Announcing the launch of new album In the Room by Ensemble Renard and Julian Chan in collaboration with the Stomping Ground Collective, a groundbreaking group of composers and visionaries.
With works by Geoff King, Jon Paul Mayse, David Nunn, Georgia Denham, and Isabella Gellis, the album highlights the creation and flourishing of art within isolation; it features new works, transcriptions, and reflections on sonatas by Baroque composer and nun Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704).
This album presents arrangements from the earliest surviving collection of sonatas written by a woman. That woman is Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704), an Italian nun who lived a long and productive life at her convent in Novara, Italy. As the main music teacher in the convent, she was tasked with overseeing, and often personally delivering, the music instruction to the more junior nuns, including writing music for them to play and sing. - Stomping Ground Collective
The album represents a bold, new experience of music, connecting Leonarda's historic and monumental works to the styles, techniques, and sounds of today through the varied recreations, reflections, and imaginations of the Stomping Ground composers.
In this album we want to help revitalise Leonarda’s standing in early Baroque music by presenting her music in a modern context. This album combines arrangements of three of the Op.16 sonatas, four entirely new pieces, and bridging the gap, a modern ‘reflection’ on each of those three sonatas. These reflections borrow material from a given sonata but filter it through a new sonic lens, focusing and amplifying a single component.
To achieve this ambition, the group collaborated with pianist Julian Chan and the musicians from Ensemble Renard to curate an album full of colour, vigour, but also immense depth and introspection.
About Ensemble Renard:
Ensemble Renard comprises five of the country’s most outstanding young musicians. Together, they exist to explore a wide range of timbral possibilities within modern day chamber performance. Centrally a wind quintet, Ensemble Renard’s frequent collaboration with composers and guest instrumentalists allows them to showcase a prismatic variety of colours. - Ensemble Renard website
Available now on all good streaming platforms. Below are links to but a few: