On her latest album, Delphine Dora is concerned with temporality, its pace and pressures it produces. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps finds the French pianist, composer and improviser summoning a gentle collection of piano cycles with drone undertows. The record took shape during a time of intense touring, while Dora was simultaneously busy engaging with writings on acceleration and alienation by Hartmut Rosa, a “sociologist of speed”.
According to Rosa, capitalist societies are programmed for constant economic growth, which forces us into a rat race, approaching the world instrumentally and as a competition. It may sound too esoteric for a German sociologist, but Rosa proposes a different mode of…
Category: classical
Michael Stephen Brown’s bona fides as a classical pianist were well-accounted for by his 2021 release Noctuelles and its Medtner and Ravel content. The NYC-based Brown (b. 1987) now demonstrates his prowess as a composer with this debut collection of all-original works. The seven presented speak to the versatility and imagination of their creator in featuring solo piano pieces, chamber works, and art songs. Whereas the piano setting Four Lakes for Children (2024) nods in the direction of Impressionism, the vocal-and-piano work Love’s Lives Lost (2023) flirts with the theatricality of a flamboyant Broadway score. There is variety aplenty in the material, and variety too in the arrangements, with the composer appearing as a solo pianist and accompanist to soprano…
Released a month before the composer’s 89th birthday, Irmin Schmidt‘s Requiem is a meditative work reflecting on loss and commemoration, as well as nature and the environment. The slowly unfolding composition, divided into two parts, is intended for deep listening. Schmidt gathered natural sounds such as rushing water and the calls of birds, frogs, and insects, hearing music within them, and decided to incorporate them into his own music. The beginning of Requiem features abstract piano notes laid over a bed of chirps and croaks, largely undisturbed, until some strange thrusting movements emerge after five minutes, resembling some sort of vehicle like a tractor manipulated into a rhythm. Dripping water periodically works its way into the rhythm as well,…
One might debate whether the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics” belongs to nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli or to Mark Twain, but it is hard to dispute the popularity reflected in over 100 million streams. Whatever the numbers say, Swedish pianist Joel Lyssarides’ music is clearly resonating with audiences around the world. Alongside his streaming success, Lyssarides has accumulated numerous jazz awards, which makes it all the more intriguing that the two words most naturally applied to his music might be “quiet” and “intense.” Classically trained, he deals in subtlety, light grooves and fine details. His melodic compositions and cascading patterns are supported by his longtime collaborators, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer…
Over the past decade, Sono Luminus has done an incredible job promoting the music of Icelandic composers and granting listeners multiple opportunities to hear the wondrous music they make. It’s safe to say that names such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Vikingur Ólafsson, Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, and others would be far less familiar to those outside the country in the absence of the label’s efforts. One of the country’s greatest home-grown talents and exports is composer Daníel Bjarnason, who currently holds the title Artist in Collaboration with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and was previously its Principal Guest Conductor (2019-21) and prior to that Artist in Residence.
One could regard him as the quintessential…
Any contemporary composer would thrill at the prospect of having pianist Emily Manzo as an interpreter. She’s performed as an ensemble member in the Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner and other forward-thinking companies but is also a composer who’s written film scores and operas. As a new music advocate, she’s premiered works by John Luther Adams and Angélica Negrón and also played pieces by Anton Webern and Chopin. As a singer and pianist, Manzo’s recordings have appeared on Tzadik, New Amsterdam Records, Klangbad, and other labels.
Time in Water presents solo piano works composed by her long-time collaborators Mary Halvorson and Aaron Siegel. Halvorson, with whom Manzo has worked in various capacities…
Italian composer and pianist Olivia Belli’s Daimon is comprised of three new works and lasts just under a gorgeous hour. With cellist Raphaela Gromes, violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing and saxophonist Jess Gillam, as well as the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin on the concerto, these compositions explore a neoclassical territory that hint at a vast variety of inspiration including Homer’s The Odyssey, J.S. Bach and Philip Glass.
The music plays more like a film score than anything else. It would fit well in a Jane Austen film or period drama. Belli is a delicate composer who fits well within the modern music scene while still retaining her own unique voice.
The release begins with the title piece, a concerto for piano and string orchestra. Comprised of…
Their last album with works by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Tõnu Kõrvits saw the Gazzana sisters Natascia and Raffaella “achieve the highest levels of instinctive expression”, according to the French daily paper Le Monde, and one could argue that this holds even more true for their new recording with music by Sergei Prokofiev, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke.
