Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Songs for Tony	Michael Nyman
A Great Day in Kathmandu	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
City of Turin	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Fever Sticks and Bones	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Friendly Fire	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Going to America	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
In Laos	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
In Rai Don Giovanni	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Secrets, Accusations and Charges	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Take the Money and Run	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen
Underneath the Hessian Bags	Nyman/McAlmont	Listen

Reviews

• …The Glare, a dazzling chamber-pop collaboration featuring lush, luxuriant, soulful vocals by David McAlmont. Each track is recycled from the composer's extensive back catalogue, but with new lyrics by McAlmont reflecting on contemporary events - including the title track, which weighs the emotional cost of Boyle's overnight fame. This sublime pop-classical fusion has earned ecstatic reviews since its release last November, and is being widely tipped as a frontrunner for this year's Mercury Music Prize.
  Stephen Dalton, The Times, 07 April 2010
• Bad news for any artists working on exciting new crossovers between two musical genres, or for any band that think they might just have come up with the right mix of mainstream appeal and quirky individuality to nab the Mercury prize - you've just been trumped.
  , The Sunday Times, 15 November 2009
• David McAlmont, the extraordinary singer from Croydon who sounds like a celestial mix of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Antony Hegarty, has pulled off an idiosyncratic triumph with this collaboration. Inspired by contemporary news stories about the glare of the media, McAlmont recasts them as soul songs, set against rearrangements of some of Nyman's movie themes. Though McAlmont has often worked with jazz artists in the past, there's no jazz here, but the pieces often thicken and intensify with a spontaneous-sounding drive. Evocative ballads such as Secrets, Accusations and Charges (set to Nyman's The Departure, from Gattaca) or Friendly Fire (over a sombre swirl from The Actors) show the singer's ability to impart reverberating impact to the softest murmurs, but several of the pieces unfold over pounding minimalist riffs with a pop-infused directness. McAlmont's lyrics occasionally creak under the weight of their serious subjects; and the 17-minute closing instrumental Songs for Tony is such an effective balance of Nyman grooves and modulating sax lines as to make one wish there had been more instrumental variation throughout the set. But it's a fortuitously inspired collaboration all the same.
  John Fordham, The Guardian, 13 November 2009
• David McAlmont is one of British pop's most precious hidden treasures. His voice is a sublime and miraculous thing, able to convey unimaginable reserves of vulnerability and inner strength in one wavering syllable.
  
  
  And if his mercurial career hasn't touched you yet, here's your catch-up listening list: "Unworthy" by Thieves, "Yes" by McAlmont And Butler (and the whole of their Bring it Back album), "Diamonds are Forever" with David Arnold, and that barely scratches the surface.
  
  Michael Nyman is less in need of an introduction, being probably the country's most celebrated living composer. The idea of putting them together as a duo is almost too good to be true: it cannot, surely, live up to its potential. Except that it does. The Glare is a daring project in which McAlmont has scoured the world's regional newspapers (the Ottawa Citizen, the Las Vegas Journal and so on) for poignant under-the-radar human-interest stories, and set them to some of his favourite Nyman works. The result is a kind of conceptual operetta, with broad themes of release and escape.
  
  Over 11 pieces performed by the Michael Nyman band (a 12-piece ensemble consisting of strings, horns, and Nyman on piano), the singer spins first-person narratives about the lives of a New Zealand couple who found themselves with millions of dollars due to a bank error, a Nigerian prostitute caught in a people-trafficking ring, a man whose terminally ill neighbour asks him to shoot him, and even the Britain's Got Talent adventure of Susan Boyle and its aftermath.
  
  His heartbreaking vocals mesh with the (paradoxical) opulent minimalism of Nyman's compositions so perfectly that you'd swear they'd been co-written specifically for the purpose. McAlmont inhabits his characters, and Nyman's band express their inner turmoil magnificently. The 17-minute finale, and instrumental suite called "Songs for Tony", allows pause to take in the tragedy and beauty of what you've just heard. There will be those who find the whole enterprise dauntingly arty (not many albums list Theodore Gericault and Sigmund Freud in the thank-yous), but once heard, you'll never want to live without it.
  
  Simon Price, The Independent, 01 November 2009
• a unique blend of classical, soul and avant-garde pop in tandem with Britain's most lauded modern composer Michael Nyman.
  
  The Glare consists of 11 classic Nyman compositions which McAlmont has transformed into songs. The title refers to the glare of the media, and the lyrics are all inspired by world news stories which McAlmont has turned into first-person reportage. So, the giddy rush of opener Take the Money and Run comes from the true story of a couple that got rich off a banking error and disappeared; the waspish camp of In Rai Don Giovanni sees McAlmont imagining himself as Silvio Berlusconi's lover, and the heartbreaking ballads In Laos, Fever Sticks and Bones, and Underneath the Hessian Bags are sung from the perspectives of a pregnant Nigerian prisoner, a Zimbabwean orphan and a Palestinian student respectively.
  
  Another ballad, Secrets, Accusations and Charges, encapsulates how elegantly McAlmont transforms the newsworthy into the personal, as the unlikely tale of an Aberdeen woman who ran international jewellery heists becomes a string-drenched confessional of shame and lost love. When McAlmont glides over Nyman's stately strings, deliriously wailing "What good are millions in diamonds hidden away?/I didn't want you in the same room as the secrets", he finds a deep soul melody and rhythm where there should be none, and displays an ability to make the specific into the universal that even his greatest admirers had no idea he possessed.
  
  In case Nyman fans fear that he has abandoned them for pop, his memorial for his late manager Tony Simmons, the saxophone quartet Songs For Tony, is included as a bonus. This neither adds to, nor subtracts from, the unlikely twinning of talents that has produced one of the better long-players of 2009. Grab The Glare quick, because, if the pair's past artistic restlessness is anything to go by, there may not be a part two.
  
  Garry Mulholland , The Observer, 01 November 2009
• In this intriguing alliance of soul and classical forms, David McAlmont uses selections from Nyman's back catalogue as the backdrops to song-stories drawn from recent news reports, all concerning people on the cusp of crisis.
  
  
  In the title-track, for instance, an unnamed talent-show contestant (clearly Susan Boyle) comes to terms with the sudden searing blast of fame, and in "Take the Money and Run", the chattering piano, sawing violins and aspirational horns of Nyman's Seville Fanfare furnish suitably urgent accompaniment to McAlmont's account of the couple who, finding their account mistakenly credited with £10 million, understandably did a runner. Many songs deal with the poor and dispossessed – the jailed drug mule of "In Laos", the Zimbabwean child refugees in "Fever Sticks and Bones", the trafficked humans stranded in the "City of Turin" – on whose stories Nyman's minimalist riffs impose an air of fatalistic inevitability. Concluding proceedings is the Nyman Sax Quartet's 17-minute suite "Songs For Tony", whose industriously tootling reeds offer the missing link between Henry Purcell and Moondog.
  Andy Gill, The Independent, 30 October 2009