World & Cross-cultural
Amir Farid plays Javad Maroufi
Javād Maroufi was among the first composers of piano music in Persia, celebrated for his contribution to Persian classical music. Born in Tehran to musician parents Musa and Ezra Maroufi – both pupils of Darvish Khan – he lost his mother young, was raised by his father, and learned violin and tar from an early age.
Argentine Cello
More than Piazzolla alone: seven Argentine composers shape a cello-and-piano programme of tango, pampas colour and lyric nationalism, played by Zoe Knighton and Amir Farid.
Sombras: The Music of Astor Piazzolla
La Tin Shed Orquesta presents the music of Astor Piazzolla, whose compositions from the 1930s to 1990 redefined the tango. His celebrated Quintet of the 1970s gave the world ‘Tango Nuevo’, drawing classical and jazz influences into the Argentine form.
Cosmosis
The album explores the many combinations throat singing can take. Dean Frenkel pairs overtone singing with a children’s choir, guitar and mandolin, Australian birds, contemporary piano, vibraphone duet, and a female vocal duo in song form.
Intuition
Intuition is the Move debut of Italian guitarist–composer Rosario De Marco. Solo guitar pieces of quiet, reflective character draw on flamenco, jazz, classical, folk and popular traditions, and carry the warmth of the southern Mediterranean.
Echoes of Ancestral Voices
Le Tuan Hung and Dang Kim Hien present traditional Vietnamese classical and folk music on Echoes of Ancestral Voices, following their earlier Move disc Landscapes of Time.
Landscapes of Time
Contemporary sound art of Vietnam: evocative images and haunting effects that stay with the listener. New directions in sound art with Vietnamese colour, drawn from poems, ideas and spirituality.
Breath of Creation
Flutes of two worlds. On shakuhachi, baroque flute and recorder, two performers renowned in their own fields join forces in a display of virtuosic delights and evocative sound-scapes.
Quivering String
Four composer-performers of Back to Back Zithers weave Vietnamese, Sundanese and mediaeval European strands into new Australian chamber music for zithers, flutes, voice and found sound.
Musical Transfiguration
An acoustic journey across Vietnamese soundscapes, from majestic court music and the subtle flow of lullabies to chanted poetry, classical chamber music and lively village festival songs.
Magic Sounds
Magic Sounds moves through meditation, ambient, chill-out, fine world, soundtrack, spiritual (non-religious) and contemporary choral territory, built from authentic human voices rather than synthesizers.
Breathe
Melbourne duo Nougat – guitarist and composer Tania Ravbar Costantino with mandolinist Ruth Roshan – place Breathe on the cusp of world and classical music.
Songs from Georgia
Unique for its sound, melodies, harmonies, polyphony and modes, Georgian music was declared by Igor Stravinsky a stimulus for modern Western music. Australian ensemble Golden Fleece collects, teaches and researches this tradition, painting a vivid portrait of a rich cultural heritage.
Eclectic Collection
The mandolin orchestra is remarkably versatile. This recording sets out to show that range and the ensemble’s distinctive colour across a programme that moves freely between styles and cultures.
World Music
The Melbourne Mandolin Orchestra presents music from around the world: Latin American dances, Klezmer, Slavic folk and blues, in contemporary works that still draw on traditional song and dance.
World Rhythm Band
An unexpected cross-fertilisation: contemporary jazz melody and harmony joined with rhythmic traditions of the Third World, especially West Africa, in a distinctive ensemble sound.
Bach to China with Yu
Volume 3 of Julian Yu’s clarinet music, with Robert Schubert and ensemble in arrangements that join Chinese folk melody to Western classical craft.
Old and Yu: The Clarinet Music of Julian Yu, Vol. 2
Catchy short pieces by Julian Yu for clarinet with string quartet, and with cello and piano: playful settings that braid Chinese folksong with oddly familiar classical themes, including Dvořák and Mozart.
Cutetudes
Cutetudes (‘cute’ + ‘études’) is a set of twenty short, classically related and humorous piano pieces Julian Yu wrote on commission from pianist Ke Lin.
China Wind: the clarinet music of Julian Yu, Vol. 1
Five chamber and concertante works for clarinet with strings, piano and flute show Julian Yu drawing on the inner structures of Chinese tradition rather than its surface colour, with remarkable versatility and emotional range.
