Terry Riley has always had a propensity for cosmic whimsy. As such, and given the fluidity of his work over the last decades, it comes as no surprise that his contribution to flautist Claire Chase’s multi-decade Density 2036 project arrived not in the form of Sibelius-drafted PDFs but as a colourful sketchbook of caricatures, flying creatures, and doodled marginalia.
Expectedly, Riley’s non-conformist approach resonated deeply with Chase’s vision of a future flute repertoire – one that lives outside the rigid boundaries of classical music academia.
Fittingly, The Holy Liftoff spends most of its time in breezy motion and joyous buoyancy, where the eight-part flute chorus, multi-tracked by Chase, and JACK Quartet’s strings generate…
Category: classical
Arvo Pärt’s four symphonies occupy a distinctive place within his output. Written over a span of 45 years, they chart not so much a linear evolution as a series of aesthetic ruptures, from the serial experimentation of the 1960s to the austere spirituality of the Fourth Symphony. By bringing together the complete cycle on a single recording, Eva Ollikainen and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra offer a compelling survey that emphasizes the striking contrasts between the works rather than imposing an artificial sense of continuity. The album joins a still relatively modest discography, long dominated by the various recordings from the Järvi family and Tõnu Kaljuste’s complete cycle. From the opening bars of the First Symphony, Ollikainen adopts an approach…
If Irish violinist Darragh Morgan’s latest release is any indication, Northern Irish contemporary music is not just alive and well but thriving. With the violinist partnering with the Ulster Orchestra and conductor David Brophy, the smartly curated Spin presents four fiercely imaginative works for violin and orchestra written expressly for Morgan by long-time collaborators Bill Campbell, Brian Irvine, Ryan Molloy, and Frank Lyons. Northern Irish musical heritage and traditional classical structures are drawn upon, but the music on Spin, all four pieces world premiere recordings, is in no way constrained by geography or the past when the composers present vivid works emblematic of their distinct personalities.
The personnel involved in the project is…
Anyone looking for an excellent recording of Handel’s masterpiece can find it here. The Irish Baroque Orchestra, led by Peter Whelan, aims to bring the magic and drama of the first performance of this piece, which took place in Dublin in 1742. The orchestra members perform on period instruments, lending the sound a warm, glowing quality throughout. The chorus is relatively small by the standards of many Messiah recordings, in keeping with Handel’s lean yet first-rate forces for the premiere. As a result, individual lines stand out with unusual clarity, aided by excellent recording quality. In addition, the diction across the ensemble is exemplary, such as in “His Yoke is Easy” and the brief “The Lord Gave the Word,” where the chorus dispatches Handel’s plentiful…
The latest entry in Wild Up’s complete account of music by Julius Eastman focuses exclusively on one of his greatest works, 1979’s Gay Guerillia. Although the score is open to any group of instruments of a similar timbre, Wild Up director Christopher Rountree stretched those definitions a bit to forge an orchestral version with four loose instrumental categories.
As Rountree explained, “Our idea for our interpretation is to reach toward one another timbrally so that the instruments begin to blend and transcend their characteristic sounds.” The resulting arrangement recasts the music with fuller voicings and enhanced richness, while still transmitting an essential power and drive. Structured like a chorale fantasia based on…
Since 2024, Kou Records, a label co-run by vocalist Charmaine Lee and sought-after producer and composer Randall Dunn, has been “dedicated to artists who have built their own musical language”. A listen to their small but potent roster bears this out. From Lee’s processed, often violent vocal contortions to Aliya Ultan‘s foreboding song cycle for cello, these are serious artists with daunting resumes. These musicians have often grounded themselves in classical forms, so they know exactly what rules they are breaking.
Taiga Ultan, a classically trained flautist who now creates her own tight constrictions only to break free of them constantly, creates music perfect for the Kou label. With her debut, Shade Zero, she makes a strong argument for…
Arguably no contemporary vocal ensemble is more daring than NYC-based Ekmeles (Charlotte Mundy, Elisa Sutherland, Timothy Parsons, Tomás Cruz, Steven Hrycelak, and Musical Director Jeffrey Gavett). As if its earlier releases, A howl, that was also a prayer (2020) and We Live the Opposite Daring (2024), didn’t already argue that point, it’s rendered incontrovertible by its third, Nonsongs, and the trio of works George Lewis, Wolfgang Von Schweinitz, and Katherine Balch fashioned expressly for it and the ensemble. Whereas another vocal outfit might focus its attention on harmonizing celestially, Ekmeles leaves standardized singing behind for microtonality, extended techniques, and other innovative strategies. As challenging as the music is, it’s all…
With No Resting Place, The Tallis Scholars devote an entire album to the music of Nico Muhly, bringing together six works written for the ensemble at the invitation of Peter Phillips. Often associated with contemporary minimalism, Muhly reveals in this program a far more intricate musical language, shaped as much by his engagement with liturgical traditions and ancient texts as by contemporary concerns surrounding memory, displacement, and cultural identity. The composer’s close affinity with early choral music is evident from Recordare, Domine, the first work he wrote for the ensemble. Without ever resorting to historical pastiche, Muhly appears instead to draw on certain contrapuntal techniques of the Renaissance masters, combining them with more unstable…
Three years ago, saxophonist Jeff Lederer issued Schoenberg on the Beach, an audacious jazz song cycle based on music of the Second Viennese School and performed by Lederer and his partner, vocalist Mary LaRose, alongside jazz artists Hank Roberts, Patricia Brennan, Michael Formanek, and Matt Wilson. It would appear that blurring the lines between jazz and classical comes naturally to Lederer as his latest project There’s a Yearnin’ does something similar, if from the opposite direction. This time, pieces by jazz alto saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Oliver Nelson are delivered in a chamber-like manner, with Lederer (on clarinet and alto saxophone) and LaRose now augmented by the Brooklyn-based Wildebeest Wind Quintet: flutist Michel Gentile,…
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
…Johanna Summer’s collaboration with producer Andreas Brandis has been steadily building traction. Their first venture was a highly acclaimed solo album, “Resonanzen”; that was followed by “Cameo”, a duo album with saxophonist Jakob Manz, and the concert in Lucerne became the catalyst for the new album “Dialoge” (dialogues). The context here is four duos. Each of them features Summer on one of two grand pianos, with another pianist – Claire Huangci, Kit Armstrong, Danae Dörken and Igor Levit – on the other. The objective is to create an open-ended conversation between tradition and the present, between composition and improvisation. As for the repertoire, Summer’s studio guests were encouraged to take as much liberty…
“Walden consists of a series of musical sketches inspired by the 1854 novel of the same name by Henry David Thoreau”, thus reads the short description of this project by Heiner Goebbels. But those familiar with the oeuvre of the German trans-media conceptualist and composer know that with Goebbels it’s never quite that simple. In his 1998 creation Walden, composed for expanded orchestra with speaker, Goebbels incorporates a wide-flung stream of inspirations and approaches, spanning excerpts from Thoreau’s “Walden”, soundscape-design in the spirit of audio plays, arsenals of outlandish instruments and sonic layouts as much at home in the avantgarde as they borrow from popular music, all brought to life with Peter Eötvös conducting and Bob Rutman…
An abundance of tildes occupies our title space as ~Nois returns with What Is ~Nois, the follow-up to Kinds of ~Nois.
The playfulness of the album title translates to the music, while the implied question, “What is noise?” is a challenge to the listener.
What is noise? In music, the answer is subjective. Some listeners call rap, metal and improvised jazz noise, while others embrace these genres.
In like fashion, some feel comfortable with the sounds of a city, while others call it cacophony.
Is ~Nois noise? Even within the boundaries of What Is ~Nois, the variety of tracks may lead to differing opinions.
Even the question “What is ~Nois?” is difficult to answer. On the surface, the ensemble is…
Canadian composer Robert Humber is prolific, releasing two albums in 2025. Into Air, his first offering for 2026, is an ambitious collection of pieces written from 2020-2022 for overdubbed solo instruments. Humber’s work involves repetition as a grounding principle, with a fascination for playing with texture serving as a refreshing element.
