To celebrate the upcoming centenary of Claude Debussy in March 2018, Maestro Daniel Barenboim presents a personal collection with works of the prolific French composer. It was during his years as principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris from 1975 to 1989 that Barenboim began to take a closer interest in Debussy’s music. It makes logical sense that Barenboim approached Debussy’s piano works through his orchestral music given the composer’s musical language evolved through the interplay between these two different worlds. As a result, we can hear an imaginary orchestra in the tremendous subtleties of the tone colours in Estampes, for all that those orchestral sonorities are created by genuinely pianistic means.

Alice Sara Ott releases new album Nightfall, featuring works by Satie, Debussy and Ravel, including Gaspard de la Nuit, one of the greatest challenges of piano literature. The album marks ten years that Ott – one of the world’s most in-demand classical pianists – has been signed as an exclusive recording artist to Deutsche Grammophon. Ott will tour the recital programme internationally, with European dates including Paris’s La Seine Musicale, Vienna Konzerthaus, Munich Prinzregententheater, Wigmore Hall and Birmingham Symphony Hall, plus a nine-date recital tour across Japan in autumn 2018. Nightfall takes its inspiration from twilight: the brief, magical time when day meets night, light meets dark. This merging of contrasts is reflected in a programme of works that explores the complex dichotomy existing in every human character. “I believe that as humans we all carry in us certain elements of light and darkness. On the one hand consciousness and conscience, and on the other the shadow of greed and temptation. Most of the time we can tell the difference between right and wrong, bad and good, but sometimes there are situations and moments when the boundaries cannot be so clearly defined.” Included on the album is Debussy’s Clair de Lune, one of the most popular works in the piano repertoire, which sets to music the celebrated poem by Paul Verlaine. However, behind the beautiful, dream-like melody, the poem tells of the sadness disguised by the whimsical mask of happiness. Meanwhile Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit sets to music three poems by Aloysius Bertrand who, according to one account – felt he had received the prose from the devil himself. Ravel’s technical Everest is full of allegorical allusions, suggesting that it is in our dreams that our deepest fears arise. From Ondine the mermaid, who faces rejection after a doomed love affair with a human being, to Scarbo, the goblin who attacks artists at night, perhaps hinting at our fear of failure. In Gibet, the heartbeat of the deceased beats throughout the piece, bringing us face to face with loss. Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes also feature on the album. Deceptively simple in their minimalist compositional style, the pieces by contrast contain much complexity. Instead of musical instructions, the score features a series of ambiguous, ludic instructions such as “open your head”, or “sculpt something hollow”. Nightfall features three composers who lived, worked and died in Paris. Three contemporaries, sometimes friends, sometimes rivals, who were all part of a time that gave the art world a new definition and direction. Nightfall is accompanied by two short films, created in Paris, by the Tokyo-based French film director, Julien Lévy.

Great new album from Olafur Arnalds - a long time favourite of Rough Trade. The highly anticipated record features Ólafur’s ground-breaking new software, Stratus, which transforms the humble piano into a unique new instrument. He is currently performing his new material on a huge worldwide tour. The Stratus Pianos are two self-playing, semi-generative player pianos which are triggered by a central piano played by Ólafur, and are the centrepiece of his new works. The custom-built software is born out of two years of work by the composer and audio developer, Halldór Eldjárn. The algorithms generated from Stratus were also used to create the innovative album artwork. On the album Ólafur uses these methods reinvigorate the compositional experience, feeding back into the creative process in a completely new way. As Ólafur plays a note on the piano, two different notes are generated by Stratus, creating unexpected harmonies and surprising melodic sequences.

Bach’s Cello Suites – among the best-known and best-loved works in the classical canon – get a thoroughly modern makeover from young Scottish composer Peter Gregson in Recomposed by Peter Gregson: Bach – The Cello Suites. Three hundred years after their creation, the six suites composed by Johann Sebastian Bach between 1717 and 1723 are given a stunning reinterpretation by the award-winning cellist for Deutsche Grammophon’s pioneering Recomposed series. “These suites are the foundation of the cello repertoire and I’ve grown up hearing and playing them, so I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t lost sleep over worrying about what Bach might have thought of this,” admits Gregson. Instead of being performed by a solo player, the six suites are played by Gregson and an ensemble of up to five other cellists, in various combinations, and are underpinned by a subtle electronic soundbed created and played by the composer himself. “Rather than thinking about Bach’s compositions as a two-dimensional painting, I thought about them as sculpture. So although the object is the same, if you turn it around and see it from a different angle – shine the light on it in a different way – you get different textures coming out; different shadows get cast.” He recorded the suites last winter at London’s Air Studios, turning an arsenal of analogue synthesisers into acoustic instruments by re-amping them. “So although they have a power cable in them they’re all performed by me – by a human being in a great big acoustic space.” For Gregson, the complex production values of the recording – mapped out on more than 500 sheets of paper in his studio – were an integral part of the process of (re)composing. “Understanding how we use the room and where we place the instruments played a huge part in that compositional process,” he explains. “Listening to my version is like looking at Bach’s music through a different lens.” Peter Gregson is one of the UK’s leading cellists and contemporary composers. Born in Edinburgh in 1987, he began playing the cello when he was four, inspired not by hearing the instrument but by seeing James Bond “ski” down a mountainside on a cello case in The Living Daylights. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and has also collaborated extensively with the Media Lab at MIT. He has made three solo albums: Terminal (2010),Lights In The Sky (2014), and Touch (2015). Gregson Richter Jóhannsson (2011) is a two-track EP for Mute Records’ Short Circuit festival, written for him by Max Richter and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. Cello Multitracks (2012) is a collaboration with the composer Gabriel Prokofiev. Gregson also composed and performed the soundtrack for the ballet FLOW (2013), and composed the film soundtracks for Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos (2015) and Arran Shearing’s Forgotten Man (2017). His most recent releases are Quartets: One and Quartets: Two (both 2017) – two albums of string quartets which have since been used as the score for the ballet Eight Years of Silence. Gregson has also worked extensively with Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions as solo cellist on numerous film and TV projects (includingWonder Woman, Terminator, Marcella, The Legend of Tarzan and Hacksaw Ridge); written string arrangements for Rag’n’Bone Man and Public Service Broadcasting; and conducted strings and played solo cello on Ed Sheeran’s chart-topping album ÷ (Divide).