Bossa Eyes
Laid-back jazz vocals drift over bossa and samba grooves in a programme inspired by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Familiar standards sit beside originals on an acoustically open set that favours space, lyric and a gentle Latin pulse.
On the Wings of a Butterfly
Cross-cultural music by Australian composers. This 2005 collection from Lê Tuấn Hùng gathers works by Ros Bandt, Brigid Burke, Warren Burt, Deborah Kayser and others, and was nominated for an ARIA Award.
Chinese Whispers and other contemporary dance music
Piano works by leading contemporary composers from Australia and China, played by Gabriella Smart. The programme ranges across prepared piano, film-related pieces and dance-inspired solos by Griswold, Tan Dun, Curran, Jia Daqun, Nyman and others.
Jacinta's Song
ARIA-winning pianist Andrea Keller, guitarist Steve Magnusson and percussionist Peter Neville join multi-saxophonist and composer Jenny Game-Lopata on Jacinta's Song, a set of original works for the Jenny Game Ensemble.
Japanese Story (Original Soundtrack)
Elizabeth Drake's award-winning score for the Australian feature Japanese Story, starring Toni Collette, layers Japanese instruments and Okinawan folksong with western orchestra. Two bonus cues and a 16-page booklet complete the release.
africussia
Innovative ensemble d'volv, formed in 1999, pairs electric, steel-string and nylon-string guitars in original works drawing on Spain, Ireland, contemporary art music, blues and jazz.
Scent of Time
Six Australian composers take Asian instruments and voices beyond their own traditions. From dan tranh and sheng to shakuhachi and erhu, the programme is cross-cultural concert music at its most exploratory.
Wordless Meanings
In the beginning there was harmony – before anyone asked “What sort of music do you play?”, before everyone grew too busy to listen, before music became ‘the industry’. Somewhere along the way, harmony was lost in a cacophony of meaningless words.
Ambient Voice
Ambient Voice places Dean Frenkel’s haunting harmonic vocals over and within works by outstanding Australian composers, among them Mark Clement Pollard, George Dreyfus, Andrew MacGregor and Invention in Time.
Serenades (Original Soundtrack)
Davood A. Tabrizi's haunting score for Mojgan Khadem's film Serenades was extended in the studio so the album stands alone, away from the motion picture, as a complete listening experience.
Recorded Messages: Violin
Composer Eve Duncan commissioned violinists in Austria, China, Japan and Australia to record her works, gathering solo, duo, quartet and ensemble pieces onto this cross-cultural violin programme.
Tuneful Percussion
One of International Record Review’s “Best Discs of 2000”, and nominated for Best Classical CD at the 2001 ARIA Awards. Woof! play Grainger’s complete music for tuneful percussion on authentic instruments, including his own staff bells and steel marimba, with many works previously unrecorded.
A Handful of Rain
Inspired by Javanese gamelan and Japanese Shinto music, Mark Clement Pollard's ambient concert works pursue beauty and simplicity. A Handful of Rain gathers this acclaimed Australian composer's popular style from the mid-1990s.
Classical Allusion: Selected Works by Julian Yu
Julian Yu takes famous pieces from the Western musical tradition and ornaments them in the manner of Chinese folk music, until the familiar becomes something newly made.
Light on the Edge
The landscape and atmosphere of Australia come to life in this varied collection of solo and chamber guitar works by Australian composer Phillip Houghton.
Nardoo
Nardoo weave original improvisations from jazz, ethnic and medieval strands. Zana Clarke and Peter Biffin play new and traditional wind and string instruments on this debut of haunting, cross-cultural duo music.
Courts in Colour
Traditional melodies from four important courts of the Middle Ages: Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Gaon of Tiberias, Saladin of Egypt, and Alfonso X of Castile and León. Cantigas bring them to life on authentic mediæval instruments.
Nullarbor
Three kinetic dance scores by Robert Lloyd for keyboards and percussion, weaving American minimalism and Balinese gamelan into brightly coloured, interlocking rhythms of striking clarity and drive.
Sonic Archaeologies
Ros Bandt’s electro-acoustic pair Mungo and Thrausmata treat land and ancient Greek text as sonic archaeology. Award-winning works made in the studios of West Deutsche Rundfunk, Cologne.
