Music Chamber

Music Chamber is proud to release a label-defining album by London based British composer Ian Stewart.  His ambition here is contemporary yet tuneful chamber music, with most of the tracks written with these players and their instruments in mind.

The musicians are American Kyle Horch (soprano & tenor saxophones), Spaniard Guillem Calvo Martínez de Albéniz (violin) and Russian Pavel Timofejevsky (piano) - who first came together to premiere Ian’s works at a London concert last year. Kyle is a saxophone professor at the Royal College of Music with several CDs to his name and leads the Sax Quartet Flotilla. Guillem leads the Altissimo Ensemble and Albeniz Quartet in London and Barcelona. Pavel graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, is resident musician at St John’s Church Notting Hill and performs as an international concert soloist.

At the core of the album is a substantial violin sonata. It’s composed in a traditional 19th Century sonata style with much use of rubato and flexible tempos. Interwoven are themes, harmony and phrasing with a provenance in Celtic and psychedelic music.

The delays often found in electronic music can be heard in ‘Astral Hurdy-Gurdy’. In ‘Limes Groves of South Kensington’ the piano imitates the Autoharp (prominent in Bluegrass music), with each instrument providing a pulsing part somewhere in the textures. The title track Islas (Spanish for Islands - with Ian enjoying Spain and Malta when he can escape London) is influenced by ambient/new age music. The piano creates a dreamy texture over which the soprano sax plays long melodic lines.

As well as composing music ranging from classical and jazz to electronica and new wave - Ian plays keyboards, trombone and bass guitar - alongside new instruments like turntables and laptops. His classical saxophone compositions have been played by Saxploitation and John Harle with the Brodsky Quartet. Ian has always had a passion for unconventional instrumentations - his first CD on the Music Chamber label featured an octet of violins and violas: San Gejtanu MC0005