The duo’s reading of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 1, op. 80 opens the proceedings with urgency, true to the composer’s intention (Prokofiev famously declared that a particular passage “should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat…”), but also with lyrical serenity, casting the work’s third movement in a spellbinding light. His Five Melodies op. 35a are interpreted with…
The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work — but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW — until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that…
Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…
The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of Drumming. This year, the great American composer turns 90, making this, the group’s fourth Reich album on Currie’s own label, a double celebration.
Sextet, hailing from 1985, features two keyboardists playing piano and synthesisers alongside four percussionists on marimbas, vibraphones, bass drums, crotales, sticks and tam-tams. Shifting patterns interlock with the precision of a Swiss watch across one of the composer’s typical fast, slow, fast, slow, fast arcs. Currie’s recording flickers with subtle nuances with a naturalistic sound less closely mic’d than in Reich’s own classic accounts.
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.
Both artists produce spiritually replenishing music of humanity, integrity, and authenticity. Consistent with To’s own comment that “running through all of it is a thread of hope,” her music chooses uplift over resignation. It’s not…
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant.
Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée in 1999. The title of the album comes from a piece of the same name that Ant wrote for the celebrated pianist Martha Argerich, who premiered the work in duet form in 2018. Gemini – Pieces for Piano includes Ant’s solo version of the track. Anthony Phillips has stayed the course, having long mastered the art of the quiet overachiever. While many of his contemporaries have settled into a predictable cycle of nostalgia, ‘Ant’ continues to operate as a singular moodsmith.
BODY SOUND brings frequent collaborators Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart together in a string trio format. The album’s pieces are all based in improvisation, and they’re all shaped by the spaces they were recorded in, which included two Chicago recording studios and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino helped out by manipulating tapes and sonically translating the unique qualities of the recording locations.
All of the pieces’ titles were drawn from Yoko Ono’s book of text scores, Grapefruit, and all consist of everyday items and actions. The compositions are intimate and delicate, yet they find ways to escape their confines, as if the musicians and their instruments are entranced and…
…Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from…
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all the instruments without any pre-programmed arrangements or loops, and he did the same with Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato. Following Solo Three, which included pieces by Glenn Branca, Laurie Spiegel, Charlemagne Palestine, and Reich, Hall released a different version of Canto Ostinato, this time performed with two of his regular collaborators, Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion.
Glorious Mahalia is Kronos Quartet‘s third release for Smithsonian Folkways. It follows 2020’s Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, and 2022’s Mỹ Lai. It’s an homage to gospel singer and activist Mahalia Jackson’s work, music, life, and friendships. The idea for the album appeared to Kronos founder David Harrington in 2013 after seeing Clarence Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter on TV discussing King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington. Jones provided King with written thoughts, about 15 paragraphs’ worth. As King spoke what he had been provided, Jackson, who had sung before him, was sitting near King and said, “Tell them about the dream. Tell them about the dream, Martin.”
Let’s look at the numbers: John Williams has been on this mortal plane for 93 years, and has been composing for visual media for 73 of those years. Compact discs have been a part of music lovers’ collections for at least four decades, and the “art” of John Williams on CD – a real, curatorial approach to his iconic film scores – began in earnest more than 30 years ago, when the 4CD box set Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology hit record stores in 1993. From basic compilations like Greatest Hits 1969-1999 to hefty box sets covering his material recorded with The Boston Pops and other orchestras on two labels between the ’80s and the ’10s – not to mention the Herculean restoration work of remastering and expanding Williams’ scores beyond…
In Raven Chacon’s music, listening is about paying attention to silence as much as sound. The composer, performer and installation artist presents this dichotomy across experimental noise, chamber and installation works that unfold through layered timbres and ample rest.
His pieces leave space for ideas to emerge in moments that could seem, at first, like quietude. But listen closer and find that so much lives inside: the weight of history, the power of protest, the resonance of performing spaces.
Voiceless Mass, recorded by Milwaukee-based ensemble Present Music, presents three of Chacon’s chamber works that each offer a different lens into his use of sound and silence, showcasing how listening extends beyond pitch.
How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, it seems a breeze, as his latest album Hymns showcases.
And yes, August also runs 99CHANTS, a label that is supposed to push boundaries between genres, but also art forms.
It seems that Hymns serves as some kind of career deconstruction/reconstruction move for August. Going back to his classical piano training, August moves from prime EDM to…