Another World – Charlie Huskinson – CR6015

Description

Hi my name is Charlie… I hope you will enjoy this album ‘Another World Volume One’ (if so, there will be more to come!) Here is just a small collection of my many compositions for piano and is considered by many as ‘’Wonderful music for Meditation and Relaxation’’.

Educated at Summer Fields in Oxford followed by a period at Eton College. I have been playing the piano since I was around 5 years of age and have always loved writing my own pieces.

Waterfall – A little zest from China was inspired after visiting a magnificent Waterfall in Wales and then subsequently having a similar experience on a visit to The Green Emerald Isle (Ireland). The emotions that it evoked were very stirring and powerful and I hope you will feel the same whilst listening to this piece.

A Reason In life we are all searching for reasons behind why events or situations take place. This piece was composed by me with that specifically in mind. It really speaks to the inner soul. Calmly providing a meditative explanation in the music. With just enough repetition for the reason’’ to be clearly understood with the utmost of clarity. It is a very reassuring, relaxing, comforting and supporting piece for anyone who has experienced anxieties due to not getting a reason or reasons behind things happening in this journey we call life. This piece provides the answers. It’s all there in the music when you listen to it.

Believe was written with a great feeling of pride in ones achievements. Self belief is the motivator that drives forward a person to make good in the world. Ego is an important factor in enabling one to work towards personal goals and targets. It creates a sense of well being in ones soul when one has achieved. Also the main aim of this piece is to instil and inspire an unrivalled sense of confidence and faith in the listener.

Flight We all would like to be free as a bird. I had the idea for this piece of music whilst staring at the sky and watching a flock of birds as they circled around each other for a few minutes before flying off into the distance and out of sight. It was, all I needed to compose ‘’Flight’’. The fast bits represent unbridled joy and freedom. With this music you too can be free as those birds and enter into their world for a few minutes.

Forest Calm We all have a primitive forest-dweller inside us. And this is a very happy piece that paints a picture of all the beautiful and vibrant wildlife one would encounter in the forests of this world. And though vibrant and happy also at the same time mysteriously enigmatic and calm like in the title. I had the idea for this piece whilst walking in the new forest in Southampton. There were so many chirpy cheerful birds tweeting and the squirrels were playing and darting up trees, that I was simply mesmerised for a good long while and unbeknownst to me in those very moments the music to ‘’forest calm’’ was already starting to form inside my head. Enjoy the calm of the forest in this!

Blue Lagoon The caves in Wookey hole at Cheddar Gorge with its stalagmites, stalactites and perfectly transparent clear blue rock pools gave me the idea for ‘’blue lagoon’’. My music is deliberately repetitive sometimes, creating a sort of magic. The blue lagoon I experienced in my mind, was very relaxing and even spiritual!

I’ll be there is a more romantic piece that brings thoughts of love and caring between two people into the mind. A much more gentle sound. Softly speaking to your soul and evoking a much needed peace of mind and security in the listener. Also for good measure jazzy overtones have been added as a personal touch by the performer the very talented concert pianist Mario Montagna on his Steinway concert grand piano in a natural acoustic to enhance the overall pleasure of the piece.

The Eye of the storm is a much more powerful and poignant piece dedicated to those that lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans. The energy power and strength of the hurricane comes through in the music evoking a stimulating and thoughtful vortex of thought and is in turn stimulating to the senses. Although this piece is listed as Eye of the storm. Its full title is actually longer than this for good reason. For the record is ‘Eye of the Storm – Get out of New Orleans – A Hurricane Katrina Tribute’.

© 2014 Charlie Huskinson

MARIO MONTAGNA

As a special talent among the selective breed of crossover pianists, Mario Montagne is a largely self-taught artist. Although classically trained, he acquired a love of this special art form through his exposure to the recordings of some of the world’s great pop artists while still a young man. While a teenager, aside from his practicing of the masterworks of Chopin and Bach, he would often sit for hours and improvise in dreamy passages, products of his imagination and of his fantasy, which held his peers and others in sway with the beauty of his renditions.

Mario’s involvement in this CD, featuring the music of Charlie Huskinson, is based on his commitment to children and to young people and on his belief in the power of music to overcome illness and create a better world.

With this CD, we are pleased to introduce a wider public to Charlie Huskinson’s music as interpreted by an artist who, surely, will become one of the most memorable pianists of his generation.

Laila Underberg (2014)

Review – Musical Opinion Magazine

This exceptionally well recorded and beautifully played disc has been my first introduction to the music of the young British composer Charlie Husk­inson, whose date of birth is not given, but to judge from the pleasant photograph in the booklet he would seem to be of the younger generation.

There are eight different tracks here, ranging from around 5-6 minutes to a little under 11 minutes in duration. Each has a descriptive title, mostly drawn from natural phenomena, with almost all of them inhabiting a similar ambient world of gently-moving pulse, with clear alberti-like influenced basses and lyrical right-hand melodies. In many ways, this could be described as New Age music for piano, which is not meant as a criticism but as an indic­ation to the curious music-lover of the kind of music they are most likely to encounter on this disc.

The music is certainly conceived throughout in genuine keyboard terms, and would appear to fit under the hands very well. There is a constant meditative ‘feel’ to the music, which often turns in upon itself as the surface of a slow-moving lake might do, lapping against the shore. Drama is not Huskinson’s strong point, nor is there any need for it to be, but the intimate, often inward-looking nature of this music has the ability, over a stretch of time, to exert its own confident and contemplative nature.

This album is strongly recommend­ed to those who are interested in exploring the range of modern piano music, and although this music was obviously conceived with the piano in mind, it appears that many of these pieces would transfer well to string orchestra or to string quartet.