Tarik O'Regan: A Celestial Map of the Sky Hallé • Hallé Youth Choir The Manchester Grammar School Choir Sir Mark Elder conductor • Jamie Phillips conductor NMC D220 • Tarik O'Regan was born in London, spending some of his childhood in Morocco, where his mother was born, and in Algeria.   He has lived in New York City since 2004. • Tarik’s current projects include a full-scale opera about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera for 2019, and the preparation of an orchestral suite from his evening-length ballet, Mata Hari, fresh from its sold-out run with the Dutch National Ballet. • His major new work with librettist Alice Goodman, A Letter of Rights, will be performed by Chamber Choir Ireland and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Hillier, in Belfast, Limerick and Dublin 23-26 February. • Gradual, O’Regan’s fi rst string quartet, receives its West Coast premiere in San Francisco in a performance by the Alexander String Quartet on 26 March. Tarik O'Regan's title work A Celestial Map of the Sky, here performed by a children's and youth choir with the Hallé, is a vibrant composition with propulsive, syncopated rhythms contrasting darker moments of refl ection.   The piece is inspired by two woodcuts engraved by German polymath Albrecht Dürer in 1515, which are amongst the oldest known printed European star charts of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres. A deep-rooted interest in North African traditional music, shaped in part by Tarik’s Algerian heritage, is integrated into two of the orchestral works on this album, which are infl uenced by and named after Algerian folk music forms: Raï and Chaâbi. First heard at the BBC Proms, Latent Manifest is an ingenious expansion of a single gesture from a Bach violin sonata, magnified to create an entire universe of orchestral colour.   To close the album, Fragments from Heart of Darkness is a compelling orchestral reworking of thematic material from O'Regan's chamber opera Heart of Darkness, and is based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad. The bonus download-only track, Now fatal change, for countertenor and violin, is a reworking of material found in Chaâbi and is set to the same btext by Nahum Tate that Purcell used for Tell me, some pitying angel.   — This is Tarik's first album dedicated to his orchestral works. 1 A Celestial Map of the Sky     15’14 Hallé • Hallé Youth Choir • The Manchester Grammar School Choir Sir Mark Elder conductor 2 Latent Manifest     7’02 Hallé • Jamie Phillips conductor 3 Raï     11’13 Hallé • Jamie Phillips conductor 4 Chaâbi     18’19 Hallé • Jamie Phillips conductor 5 Fragments from Heart of Darkness     21’18 Hallé • Jamie Phillips conductor BONUS TRACK (download only) Now fatal change     9’52 Ryland Angel countertenor • Lara St. John violin NMC Recordings are distributed in Australia by Rockian Trading, P.O.Box 44, Briar Hill, Vic, 3088, Australia Telephone (03) 9432 4149 ~ Facsimile (03) 9444 6879