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Special offer. Tom Coult: Pieces That Disappear
Tom Coult, Anna Dennis (soprano), Daniel Pioro (violin), Elena Schwarz, BBC Philharmonic, Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Gourlay
Awards:
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Gramophone Awards, 2025 Shortlist, Contemporary
There is something ominous about the debut album from Tom Coult . Across four works, he takes us to darkly dramatic places with his expressive writing and playful textures.
Special offer. Tom Coult: Pieces That Disappear
Tom Coult, Anna Dennis (soprano), Daniel Pioro (violin), Elena Schwarz, BBC Philharmonic, Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Gourlay
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Gramophone Awards, 2025 Shortlist, Contemporary
There is something ominous about the debut album from Tom Coult . Across four works, he takes us to darkly dramatic places with his expressive writing and playful textures.
About
On 22 November 2024, NMC Recordings releases Pieces that Disappear - the debut album from the composer Tom Coult performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Coult's playful and seductive music has been championed by many of the UK's major orchestras and ensembles, and he was made Composer-in-Association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021. Coult has been commissioned by BBC Proms (including St John's Dance for the First Night of the 2017 Proms), Aldeburgh Festival (including pieces for Mahler Chamber Orchestra and for Marian Consort), and Lucerne Festival. His frst opera, Violet, with text by Alice Birch, was premiered in 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival and on tour, and was described by The Telegraph as 'the best new British opera in years'. It has already been staged in second and third productions in Paris and Ulm, Germany, in 2022 and 2023. It has won or been nominated for: an International Opera Award, a South Bank Sky Arts Award, a Critics Circle Award, an IVORS Composer Award and a UK Theatre Award.
This debut album features Coult's violin concerto Pleasure Garden conducted by Elena Schwarz with soloist Daniel Pioro and is the product of a fruitful relationship Coult enjoys with the violinist. In After Lassus , Coult takes a number of the duets from Orlando Lassus's Novae aliquot and reworks them for Orchestra and soprano solo, performed here by Anna Dennis and conductor Andrew Gourlay. Dennis and Gourlay return in Beautiful Caged Thing - a work that demonstrates the expressive idiom for which Coult is renowned.
The title track, Three Pieces That Disappear, for orchestra and fxed audio, is one of several works written for the BBC Philharmonic. Coult says: 'The three movements of this piece are linked by a vague, loosely connected set of ideas about music being remembered, forgotten, misremembered, imagined or deteriorating'. As well as music disappearing, those ideas include the birth of Coult's child (resulting in a turn towards sounds that signify childhood), his own health problems (making words and sounds indistinct), and a dictaphone which misremembers sounds. The work is conducted by Martyn Brabbins
Contents and tracklist
- Tom Coult, Martyn Brabbins, BBC Philharmonic
- Tom Coult, Anna Dennis, Andrew Gourlay, BBC Philharmonic
- Tom Coult, Daniel Pioro, Elena Schwarz, BBC Philharmonic
- Tom Coult, Anna Dennis, Andrew Gourlay, BBC Philharmonic
Spotlight on this release
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Tom Coult on Pieces That Disappear
The British composer discusses the inspirations behind the works on his debut album, released on NMC at the end of last year and including the violin concerto Pleasure Garden (written for Coult's friend Daniel Pioro).
Awards and reviews
January 2025
There is something ominous about the debut album from Tom Coult . Across four works, he takes us to darkly dramatic places with his expressive writing and playful textures.
January 2025
As suggested by this album’s title, Tom Coult’s compositions often engage with presence and absence – especially how music shapes time by playing with memory in strange and unpredictable ways.
21st November 2024
Tom Coult’s distinctive voice comes through vividly on this celebration of his time at the BBC Philharmonic…[Beautiful Caged Things] demonstrates Coult’s ability to write music that’s texturally rich yet strikingly translucent...These aren’t pieces that disappear, not at all.
