Diamond Music is a 1996 album by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins.
Perhaps one of Jenkins most recognised works is the first movement of the "Palladio" suite, inspired by 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio and in the style of a concerto grosso. This piece, in varying arrangements, has served as the music for DeBeers television advertisements since the company's "Shadows and Light" campaign in the mid-1990s. For this reason, the album is titled Diamond Music and the cover art features shadowed figures and photographs of diamonds much like the imagery used in the ad campaign.
Jenkin's compositions in this album encompass a broad polystylistic range, contrasting delicate pieces written for string quartet with the broad sound of a string orchestra. "String Quartet No. 2" includes movements in the Baroque style of Antonio Vivaldi ("The Fifth Season") as well as a tango, waltz, hoedown, and others. The four "Adiemus Variations" are reworkings of Jenkins' own piece "Adiemus" from Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary. Additionally, the second movement of "Palladio" served as the theme for "Cantus Insolitus" also heard on Songs of Sanctuary.
Read more about Diamond Music: Track Listing, Personnel, Other Arrangements
Famous quotes containing the words diamond and/or music:
“The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)