Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.
John Greaves is a British bass guitarist, pianist and composer who was a member of Henry Cow and has collaborated with Peter Blegvad. He was also a member of progressive rock band National Health and jazz-rock supergroup Soft Heap, and has recorded several solo albums, including Accident (1982), Parrot Fashions (1984), The Caretaker (2001) and Greaves Verlaine (2008).
The Ahn Trio is a classical piano trio composed of three sisters: Angella (violin), Lucia (piano), and Maria (cello) Ahn; Lucia and Maria are twins. Born in Seoul, Korea, they moved to New York City in 1981, and began their training at the Juilliard School. The sisters formed a trio while they were earning their master's degrees at Juilliard. The Ahn Trio is known for its performance of new classical music, genre-crossing programming, and collaborations with other artists.
Motion Trio is a Polish accordion trio founded in 1996 by Janusz Wojtarowicz.
The Michael Nyman Band, formerly known as the Campiello Band, is a group formed as a street band for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's 1756 play, Il Campiello directed by Bill Bryden at the Old Vic. The band did not wish to break up after the production ended, so its director, Michael Nyman, began composing music for the group to perform, beginning with "In Re Don Giovanni", written in 1977. Originally made up of old instruments such as rebecs, sackbuts and shawms alongside more modern instruments like the banjo and saxophone to produce as loud a sound as possible without amplification, it later switched to a fully amplified line-up of string quartet, double bass, clarinet, three saxophones, horn, trumpet, bass trombone, bass guitar, and piano. This lineup has been variously altered and augmented for some works.
The Michael Nyman Songbook is a collection of art songs by Michael Nyman based on texts by Paul Celan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare and Arthur Rimbaud. It was recorded as an album with Ute Lemper in 1991, and again as a concert film in 1992, under the direction of Volker Schlöndorff, again with Ute Lemper, though many of the musicians had changed. The songs have been recorded by others and as instrumentals, and are published by Chester Music. The album has been issued by both London Records and Argo Records, though the covers are the same except for the logo.
Live is a 1994 album by Michael Nyman and the Michael Nyman Band. It is Nyman's 24th release and the fifteenth with the Band. It is the first commercial live album by the band, which had previously performed live on the magazine release, 'The Masterwork' Award Winning Fish-Knife. It is also known as "The Upside-Down Violin", the only new composition on the album, and the working title, Breaking the Rules, made it into many computer sales systems. The album's cover and booklet were designed by Dave McKean. Liner notes are by David Toop. Early printings of the album cover listed the first three tracks erroneously as "Queen of the Night", "An Eye for Optical Theory", and "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds"
The Piano is the original soundtrack, on the Virgin Records label, of the 1993 Academy Award-winning film The Piano. The original score was composed by Michael Nyman and is his twentieth album release. Despite being called a "soundtrack", this is a partial score re-recording, as Nyman himself also performs the piano on the album. The music is performed by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nyman with Michael Nyman Band members John Harle, David Roach and Andrew Findon performing the prominent saxophone work.
Too Many Years is a Jorma Kaukonen studio album released in August, 1998. It was his last studio album on Relix Records. Michael Falzarano returned to play guitar and help produce. He also sang lead on several tracks. The keyboard work was now handled by former Jefferson Starship keyboardist Pete Sears, who had been playing with Hot Tuna since 1992. After this album, the three began to perform as the "Jorma Kaukonen Trio" and recorded a live album for Relix, Jorma Kaukonen Trio Live.
The Essential Michael Nyman Band is a studio album featuring a collection of music by Michael Nyman written for the films of Peter Greenaway and newly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. It is the seventeenth album release by Nyman. The album features liner notes by Annette Morreau, who describes the album as "a summation and digest of ten years of progress in the performance of music by a composer -- a composer with whom, so evidently, a group of friends and expert musicians intimately identify their total commitment, virtuosity, and joyous enthusiasm."
Michael Nyman for Yohji Yamamoto is volume 2 of Yohji Yamamoto's series of albums, The Show. The album features the solo violin work Yamamoto Perpetuo, which Nyman has since adapted into the String Quartet No. 4 and the orchestral work, Strong on Oaks, Strong on the Causes of Oaks. The violin is played by Alexander Balanescu, and Nyman can be heard on one track, "Song L," at the piano.
Taking a Line for a Second Walk is the name of piano duo reduction of a dance work for orchestra by Michael Nyman, Basic Black, written in 1986 for the Houston Ballet. It is eponymous with a 1994 album on Work Music on which it constitutes approximately half the material. The album is also known as Music for Two Pianos, which is given as the album's name on the back cover and insert back, while Taking a Line for a Second Walk appears on the front cover, spine, and physical disc. The performers are identified on the front cover, and all of the booklet, as The Zoo II, and on the back cover as "The Zoo Duet". As one of the tracks on the album is "Lady in the Red Hat" from A Zed & Two Noughts, also known as Zoo, this is often seen as a reference to that film. A photograph of the duo is inside the booklet, two young women in black on a black background, leaving only their wedding banded-hands and faces visible, with "The Zoo II" as the only caption. The pianists are identified as Helen Hodkinson and Brenda Russell in the Michael Nyman discography on the 1995 promotional compilation Michael Nyman.
