New Piers Hellawell CD released

UK record label Delphian Records will release their first recording by composer Piers Hellawell during May. Titled Airs, Waters, the CD and digital release features the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the Fidelio Trio and clarinetist Robert Plane on six works written between 1992 and 2008.

The pieces featured on Airs, Waters are connected through a compositional thread: Hellawell’s penchant for segmented or block structures. The album opens with Hellawell’s Agricolas for clarinet and orchestra, commissioned and premiered by Plane with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2008, and inspired by the ‘modular’ work of American sculptor David Smith. The album’s title comes from the second piece, Airs, Waters and Floating Islands, another commissioned work, premiered in 1995, which formed a bridge between the composer’s earlier style of separate blocks of material and his later segmented but bridged structures. Estruscan Games is part of this later style, written in 2007 for the Da Vinci Trio, constructed of short movements preoccupied with the question of communication. Basho is another short solo piano work, while Degrees of Separation is the central piece from a set of works for various orchestral groupings, originally scored to be performed in different areas of the concert hall. Finally, the album closes with Jan Palac and the Flaming Skier, for violin and piano.

Airs, Waters features as CMC’s current “CD of the Month”, and will be available to purchase from CMC’s online shop and direct from www.delphianrecords.co.uk.