Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Acts of Beauty	Michael Nyman	Listen
Exit, No Exit	Michael Nyman	Listen

Reviews

• Cyclical and post-minimalist in many of its features, this gritty, brightly coloured music is shaped by the sharp, lucid intelligence familiar from Nyman’s other works.
  
  …A richly lyrical invention, it answers only to its own internal musical promptings, and is thoroughly satisfying as a result.
  Christopher Ballantine, International Record Review, 01 October 2006
• Despite their apparent directness, Michael Nyman’s works often carry a great deal of musical and extra-musical baggage, with connections linking them. The song cycle Acts of Beauty has links with two of Nyman’s operas – the overall title and the first text were taken from an Italian Renaissance treatise on how beauty may be quantified, while the second is a text collage by Kurt Schwitters who is the main character in Man and Boy: Dada. Added to that are songs based on the writings of the early documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov and a setting of a Martial epigram about the weighing of a penis that ties in with his continuing sequence of works based on historic writing on sex. It’s a rich, eclectic mix that Nyman’s settings, and especially soprano Cristina Zavalloni’s singing of them, makes coherent. The instrumental work coupled with it is equally unlikely – the 11 brief movements of Exit No Exit for […] bass clarinet and string quartet started life in Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, the piece for John Motson’s pre-recorded voice and string quartet that was commissioned by the BBC for the end of the World Cup in 2002, and whose movements were portraits of individual footballers.
  Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 28 July 2006