After Extra Time is a 1996 album by Michael Nyman with the Michael Nyman Band containing three tributes to Nyman's fandom of Association football: After Extra Time, the soundtrack to The Final Score, and Memorial. The latter is described as a remix, but is simply the 1992 recording from The Essential Michael Nyman Band. It was included in order to put it together with his two other football-inspired works. The album lists only three tracks, which has caused it to be erroneously reported that Memorial is track 3 and the others are all hidden tracks, but Memorial is track 26. Therefore, a track listing, as the individual portions of the pieces are not named, is not useful. The three pieces were recorded at separate times and thus have separate personnel lists.
Time Will Pronounce: The 1992 Commissions is a 1993 album by Michael Nyman, his eighteenth release. Nyman does not perform on the album, but he composed all the music, produced it, and wrote the liner notes. The album contains four compositions. The album is dedicated to the memory of Tony Simons, "friend, manager, and generous and courageous survivor." The album is named for the second and longest of the four works, the only one featuring a former member of the Michael Nyman Band, Elisabeth Perry.
The Suit and the Photograph is a 1998 album by Michael Nyman with the Michael Nyman Band, recorded in 1995. On this album, Nyman is the composer, conductor, and producer, and wrote the liner notes. The album contains two works, String Quartet No. 4 and 3 Quartets. The album is named for its cover photograph by August Sander, which Nyman had associated with the Michael Nyman Band since its inception in 1977. He cites a description of the photograph by John Berger, in an essay of the same title, describing that the suits deform the working class rural men just enough to "undermine physical dignity." Both of the pieces on the album originated in Japan. It is Nyman's second release on EMI and his 33rd in general, but is not designated part of a series, as EMI had done with Concertos. Said Nyman of EMI, "I didn't excite them, and they didn't excite me." Nyman's only further releases on EMI would be the UK edition of Ravenous, featuring remixes by William Orbit, and The Actors, both film scores.
The Composer's Cut Series Vol. I: The Draughtsman's Contract is the 51st album by Michael Nyman, recorded in 2005 with the Michael Nyman Band and released in 2006. It is the first in an unprecedented series in which Nyman began rerecording some of his film music independently of the needs of film production, and the culmination and refinement of 23 years of performances of the work since the recording of the original 1982 recording of The Draughtsman's Contract.
Mozart 252 is a 2008 album by Michael Nyman with the Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, and Andrew Slater, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth. Although "Revisiting the Don," one of only two newly written works on the album, was commissioned and performed in 2006, the album's title is a joke on its lateness as an album, released 252 years after Mozart's birth. The album also includes "In Re Don Giovanni," Nyman's first composition for the band, which is based on the first fifteen bars of "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Don Giovanni, six selections from Peter Greenaway's film, Drowning by Numbers, in which he was instructed to base the music on the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K. 364, and two duets and an aria from Nyman's television opera, Letters, Riddles and Writs, in this recording featuring bass Andrew Slater as Leopold Mozart and contralto Hilary Summers as Wolfgang.
The Piano Concerto/MGV is the 23rd album by Michael Nyman, released in 1994. It contains two compositions, The Piano Concerto and MGV. The first is performed by Kathryn Stott and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Michael Nyman, and the second is performed by the Michael Nyman Band and Orchestra with Michael Nyman at the piano.
The Composer's Cut Series Vol. II: Nyman/Greenaway Revisited is the second in a series of albums, all released on the same day, by Michael Nyman to feature concert versions of film scores, in this case, films of Peter Greenaway, and his 52nd release overall. The album is similar to The Essential Michael Nyman Band, although a number of tracks are on only one album or the other. In spite of being recorded in 1992, with the same lineup, Memorial is not the same performance as the one that appears on The Essential Michael Nyman Band or After Extra Time, which was recorded in Tokyo. This performance was recorded in London and is slightly less aggressively performed.
Wonderland is the 38th album release by British composer Michael Nyman and the soundtrack to the 1999 film Wonderland. It is the first of many collaborations of Nyman with director Michael Winterbottom. For Winterbottom, Nyman would later perform excerpts of this score in 9 Songs, provide a score for The Claim, and arrangements and re-used tracks for A Cock and Bull Story. Nyman's daughter, Molly, has continued the family working relationship with Winterbottom, scoring The Road to Guantanamo with Harry Escott.
