Today the digital single from Daniel Hope’s new album ‘Spheres’, is released. ‘I Giorni’ by Ludovico Einaudi, is a piece inspired by twelfth-century folk music from Mali and is performed by Daniel Hope, Jacques Ammon and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin.
The track is part of a curated anthology (“Spheres”), which explores the idea, first brought forward by Pythagoras, that planetary movement creates its own kind of music; an idea that has fascinated philosophers, musicians, and mathematicians for centuries. “Spheres” contains the world premiere recordings of five works by diverse and strikingly inventive composers: Alex Baranowski (b.1983), Karsten Gundermann (b.1966), Aleksey Igudesman (b.1973) and Gabriel Prokofiev (b.1975).
The album also reflects older, historic notions of the “music of the spheres”. It opens with Johann Paul von Westhoff’s hauntingly beautiful Imitazione delle campane, published in Dresden in the 1690s, an earthly evocation of the bell-like sonorities attributed to planetary motion. In addition to new works and contemporary arrangements of pieces by J. S. Bach and Gabriel Fauré, “Spheres” also includes compositions embracing Baroque, minimalism and even cinema by Lera Auerbach, Ludovico Einaudi, Philip Glass, Karl Jenkins, Elena Kats-Chernin, Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt and Max Richter. Hope performs here with members of the multi-Grammy®-winning Berlin Rundfunkchor, pianist Jacques Ammon and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin under the direction of Simon Halsey.
Hope, an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2007, has been nominated for five Grammy® Awards, most recently for “Best Small Ensemble Performance” 2010 for his DG recording of concertos and arias by Antonio Vivaldi. His recordings have been honoured with a Classical BRIT Award, the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis and five ECHO Klassik Prizes. He attracted worldwide attention and critical acclaim this autumn for his performance on the release of Vivaldi Recomposed, a world premiere album of German-British composer Max Richter. The recording, a captivating re-working of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, was hailed by the media as “one of the best albums this year” and an “album for the 21st century”. It leapt straight to the top of the Classical iTunes and Classical Billboard charts.
To download I Giorni on iTunes, please click here.
For more information on Spheres, please visit the Deutsche Grammophon website here.
For more information on Daniel Hope and all his upcoming projects, please visit here.
(Written on December 14, 2012 )
