Coming Soon, Shakespeare's Globe

It was announced on Tuesday that Shakespeare’s Globe are soon to launch their own label, Globe Music, with a folksong-inspired disc from Ian Bostridge and the guitarist Xuefei Yang. Recorded live at the venue in autumn 2014, Songs from Our Ancestors will feature music by Dowland, Schubert and Britten as well as ancient and medieval Chinese songs and a new cycle based on Chinese texts by the Welsh composer Stephen Goss, and is to be released on 2nd September (which, coincidentally, also sees the release of Bostridge's Shakespeare Songs with Antonio Pappano on Warner Classics). Yang and Bostridge have previously collaborated on Britten's music, recording his Songs from the Chinese to mark the centenary of the composer's birth back in 2013; the new disc will include the Second Lute Song from Gloriana.

Future releases from the label will include highlights of the incidental music used in The Globe’s recent productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III, to be released in November; the recording will feature the Musicians of Shakespeare’s Globe in Claire van Kampen's arrangements of music by composers including Morley, Holborne, Dowland, Gibbons and Mundy.

Bill Barclay (Director of Music at the venue) writes: "Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – with its intimate, candle-lit ambience and distinctive woody acoustic – has built a substantial reputation for its live music and, through the introduction of state-of-the-art equipment, enables Globe Music to capture studio and live events whilst opening up a brand new recording venue for London. The quality of the Playhouse acoustic provides a singular enhancement that gives recordings made within it a unique signature, with the studio recordings bringing the essence of this painstakingly recreated Jacobean Theatre and its music to wider, international audiences.

Globe Music is a true reflection of live acoustic music creation today, capturing the intimacy of music creation but allowing for global dissemination that maintains artists and performance at the centre of the experience. The label will not be guided by artificially separate silos of genre, but by special collaborations and musical stories that arch across all centuries and styles."

Recent and forthcoming releases from the venue on Opus Arte

(You can view the complete 'Shakespeare's Globe' series on Opus Arte here)