Taking a critically acclaimed, historic composition and reconfiguring it for a seemingly anachronistic style can be tough to pull off, even, to some ears, heretical. However, for composer and pianist Aaron Wyanski, retooling the works of the prolific, groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has become something of an ongoing project, with results nothing short of stunning and deeply imaginative. Taking these unorthodox, atonal works and dropping them into the mid-century world of lounge jazz works a lot better than you would think, and the most ambitious example of this ongoing fascination may be his best work yet.
Pierrot Lunaire is Schoenberg’s 1912 interpretation of 21 poems by Albert Giraud,…
Category: classical
The Turtle Island String Quartet has built a unique position in chamber music. They improvise as readily as they read from a score, and they are committed to bringing diverse musical traditions into dialogue with the classical quartet tradition. Throughout the album, these composers write their art-music passages with skill, but the strongest moments come when the quartet is set free to improvise. So fluent is their collective improvisation that on many tracks it is genuinely difficult to tell where the written score ends and the spontaneous invention begins.
Representing the tensions between different musical traditions, the title piece by Balakrishnan is aptly spirited, tuneful, and blues-inflected, with fiddle-style violin playing and ample…
A lot of life can happen when nothing’s going on. As the years tick by, landmarks become less regular. Highs become less vaulted. Lows become less abyssal. There’s a reason that posting to social media is mostly a younger person’s game. It’s not that less becomes less exciting or moving, it’s just less flashy. Most of life tends to happen in those quiet periods, which we far too often write off as boring, which, in turn, makes us feel bad about our lives, as if we’re not living up to the influencers we could be.
On her first album in five years, British composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd explores those moments that fall between the posts, the phone calls and text messages; they might not even warrant a diary entry, depending on how…
Conceived as a series of portraits inspired by his personal encounters, Alter Ego, released by Decca, marks a new direction in the discography of Thibault Cauvin. Extending the ideas of his eponymous book and framed as a kind of sonic travel diary, the album features eleven original pieces, each tied to a figure who left a lasting impression during his journeys. Far removed from the more flamboyant character of his previous works, Cauvin here turns toward a stripped down form of introspection, inviting the listener into a more private, inward world over the course of a 39-minute program.
The album opens with Sabbir and Constanza, two pieces that immediately establish an accessible musical language built on short motifs…
Producer and composer Hannah Peel first worked with percussionist Beibei Wang on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album Neon, which included compositions by Peel as well as Lyra Pramuk and Steve Reich. The two artists then performed a fully improvised concert together as part of Peel’s artist residency in London. Afterwards, they spent five days improvising and recording at Real World Studios. The result is The Endless Dance, a playful, exploratory record inspired by the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism. The music takes several forms, from atmospheric soundscapes to galloping techno workouts. Wang’s spirited percussion and guest musician Hyelim Kim’s colorful playing of the daegeum (a large bamboo flute from Korea) bridge Asian traditions and contemporary…
Combining different genres through your music has become something of a norm these days, the effectiveness and quality relying mainly on two artistic variables – the level of the artist’s knowledge and understanding of the genres they are combining and the ability (including technique) and inventiveness to make such a combination work. The above might sound a bit dry and scientific, but then, it all comes down to the results, and Norwegian pianist, organist and composer Ruth Viggen makes it all art turn into music as art on her second solo album Open Plains.
Throughout the seven piano/ rhythm section compositions, Viggens shows all her knowledge of everything from jazz and classical music to prog and post-rock and at an inventive…
Currently on the piano faculty as Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Bard College, Franco-Irish pianist Isabelle O’Connell has worked with a who’s-who of contemporary composers, from Missy Mazzoli and Julia Wolfe to John Adams and Donnacha Dennehy. Her unwavering commitment to new music is upheld on Cocteau in its premiere of Irish composer Rhona Clarke’s 2022 titular work; it also, however, documents a particularly fertile period in twentieth-century French culture in presenting material by contemporaries of Cocteau (1889-1963). Pieces by Satie, Stravinsky, and Les Six members Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre appear alongside Clarke’s twenty-six-minute work, making…
…for a supremely rewarding presentation.
In one sense, this 8-track collaboration between Pulitzer prize-winning composer-vocalist Caroline Shaw and Grammy award-winning cellist-composer Andrew Yee is a snapshot of a friendship.
The title – Or, the Whale – comes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and in particular from director Wu Tsang’s 2022 silent film version for which Shaw and Yee provided the score. A condensed suite combines cello, electronics and ethereal vocals in a haunting, folk-infused evocation of the novel, whale song and all.
Much here is similarly imaginative. Yee’s uplifting ‘The Trees of Green-Wood’ channels Meredith Monk as Shaw sings a catalogue of trees organised by diameter of trunk: the greater the girth, the louder the music.
Released by Avie Records, Crossing the Bar explores the wide expressive possibilities of the contemporary marimba. Percussionist Mika Stoltzman assembles a rich and varied program that moves fluidly across styles and eras, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Zorn, with Claude Debussy and 21st century composer Miho Hazama in between. Built around close collaborations with several musicians, most notably clarinetist Richard Stoltzman (Mika’s husband and regular collaborator), the program brings together arrangements and contemporary works, including several world premieres. The album opens with the monumental Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in an arrangement for marimba and strings. From the outset, the approach highlights…
Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is not your typical classical violinist. He’s been known to swallow tiny microphones in concert, and he might just break into a homegrown folk tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.
Kuusisto has capably recorded the standard repertoire — including Mozart and Vivaldi — but on his new album, Willows, where he plays his violin and leads the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, he’s making some typically unexpected choices.
At the heart of the album is a performance of The Lark Ascending that’s guaranteed to ruffle feathers. The soothing, pastoral work for violin and orchestra, by British composer by Ralph Vaughan Williams, was written as World War I loomed. Over the past century, the piece has…
Blarf is the name actor/comedian Eric Andre sometimes uses when making music, and his absurdist and confrontational style of comedy can’t help but work its way into his sounds. Blarf has taken many forms over the years, beginning as a Zappa-inspired band with Andre and some college friends, but eventually turning into the disorienting samples and beats of the 2019 album Cease & Deist. Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist is disorienting in a different, more subtle way. The eight tracks here are exactly what the title suggests; cinematic scores tracked with a full orchestra and mostly very much in the tradition of theatrical soundtracks. Andre worked with esteemed soundtrack artist Prateek Rajagopal on these recordings, tracked in…
Despite describing the piano in liner notes as a “non-malleable instrument” (something specialists in prepared techniques would presumably challenge) and “an instrument [he’s] been avoiding throughout [his] compositional career,” Ivan Vukosavljevic, a Serbian composer based in The Hague, has nevertheless created a mind in the heart, a solo piano collection produced in collaboration with Portuguese pianist Joana Gama. She’s issued recordings on a number of labels, including Room40 and Pianola, and presented music by Satie and, on Travels in My Homeland: Portuguese Piano Music (Grand Piano, 2019), composers from her homeland.
Inspirations came from three primary sources for a mind in the heart, the music from…
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…
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…