The title of this album evokes not only the life-long journey of all these musicians, but also a lasting friendship between soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson String Quartet. One of the greatest string quartets of the last four decades, the Emersons will disband in October 2023. Barbara and the Emersons were determined to record Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 since they started performing the work together in 2015.

The title of this album evokes not only the life-long journey of all these musicians, but also a lasting friendship between soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson String Quartet. One of the greatest string quartets of the last four decades, the Emersons will disband in October 2023. Barbara and the Emersons were determined to record Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 since they started performing the work together in 2015.

This album celebrates dance music, from waltz to tango, from slow foxtrot to quickstep, from samba to jive. Seventy years of music rooted in the 1920s, assembled by the enthusiastic musicians of the Ludwig Orchestra, who have taken to playing them at festivals, alongside their usual programmes devoted to Stravinsky or Schoenberg, to get the audience dancing – a phenomenal success story that now becomes an album, Dance with me!

Soprano Barbara Hannigan has become something of a cult favorite with her deep dives into specific and unusual repertories. Her self-presentation in concert is unorthodox and marked by full-scale efforts to communicate the essence of the music at hand, in works ranging from Berio to Gershwin. So it is with this set of songs from the decade and a half on either side of 1900 in Vienna. The enjoyment begins with the physically passionate cover, an example of her way of personifying the music's spirit. Hannigan's is an utterly distinctive voice, edgy and coruscating, and she knows how to tone down her considerable virtuosic powers to the dimensions of the music, such as that here, intended for small rooms.

The starting point for Barbara Hannigan’s third recording for Alpha is a work by Gérard Grisey (1946-98) that is particularly close to her heart. Grisey wrote: ‘I conceived the Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil [Four songs for crossing the threshold] as a musical meditation on death in four parts: the death of the angel, the death of civilisation, the death of the voice and the death of humanity… The texts chosen belong to four civilisations (Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian) and have in common a fragmentary discourse on the inevitability of death.’ Luigi Nono (1924-90) was a politically engaged composer. His stunning monody Djamila Boupacha, a heart-rending cry for solo soprano, pays tribute to a freedom fighter tortured by French paratroopers during the Algerian war; Picasso also portrayed her in charcoal.