Birmingham Record Company

03/12/2025

🎶🎵 Back in November, RBC's Head of Composition, Professor Joe Cutler, released his new opera album, Sonata for Broken Fingers, exploring the meaning and power of music in a terrifying world 🎶🎵

Written by Head of Composition Professor Joe Cutler with libretto by Max Hoehn, the album is based loosely on the story of the legendary Soviet pianist Maria Yudina and her role in a secret recording for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

According to urban myth, Radio Moscow received a call from Stalin asking for an orchestral recording of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23. Rather than admitting the performance had never been recorded, musicians including Maria Yudina hurriedly gathered in the middle of the night to recreate the piece from scratch.

Sonata of Broken Fingers is a 70-minute “claustrophobic thriller”, created with an ensemble of seven instruments and recorded at the Conservatoire. The album was produced by Head of Music Technology Dr Simon Hall with the support of the technical team, James Abel and Joe Hockford.

The album was commissioned by Opera21, a laboratory for the development of new opera, and produced by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the Conservatoire’s record label Birmingham Record Company.

Joe Cutler said: “This is a project in which collaboration is central, and something that we could have only done in Birmingham. It brings together the fantastic music technology department at RBC with Birmingham Record Company and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

I think what’s interesting about this piece is that there’s a dark humour to it but underneath that, the story is very profound, exploring the meaning and power of music in a terrifying world.”

🔗 Read more: https://www.bcu.ac.uk/conservatoire/about-us/news/dark-and-moving-album-from-head-of-composition

18/11/2025

We've released over 24 hours of music in the past few years /// listen to it all on our Spotify playlist here https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1rPF0DfTXa2S6O2eX3KiTs?si=e311d042f4ed4d58

18/11/2025

Check out all of our 29 releases on our website https://birminghamrecordcompany.wordpress.com/

14/11/2025

One of the strangest myths of the Soviet era concerns Stalin’s relationship with the legendary pianist Maria Yudina, an openly pious virtuoso who frequently clashed with the authorities, yet somehow survived the Stalinist terror. One famous story tells of how, one evening, Stalin makes a surprise phone call to Radio Moscow demanding the urgent delivery of a record: a piano concerto played by Maria Yudina. There’s one problem: the record does not exist. But rather than say “no” to Stalin, Radio Moscow gathers together Yudina and their orchestra in the middle of the night and makes the recording from scratch, ready to be delivered to the Kremlin the following morning. In the version of the myth as told by Shostakovich, it was this recording that was found on Stalin’s gramophone player when the dictator had his fatal stroke.

Listen here https://open.spotify.com/album/52HdGMTZA2Sr9gGp0ZytzJ?si=U8q5PoA7TBGr7V6YmbBPww

14/11/2025

READ ALL ABOUT IT! Joe Cutler discusses his latest release on BRC: Sonata For Broken Fingers

Opera album, Sonata for Broken Fingers, comes out today (Friday 14 November). Written by Head of Composition Professor Joe Cutler with libretto by Max Hoehn, the album is based loosely on the story of the legendary Soviet pianist Maria Yudina and her role in a secret recording for Soviet leader Jose...

14/11/2025

We've now released over 24 hours of music since forming in 2014. You can listen to every minute of it on this playlist on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1rPF0DfTXa2S6O2eX3KiTs?si=64e7749edbb743db /// now including our 29th release: Sonata For Broken Fingers by Joe Cutler. Thanks to our distributor NMC Recordings

Playlist · music skool · 290 items

14/11/2025

OUT TODAY! Sonata for Broken Fingers – our 29th release. Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/52HdGMTZA2Sr9gGp0ZytzJ?si=g66c9AC1RWuXNosb0Nt2pw

Birmingham Record Company will release BCMG’s recording of Joe Cutler’s opera, ‘Sonata for Broken Fingers’ on CD this month.

20/10/2025

One of the strangest myths of the Soviet era concerns Stalin’s relationship with the legendary pianist Maria Yudina, an openly pious virtuoso who frequently clashed with the authorities, yet somehow survived the Stalinist terror. One famous story tells of how, one evening, Stalin makes a surprise phone call to Radio Moscow demanding the urgent delivery of a record: a piano concerto played by Maria Yudina. There’s one problem: the record does not exist. But rather than say “no” to Stalin, Radio Moscow gathers together Yudina and their orchestra in the middle of the night and makes the recording from scratch, ready to be delivered to the Kremlin the following morning. In the version of the myth as told by Shostakovich, it was this recording that was found on Stalin’s gramophone player when the dictator had his fatal stroke.

Sonata for Broken Fingers is a work of fiction inspired by Maria Yudina’s biography and many first-hand accounts of politicised cultural life under Stalinism. Yudina never appeared in the West, but her life and her recordings are gradually becoming better-known.

Framed as an 80-minute claustrophobic thriller, Sonata for Broken Fingers is conceived as an intimate sound experience, strongly influenced by the genre of radio drama and the act of imaginative storytelling it demands of its audience. The project is a collaboration between Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) and Birmingham-based composer, Joe Cutler, who runs Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s composition department. It represents a continuation of Birmingham’s rich and varied musical tradition and the first time that Joe, a two-time winner of the British Composer Award and nominee at last year’s RPS Awards, has written an opera.

20/10/2025

06/09/2025

OUT NOW - Quiet Wild on

Quiet Wild is a musical landscape of the distinct compositional voices from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s recent and current doctoral composers. Performed by Timothy Lines (clarinet), Rose Redgrave (viola), and David Quigley (piano), the album explores new terrains of compositional thought where each of the pieces move through each other to provide an intimacy of understanding in their refracted parallels.

Buy/listen now: https://nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/products/quiet-wild

06/09/2025

Quiet Wild is a musical landscape of the distinct compositional voices from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s recent and current doctoral composers. Performed by Timothy Lines (clarinet), Rose Redgrave (viola), and David Quigley (piano), the album explores new terrains of compositional thought where each of the pieces move through each other to provide an intimacy of understanding in their refracted parallels.

The album opens with Aidan Teplitzky’s Wuthering Derive, a musical wandering through Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights that draws on psychogeography to understand the hidden worlds of a loved pop song to find a sense of place. Such wandering is continued in Francesca Fargion’s All the Other Songs where the three instrumentalists weave in and around Francesca’s voice to create a lilting and shifting narrative of fluid musical lines. Explorations of relationships continue in Chloe Knibbs’ Flight Lines, where a dialogue between Knibb’s original music and that of Marie Jaell, a 19th century French composer, come together to consider the habits and patterns found within the treatment of historical women composers in the concert hall of today. Moving from the spaces created in cultural rituals towards Chinese art, Chang Ge’s Unchanging Changes translates the visual abstraction found in artist Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses into a sonic spatial environment of shifting harmonic and rhythmic material. From abstraction to defined processes, James McIlwrath’s oppe og ikke gråter, roughly translated as “up and not crying”, provides a personal musical journey to rediscover the joy to be found in musiking. Finally, Nicholas Olsen’s Plaque and Tangles continues this seeking of emotional understanding through musically processing the journeys faced by those who care for loved ones with Alzheimer’s and the loving dedication to be found in their relationships.

Quiet Wild provides an evocative journey through six musical landscapes that delve into hidden spaces and hushed sonorities, effortlessly unveiling a tactile and arresting narrative that captures Birmingham’s distinct musical identity.

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/5agXOMCpprtZmfWJHs18qY?si=ozft9pJGRyKOVwIF0oBn6w