Silk and Spice
Cantigas follow the mediæval Silk Road in dance, monophonic song and improvisation. Recorders, rebec, vielle, oud, lute and percussion carry music shaped by Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Footsteps
The sound of feet on the earth’s surface is a reminder of how location shapes our lives. Ros Bandt’s journey of place, from Western Australia and Florida to suburban Melbourne, is unlike anything else on record.
Iberian Triangle
La Romanesca presents a portrait of the musical diversity of Spanish song in the years just before the great expulsion and Columbus's voyages: music of Christian, Moorish and Jewish Spain before 1492.
Pacific Sound
Colin Offord's Pacific Sound presents musical landscapes built from everyday objects and his own invented instruments of metal, bamboo, timber, bells and shells, evoking oceans, wind, rain and Pacific wildlife.
Passage
Tony Lewis composed these scores for the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre between 1986 and 1988. Commissioned for contemporary dance works, they explore meeting points between Aboriginal and European societies and how Aboriginal people engage with modern Australia.
Tango Fantasy
An alluring Latin American odyssey: Ken Herrera’s solo piano programme of original tangos, a Baroque-tinged suite and a sultry nocturne that lean into waltz, milonga, bossa nova and blues.
Together Apart
Together Apart gathers original chamber works by Sydney composer and UTS lecturer Brent Keogh. Written in the Covid-19 lockdown, the music holds the strain of that period alongside a clear hope of renewal.
Latin American Piano Music
Alejandro Téllez performs both well-known and overlooked Latin American piano music from Mexican and Cuban composers.
Becoming
Becoming is Johanna Selleck’s hour-long song cycle for soprano, countertenor, bass, shakuhachi and string quartet, setting haiku and renga across French, English and Tibetan.
The Latin Muse
Pianist Nancy Tsou brings fire and tenderness to Spanish and Latin American works by Piazzolla, Granados, de Falla, Albéniz and Ginastera. Chosen for intensity of feeling, the programme is played with deep sympathy for the Latin idiom.
Fika
Fika is the second album from crossover ensemble Elysian Fields: music shaped for the Swedish custom of gathering with friends over coffee, conversation and something sweet to share.
Barefoot in the Sky
Barefoot in the Sky fuses ancient and contemporary practice: rhythmic and melodic, organic and electronic, choral and tribal. It moves through enough moods for several albums, in a vein the artists call ambient space-world jazz.
La vida es un pasahe: a life in Sephardic song
Troveresse shapes a life-cycle programme from Sephardic song: cradle and courtship, marriage and mourning, in Ladino traditions that travelled from Spain across Morocco, the Balkans, Greece and the wider Orient.
Character Interludes
Virginia Taylor and Timothy Kain present a Southern Hemisphere program for flute and guitar, pairing Argentine and Bolivian guitarist-composers with Australian works by Phillip Houghton and Elena Kats-Chernin.
The Rose and the Willow
Saxophone and piano rebuild Piazzolla, Ginastera and Guastavino from bare elements, treating improvisation as equal partner so both instruments share the musical weight.
Live for Life
An extremely popular pairing of clarinettist Nicole Canham and accordionist Anton Wurzer, bringing French musette, tango and salon repertoire to the Move catalogue.
Unity
A wide-ranging blend of traditional, contemporary and original Scottish music — from haunting Gaelic airs and foot-stomping dance sets to chamber textures and evocative new works.
Forgotten Dreams
In 1999 Concordia director Basil Hawkins first heard Hadjidakis’s The Waltz of Forgotten Dreams. Struck by its atmospheric, evocative character, he shaped a programme of kindred nostalgia, including Eileen Pakenham’s Reverie and Fred Witt’s Memories of Bendigo.
Zalankara
Jeff Pressing's Zalankara is a multicultural symphony: a wide-ranging, ambitious work dedicated to the refugees and displaced people of the world.
Step Back Sally
Traditional folk songs from many cultures, arranged for percussion, piano, recorder, guitar, harp, violin, mandolin and voices. An Orff-influenced music education resource meant to stimulate listening, dancing, moving and creating.
Salut d'Amour
Concordia Mandolin and Guitar Ensemble offers a warm European tour for plucked strings, crowned by Elgar's Salut d'Amour in an arrangement for mandolin orchestra.
The Rainmaker
From jazz to Celtic, Middle Eastern folk to contemporary classical, ambience to the tango, The Rainmaker gathers an eclectic spread of influences into one guitar-led programme of original pieces.