Caput Ensemble

Hafliði Hallgrímsson, now based in Edinburgh, is one of the leading figures in Scottish musical life, and his latest work Mini Stories sets the surreal poetry of the Soviet-era writer Daniil Kharms to music.Whilst internationally renowned actor Simon Callow brings Kharms's texts to life, the Icelandic Caput Ensemble reflect the mood with stellar performances of Hallgrímsson's evocative accompanying composition.

"a glorious concoction of Russian surrealist stories … with highly original, sometimes aphoristic and always apposite music that ranged from abstraction to reflection to manic hilarity…" The Herald

"a clever, entertaining, but ultimately unsettling piece of music-theatre. Kharms and Hallgrímsson make you laugh one minute, then feel vaguely guilty for laughing the next." The Scotsman

The Berlin-based Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa conceives of music as ‘a calligraphy of space and time’ and regards the flute as the instrument that can most deeply realise his musical ideas, the performer’s breath embodying the living power of sound enhanced by the equally expressive silence which surrounds it.The accomplished Icelandic flautist Kolbeinn Bjarnason, who has also studied shakuhachi music, conveys the essence of Hosokawa’s ‘musical calligraphy’, shaping sound and silence into deeply spiritual soundscapes for solo flute and within haunting instrumental textures.

BIS presents its first disc of works by this fascinating contemporary Icelandic composer. One of the label’s most innovative projects ever undertaken, the disc uniquely offers a variety of works composed specifically for the CD medium. Ingolfsson was closely involved in the making of this CD, through both the recording session and editing stages, and the decisions that he made throughout this process have undoubtedly shaped the end result we have here.<br>&nbsp;<br><center><i>“This meant making full use of the possibilities of stereo, moving and rearranging the instruments in space, changing the microphone angles (e.g. recording the violin through the flute microphone), zooming from close microphones to more distant stereo mikes, doubling or boosting some instruments, varying reverberation and even filtering some sounds… We cannot capture or reconstruct the magic of live performance, but we can treat the recording itself as a living and expressive performance."</i><br>Atli Ingolffson on his involvement in this recording project</center>