Ruby Hughes, Manchester Collective – End of My Days (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:06:09 minutes | 2,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The inspiration for this album came about from Ruby Hughes’ first collaboration with the Manchester Collective in the spring of 2020. During the first Covid lockdown, they built the programme of this recital for the purpose of touring the UK and uplifting their audiences at a time when we were all being confronted by challenging notions of mortality and isolation. As artists, they asked themselves what music might attend to the prevailing concerns of this time. Their answers came in the form of this offering. The title of this album, End of My Days, comes from Errollyn Wallen’s song; a resounding celebration of life that embraces death without regret or sadness but with great verve and acceptance. The other songs, each in its own way, evoke silence and separation, but also love and hope and even the reassurance that we will return whence we came and light shall lift us into eternity. The concluding song, Deborah Pritchard’s Peace, is a message of hope, willingly received as the world emerged out of lockdown in 2021. Luminous tranquillity moves us into the light, towards eternity.
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Thomas Dunford, Paul Agnew, Alain Buet, Ruby Hughes, Reinoud Van Mechelen – Dowland: Lachrimæ (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:04:46 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imbert’s album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release. As with the first series, the artists have been asked to contribute to the booklets, in which, with a few years’ hindsight, they talk about their conception of the works and how they went about recording them. The photographers of the Magnum agency illustrate the covers of the series with their work; this time the common design element is the colour yellow.In addition to the 13 titles shown below, the album FIRENZE 161 by LE POEME HARMONIQUE, VINCENT DUMESTRE, will also be reissued.
Read more![Ruby Hughes, Joshua Simões - Edward Nesbit: Sacred Choral Music (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/04/17/on2ydsy0pmsrb_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Ruby Hughes, Joshua Simões – Edward Nesbit: Sacred Choral Music (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:38 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records
As a young composer, Edward Nesbit was drawn to the rich complexities of contemporary instrumental music; little more than a decade later, he has found himself returning to the inheritance of his early youth as a chorister: the texts of mass, psalms and canticles, and the long centuries of the Anglican choral tradition. Not that there is anything traditional about Nesbit’s music, which synthesises these two heritages into a soundworld that is accessible, full of references yet always recognisably its own voice.
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Ruby Hughes & Joseph Middleton – Songs for New Life and Love (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:52 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony”, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world premi`ere of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects.
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Ruby Hughes, BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Jac van Steen – Clytemnestra: Orchestral Songs (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:46 minutes | 917 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
In 2015, when Ruby Hughes discovered Clytemnestra by the Welsh composer Rhian Samuel, the work had not been performed since its première some 20 years earlier. Hughes describes the 24-minute score as ‘sun-scorched and luscious’ as well as ‘intensely visceral’, but in it she also heard echoes of Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, two of Samuel’s influences. For her first album as soloist with orchestra, she has therefore devised a programme which brings together the three composers but which also spans a wide range of emotions and moods. For his Rückert-Lieder, Mahler selected five highly intimate and subtle poems by the great Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, using his large orchestral forces sparingly in a chamber music style. Ten years later, in 1911, Berg found his texts closer at hand as he set contemporary poems by Peter Altenberg, one of the main proponents of Viennese impressionism. Berg’s advanced harmonic language caused a scandal at the first performance in 1913, and the songs were only performed in their entirety in 1952, sixteen years after Berg’s death. For Clytemnestra, finally, Rhian Samuel assembled her own text, based on Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon and focusing Clytemnestra’s deep anguish at the death of her daughter and her need for revenge. Bringing this wide spectrum of human emotions to life, Ruby Hughes is supported by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Jac van Steen.
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Ruby Hughes, Clara Mouriz, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & Juanjo Mena – Montsalvatge: Partita 1958, Cinco Cancione Negras, Calidoscopi simfònic & Simfonia de Rèquiem (2012/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:55 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
This album of orchestral works marks the centenary in 2012 of the birth of the Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge.
It is released as part of our Spanish music series, conducted by Juanjo Mena, a fellow Catalan national and Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic. Montsalvatge was one on the most influential musical figures in Catalan music during the latter half of the twentieth century. He explored virtually every musical form, but many of his most significant works, including Cinco Canciones Negras (Five Negro Songs), were written after his discovery of the art of the Antilles. He was fascinated by West Indian music, which, as he wrote, ‘was itself originally Spanish, exported to the Caribbean, and then re-imported’. In Cinco Canciones Negras for mezzo-soprano and orchestra he set a varied collection of poems from the Caribbean and Spain, adopting the captivating rhythms of the West Indies. ‘Canción de Cuna para Dormira a un Negrito’ can only be described as one of the tenderest lullabies in the repertoire, presenting a vivid contrast to the exhilarating display of rumba-like rhythms in ‘Canto Negro’.
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Ruby Hughes & Huw Watkins – Echo (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:03:12 minutes | 1,85 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Huw Watkins’ song cycle Echo, composed for soprano Ruby Hughes and premiered in 2017 at Carnegie Hall, is at the centre of this artfully crafted recital. Setting texts by five different poets, the cycle is a work centred on melancholy – on transience, remembrance, and in the final song a numbed cry of inconceivable loss. As such it permeates the entire programme, adding a new and unexpected depth to that which precedes as well as follows.
Read more![United Strings of Europe, Ruby Hughes & Julian Azkoul - Renewal (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/02/14/7318599925493-cover-zoom.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
United Strings of Europe, Ruby Hughes & Julian Azkoul – Renewal (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:08:45 minutes | 2,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
Having released their debut album In motion in 2020, the musicians that make up United Strings of Europe (USE) return with another innovative program: Renewal. The title refers in part to the fact that the majority of the works included are heard in arrangements and adaptations tailormade for the ensemble by Julian Azkoul, who also directs it from the violin. In Winter’s House by Joanna Marsh and Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow are both originally choral works while a second work by Shaw, Entr’acte, was conceived for string quartet, but is here heard in the composer’s own version for string orchestra. A similar treatment has been given Mendelssohn’s F minor String Quartet, one of the composer’s final works, written in reaction to the unexpected death of his beloved sister Fanny. For the centerpiece of the disc, Osvaldo Golijov’s Three Songs, USE is joined by soprano Ruby Hughes. The three songs were written for different occasions, but were rearranged by the composer to form a single work, capturing various strands of his immigrant identity as well as specific moments of inspiration, both felicitous and tragic. This is the first time all three songs appear with string orchestra on album.
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