David Hackbridge Johnson : Orchestral Music, Volume 4

Description

David Hackbridge Johnson, born near London in 1963, is a versatile musician — not only a prolific composer but also a conductor, violinist, singer, pianist, jazz drummer, and poet. The two works on this album, recorded under the composer's direction, feature extra-musical stimuli. The Piano Concerto evokes the Kafkaesque fantastical world and the tragic fate of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, a victim of Nazi oppression — and it also marks the premature death of another uniquely talented individual, as it was written for Jonathan Powell, of whom it became the last recording. The Symphony, inspired by earlier composers such as Bax, Britten, and Vaughan Williams, is a response to the English landscape, seen through the paintings of several artists whose work Hackbridge Johnson cherishes — their colors and atmospheres changing as kaleidoscopically as nature itself.