fun pieces based on aspects of those composers. They were written in various countries as a break from legal work.”
Frank Jordan is a bassoonist, arranger and composer. He has performed professionally with ensembles in the United States, Canada and the UK and currently performs with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra and Northamptonshire Orchestral Winds. Jocosity Blues was composed in 2008 for inclusion in this CD and is dedicated to the composer's partner, Danny Clement.
David Haddon. As the title indicates 'scherzo' jest, is a fun piece, not to be taken seriously. It begins in a boisterous manner leading to a cheeky tune played on flute, followed by clarinet. A quieter, more sedate section follows, which the flute tries to disrupt by playing off-beat. This leads to a flowing melody on horn, the other instruments responding by blowing 'musical raspberries'. After a return to the original cheeky tune the piece ends with exuberant high spirits.
Patricia Evans studied piano at the Leschetisky School, with special study of Russian music, later with Peterkatin. Compositional advice also came from Penderecki. A performing/lecturing career took her to major UK and European Festivals, often lecturing on new works. Compositions are mainly solo piano, choral, spoken voice/piano, and recorders, plus published educational music, and works using letters in people's names.
Mark Beaumont. Both pieces on this CD (Resonances and Augmentations) are based on a century old desire to produce colour in sound. The quintet is based around two scales with augmented properties and limited transpositions, a term used by the Olivier Messiaen, who would have been 100 at the end of 2008. In 'Resonances' the compositional language of Messiaen feature even more prominently with the independance of rhythm to pitch in repeated cycles (isorhythms) producing an unfocused effect. The pitch material is minimal and woven into difference nuances for the first 5/6ths of the piece while the end powerfully uses Messiaen's third mode (from scale of semitone-tone-semitone repeated).
Philip J Bricher mainly specializes as a piano/organist, and is a music graduate from Northampton. Philip likes to explore artistic (and cultural) diversity in music, demonstrated in Trumpeter on a Mountaintop. This project’s Northamptonshire Portrait is less modernistic, drawing on traditional folksong, inspired by Matt Keen and Lee Dunleavy.
