Erika Fox: Paths Goldfield Ensemble Richard Baker conductor Richard Uttley piano NMC D254 • Erika Fox was born in Vienna in 1936 and came to England at the age of 2 as a war refugee.   She grew up in a Hasidic rabbinical family, where music, dancing, rituals and a belief in miracles were part of daily life. • She won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, London, where she studied piano with Angus Morrison and composition with Bernard Stevens.   She did further studies with Jeremy Dale Roberts. “It is incredibly rare to stumble across a virtually unknown or forgotten composer whose music genuinely excites and delivers,piece after piece.   Erika Fox's language is bold, feisty, uncompromising and astonishingly fresh.   A highly distinctive style has emerged from a childhood suffused with music of Eastern European origin.   Hasidic music, liturgical chant embellished with heterophony mingle with modal ancient melodic lines reminiscent of Eastern European folk music.   She is a composer who is constantly energised by sound and its inexhaustible possibilities.”   Kate Romano (Artistic Director of Goldfield Ensemble) In the 1970s, Erika was actively involved with the Fires of London, the Nash Ensemble, Dartington, and the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM).   Between 1974 and 1994 her works were regularly performed at London's South Bank Centre, at major festivals and were regularly broadcast in the UK and abroad, but then it all stopped …   We are delighted to bring her music to a new audience on this first commercial album and have selected six chamber pieces spanning a 25 year period (1980 - 2005).   They represent the depth and scope of Fox's music and are a fine introduction to her extraordinary musical imagination.   Erika says “I have always been interested in theatre and ritual, as a means of containing human drama within boundaries.   Since my music owes almost nothing to Western musical tradition, and almost everything to my childhood memories of Jewish Liturgical chant and fragments of Hasidic melody, there is no harmonic development as such, rather single melodic lines, often in heterophony, held together by dint of varied repetition, and moulded, sometimes by use of percussion, to provide a ritualistic and perhaps theatrical whole.” TRACK LISTING   1. Paths Where The Mourners Tread     23'07       Goldfield Ensemble | Richard Baker conductor   2. Quasi Una Cadenza     13'39       Goldfield Ensemble   3. On Visiting Stravinsky's Grave at San Michele     12'35       Richard Uttley piano       Malinconia Militaire   4. I. 1st Movement     4'04   5. II. 2nd Movement     3'22   6. III. 3rd Movement     3'15   7. IV. 4th Movement (‘Poem’)     3'26       Goldfield Ensemble       Café Warsaw 1944   8. I. Prologue     3'17   9. II. Lament     2'36 10. III. Scherzo     2'42 11. IV. Lament II & Coda     4'11       Goldfield Ensemble | Richard Baker conductor       Kaleidoscope Bonus download only track       details in booklet     19'35 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