The title track is played by violinist Adrian Levine. Cast in three movements, it features overlapping ostinatos that first undulate, then gallop through a triadic harmonic palette. In the middle of the piece, there is a fetching passage for hocketing glissandos that softens its edges. The presence of reverb, here as elsewhere, gives the acoustic instruments an outsized character, as if…
Nowhere Sessions was recorded in a secluded family cabin deep in the heart of Iceland, far from the bustle and roar. According to Snorri Hallgrímsson, the old cabin is “not only a retreat but a place of memory and continuity.”
The album is as much about meaningful solitude as it is about solidarity, although the two are often complementary.
The lead single “I Am Weary, Don’t Let Me Rest” is indicative of the album’s intimacy. The video begins with an image of the composer’s hand poised above the piano before the camera expands to reveal a home filled with musicians, exuding an incredible warmth. The strings ease in like clouds covering the horizon. Soon there is a second pair of hands at the ivories, a statement of…
The accordion emerges as a central instrument across three substantial concertante works exploring contemporary classical expression within Baltic music tradition. The program centers on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s 2007 Prophecy, a single-movement concerto examining the figure of the Seer, one who perceives future events yet faces societal rejection for this gift. The work unfolds across a substantial duration, maintaining musical momentum despite the absence of traditional movement divisions. Tüür’s opening establishes an orchestral foundation through soft, sustained sonority, gradually building in volume. The accordion enters almost imperceptibly embedded within orchestral texture, emerging gradually from accompaniment toward solo…
Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works brings together pianist Alice Sara Ott and the repertoire of the Icelandic composer, who passed away in 2018, in a series of solo piano transcriptions released by Deutsche Grammophon. The project is based on arrangements published by Faber Music, drawing from works originally written for film scores (The Theory of Everything, Copenhagen Dreams, Arrival, and Personal Effects) as well as albums such as Englabörn and Orphée. The album follows two preparatory EPs released in 2025, ahead of the full release in 2026. The choice of solo piano significantly reshapes the perception of this music. While Jóhannsson was known for layering orchestral and electronic textures, these versions refocus the writing on melodic lines, harmonic…
Roomful of Teeth has long pushed boundaries on what a choir can do, using their mouthes, tongues, and throats for more than simply singing or humming. Singer/songwriter/composer Gabriel Kahane consistently ignores the boundaries between pop, theater, and concert music – if it contains tunes and can support lyrics, it’s on the table. Knowing these facts, it seems inevitable that these artists would come together on a project.
With cuts for each singer in Roomful of Teeth, Elevator Songs presents a cycle concerning the denizens of an unnamed hotel that defies all boundaries of space and time, allowing the stories to take place in the present, past, and future. Given the eclectic nature of the narratives, it makes sense that each track follows its own…
The ferny Brutalist cityscape on the cover of Soli City’s Poetics of a New Estate is a fine advertisement for what’s inside: curated Copenhagen vibelessness, shorn of grit but not without a certain numinous quality. Anyone who’s heard the computer-screen fantasias of ML Buch’s Suntub or the mallsoft jazz of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night knows on some level what to expect: spiffy ’80s guitar that twangs and ripples just this side of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” a conservatory-schooled ear for arrangement, a lack of friction that belies the spookiness rumbling underneath. Less expected are the jarring tonal shifts liable to induce whiplash across its 45 minutes — and which would seem haphazard if every single one of them wasn’t…
With Vesper, Sean Shibe continues his collaboration with the Pentatone through a program entirely devoted to contemporary music. Released in 2026, the recording brings together works by Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, and James Dillon, three composers with no direct ties to the guitar, yet whose writing highlights some of its most unexpected possibilities. The unifying thread lies less in any clear stylistic or aesthetic coherence than in an exploration of contrasting sonic textures. Adès’s Forgotten Dances, which open the album, revisit the model of the Baroque suite while subjecting it to modern distortions. Shibe approaches them with a highly controlled sense of articulation, serving the rhythmic complexity of the works, but his reading, at times…