Craig Armstrong (Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby, The Incredible Hulk, Romeo + Juliet, Love Actually) has recently scored the upcoming British/Australian drama Dirt Music. The film is directed by Gregor Jordan (Buffalo Soldiers, Ned Kelly, The Informers) and stars Kelly Macdonald, Garrett Hedlund, David Wenham, Julia Sarah Stone and Aaron Pedersen. The movie based on the novel of the same title by Tim Winton is set against the landscape of Western Australia and tells an impassioned tale of love and grief. Jack Thorne (Wonder, The Aeronauts) wrote the screenplay. Finola Dwyer & Amanda Posey (Brooklyn, An Education), Angie Fielder (Lion) and Polly Staniford are producing the Wildgaze Films and Aquarius Films production.

This programme brings together aesthetic and musical elements of East and West. Zhou Long captures the essence of the Chinese plucked ch’in, and Cambodian aesthetics are preserved in Chinary Ung’s expressive Spiral III. Tan Dun’s Eight Colors combines the exotic timbres of Peking Opera with Second Viennese School tonalities. Gao Ping’s Bright Light and Cloud Shadows has been admired for its ‘long-breathed brush strokes’ (Washington Post). Taking its inspiration from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Toru Takemitsu’s beautifully crafted A Way a Lone evokes a shimmering sound world.

With Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, the Bang on a Can All-Stars show off their blazing speed, polyrhythmic virtuosity and all-world versatility in a return to the core Bang on a Can sound - an uncategorizable supermix of classical and electric instruments that is part classical ensemble, part rock band, and part jazz sextet. The album is the first in a decade that features the All-Stars exclusively, rather than as part of a collaborative project. Each of the pieces on the double-CD calls upon a different kind of virtuosity, demonstrating the range of musical abilities and experiences arguably unique to this ensemble. Recorded in New York City, all of the music on Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (including the arrangements of the works by Conlon Nancarrow) were written for and premiered by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

John Taverner's accidentally totemic theme is subjected to more wondrous transformations by the likes of Robert Parsons, Henry Purcell and of course Christopher Tye—and inspires new works from Nico Muhly and Gavin Bryars.

From the twelfth century (Saint Hildegard) to the twenty-first, the voices of The Gesualdo Six weave a meditative reflection around the ancient Office of Compline in a moving sequence of music from fourteen composers.

Acclaimed Chinese guitarist Xuefei Yang releases a new double-album - Sketches of China - featuring a unique collection of works ranging from the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) to the 21st Century, many of which are world premiere recordings. For this album, Xuefei has sought out and arranged poignantly beautiful traditional melodies, commissioned new works from leading Chinese composers and collaborated with colleagues who are the musical superstars in her native land.

Apartment House play a series of works by Ryoko Akama, based on research she conducted at the Kryzstof Kieslowski archive in Poland.

La Monte Young, generally regarded as the father of musical minimalism, is one of America’s most important contemporary composers–and one of the most elusive. Early on Young eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns. At the same time, however, he exercised profound influence on such varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and entire branches of pop music. For half a century he and his partner and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality.

Few contemporary artists have been as significant as Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award winner Christopher Rouse, whose imaginative approach made him one of the most frequently performed composers during his lifetime. The Concerto for Orchestra is a ‘hyper-concerto’ that gives each player a chance to shine, while the mournful intimacy and passion of Supplica unfolds somewhat like the slow movement of a Bruckner or Mahler symphony. Rouse’s Fifth Symphony fondly recalls Beethoven’s mighty Fifth but blurs the lines between tradition and modernity, transporting the listener from turbulence to serenity. It was described as “brilliant, exciting and at times hauntingly beautiful” in The Dallas Morning News.

Quasi Parlando is an important addition to ECM's documentation of the work of Tigran Mansurian, an often breathtaking account of highly original contemporary chamber orchestra music. Issued in the wake of his 75th birthday, the album presents four works for soloists and strings, and marks the ECM debut of the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, winner of the 2013 Gramophone Awards 'Record of the Year'. It opens with the Armenian composer's fiercely-concentrated Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and String Orchestra, and proceeds to new music performed by its dedicatees: the lyrical Romance, dedicated to Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and the intensely expressive Quasi Parlando, dedicated to German cellist Anja Lechner. Both are world premiere recordings, as is the Violin Concerto No 2, subtitled Four Serious Songs, which concludes the programme. Throughout, the soloists deliver committed performances, as does the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under the direction of Candida Thompson.

Jekabs Jancevskis is a young Latvian composer and an exponent of that thrilling, accessible brand of choral writing which ourishes in the Baltic States as nowhere else, and which has become something of an established Hyperion enthusiasm. ‘On the evidence of this recording, [Jančevskis] has found subtle and authentic ways of furthering the distinctive sound of Latvian choral music established in the last century… few more beautiful realisations of Latvia’s choral language have come my way in the past decade… one wonders where that Latvian sound can go and what events will shape it. There’s plenty of time for Jančevskis, still in his twenties, to think on that’ (Gramophone)

Composer, musician, producer – for the past few years one of the most original artists of Polish electronic, electro-acoustic, avant-garde music.

My Morning Jacket singer Jim James has teamed with conductor/composer Teddy Abrams and his Louisville Orchestra for a new collaborative album, The Order of Nature. The nine-track album features five new songs by James alongside two tracks off James’ sophomore solo LP, Eternally Even, (“Here in Spirit” and “Same Old Lie”) and two Nina Simone classics (“The Human Touch” and “Who Am I?”). James delivered acoustic demos to Abrams, who then turned the relatively minimalist arrangements into sweeping orchestral compositions that reflected the lyrics’ examination of nature and humanity. Speaking in a press release, James said the record reflects “on the fact that nature doesn’t know how to hate.” He continued, “Humans are part of nature, obviously, but why do we have this thing called hatred and how do we get rid of it? We’re fighting nature and thinking we can prevail over nature, but we’re killing each other and killing the planet.”

Academy Award-nominated composer Hauschka composed the original score to Adrift. The film's soundtrack includes his original score and a cover of Tom Waits's "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" by Emilíana Torrini. Hauschka is a composer who creates experimental music which tells the story in a minimalistic way. In the soundtrack he combines passages with piano and string melodies with synths. Adrift is based on the inspiring true story of two free spirits whose chance encounter leads them first to love, and then to the adventure of a lifetime.

Fridrich Bruk – born in Kharkov in 1937 and a Finnish resident since 1974 – made his name as a composer of tangos. But the heart of his music lies in a series of (to date) 21 symphonies, which have a strong narrative element, some reflecting Jewish themes, others inspired by Karelia and Finland. The three most recent together form a kind of meta-symphony premised on the persecution of the Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. Bruk’s kaleidoscopic use of orchestral colour, his angular but expressive melodies and his dramatic musical language reflect this urge to chronicle the outrage visited on his fellow Jews – and which directly impinged on his own life.