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The “Earth Requiem” is a gigantic work performed and recorded in Beijing in May 2011 in remembrance of the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

This is the first Chinese Requiem ever composed

This massive work by renowned Chinese composer Guan Xia is scored for 100 instrumentalists, a choir of 150 singers, an organ and 4 vocal soloists.

The well-established China National Symphony Orchestra invited the legendary French conductor Michel Plasson, who has long had a close association with EMI Classics, to work on the project. This partnership between West and East gives the recording a universal breadth as well as an overarching theme: the Earth. The emotional strength of the work is empowered by its gargantuan scale.

A concert and press conference will be held in May 2013 in Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts to mark the 5th anniversary of the Sichuan Earthquake.

Both William Byrd and John Dowland were composers who found themselves somewhat out of sympathy with the times in which they lived, a fact which may help to account for the melancholic strain which pervades much of their music. At first glance, Byrd seems to have enjoyed an eminently successful career: after becoming a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal at the age of twenty-seven, he rapidly consolidated his position ,within the English musical establishment, and in 1575 he and his mentor Thomas Tallis were granted by the Crown the monopoly of music publishing in England. In 1593 Byrd acquired a country estate in Essex, and by the time of his death he was regarded as 'Britanniae Musicae Parens': the father of British music. Yet for all these trappings of respectability, Byrd's position in society was always precarious on account of his Catholic faith. Frequently cited as a recusant, Byrd regularly had crippling fines imposed on him by the courts, and would probably have been subjected to worse persecution had he not enjoyed the patronage of some very powerful friends. His younger contemporary Dowland was not so fortunate in gaining entry to court circles and so spent much of his career as an itinerant lute virtuoso, principally in France, Germany and Denmark. Dowland was suspected of having flirted with popery during an early visit to France and although he later denied having undergone a true conversion to Catholicism, the accusation stuck and probably made it more difficult for him to obtain an English court appointment. His volatile nature may also have counted against him: even when he did secure a permanent position, as Lutenist to the King of Denmark, his regular absences led to him being eventually dismissed from this post. Dowland's Lachrimae (1604) is a remarkable set of ensemble music in which 'Seaven Passionate Pavans' all based on the same four-note descending motif are followed by a sequence of other dances, mainly galliards. Byrd is represented here by a selection of his consort songs and by his Fantasias and In Nomines - both ensemble forms in which he excelled.