Daniel Kidane: FAST/SLOW

Release date: 30 October 2026

Daniel Kidane's debut portrait album, FAST/SLOW, brings together six works written between 2016 and 2025. Featuring performances by the BBC Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Present Music, BBC Singers, the Carducci Quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra under conductors including Sir Simon Rattle and Andrew Gourlay, the album presents one of Britain's most exciting compositional voices.

Across these works, the opposing forces of speed and stillness become a lens through which Kidane explores memory, grief, transformation and renewal. Sirens is a dazzling orchestral showpiece that channels the energy of Manchester nightlife through glittering textures and a fearless fusion of orchestral writing with the pulse of jungle, dubstep and R&B. Be Still offers a personal elegy whose trembling string textures create extraordinary emotional tension, revealing movement and life within apparent stillness. In Winged, the hypnotic choreography of starling murmurations inspires music of great fluidity scored for electric guitar and strings. Kidane set a deeply moving text by poet Simon Armitage to music for The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, illuminating the strangeness of everyday life during Covid-19.

Quatre Tableaux is a luminous string quartet inspired by the changing light of Florence, unfolding as four vividly coloured musical "paintings" that revel in the expressive possibilities of the ensemble. Finally, Sun Poem presents a radiant meditation on “endings and beginnings”, inspired by the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and the death of Kidane’s father and birth of his son. With over thirty published works now to his name, FAST/ SLOW offers the first opportunity to hear six defining works together, providing a portrait of Kidane's artistic journey to date and a glimpse of a creative path that will surely continue to surprise and compel.

Kidane began composing at the Royal College of Music Junior Department before studying privately with Sergey Slonimsky in St. Petersburg and completing undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Royal Northern College of Music with Gary Carpenter and David Horne. Kidane won a Royal Philharmonic Society Prize in 2013 and received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2016. He was appointed Jerwood Composer+ in 2018, writing for and curating concerts with players from the London Symphony Orchestra. He received an honorary doctorate from Coventry University in 2022 and is currently a Visiting Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Cambridge.

Sir Simon Rattle, London Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Gourlay, BBC Philharmonic, Pekka Kuusisto, Manchester Camerata, Present Music, Owain Park, BBC Singers, Carducci Quartet

Format: CD, download, streaming

FUNDERS

Recording supported by the Ida Carroll Trust, The John Ireland Charitable Trust, The Nicholas and Judith Goodison Charitable Settlement, The Oldhurst Trust, The PRS Foundation, The Radcliffe Trust and The Thistle Trust.

RECORDING CREDITS