Taking A Line for a Second Walk Lady in the Red Hat Water Dances
Signum Records is proud to release its first volume of music devoted to one of Britain's best known composers Michael Nyman. The Zoo Duet perform music for two pianos.
No one has played a greater role in bridging the divide between the worlds of classical and popular music than Michael Nyman. He has combined Purcell and Mozart, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, ancient Sumerian quasi-feminist texts, Queens Park Rangers Football Club and innumerable other diverse musical and cultural sources to produce a style of composition which is romantic, eclectic, occasionally chaotic, but uniquely
his own.
Like the best classical, jazz or pop music, Nyman’s output does stand up to closer analysis, but the secret of its appeal lies not in the field of academic, but rather in its ability to speak to a large and culturally diverse audience.
Taking a Line for a Second Walk began life in 1986 as an orchestral work from the Houston Ballet. The Water Dances, originally written for Peter Greenaway’s film Making a Splash and appearing here in its five-movement form for the first time, is in part derived from a chord progression taken from a Monteverdi madrigal.
Michael Nyman has demonstrated that it is possible to write progressive and challenging new music without alienating a large part of the classical audience while attracting an even broader rock- and pop-orientated public. Release date: 10th May 2004
