While composer Laurie Christman benefits tremendously from the involvement of the world-renowned London Symphony Orchestra and award-winning conductor Robert Ziegler on this album-length presentation of her music, even a lesser orchestra would have to work very hard to lessen her material’s impact. Sumptuous, lyrical, and rhapsodic, the six settings on Running with Horses present as compelling an argument for her music as could possibly be made, and that they’re delivered exquisitely makes the release all the more rewarding. Nature plays a significant part in the album’s pieces, which are often marked by alluring pastoral splendour; yet while titles such as ‘Rolling Fields’ and ‘Meadow Suite’ do much to conjure visualizations of the outdoors,…
Category: classical
There’s something about the pipe organ that keeps experimental musicians going back for more. No other acoustic instrument pierces and shakes the air in quite the same way.
…Infinity Gradient is the latest in a growing canon of initially serene organ music that later reveals depth and grit. An hour-long piece for organ and 100 loudspeakers, it was composed in 2021 by New York-based composer Tristan Perich, and performed with James McVinnie at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2024.
After an opening flourish, the piece is arranged in seven sections but, in essence, it works through a handful of stretched crescendos.
Perich’s breathing, warping electronics feel like a natural addition to the organ’s…
Narrated by Suzanne Vega and performed by Belgian orchestra ICTUS and vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent, ‘Einstein on the Beach’ re-imagines Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s influential (and divisive) 1976 opera as a 200-minute “minimalistic sound-bath”.
“We had no idea it was an opera,” explained Glass in 2013 to The Guardian when Einstein on the Beach was revived for a run in Melbourne. “You could call the piece anything you wanted to, but the only place we could perform it was an opera house. People began to talk about it as an opera. It was a discovery for us as it was for everybody else.” The truth is that it was an experiment – a long-form collaboration that attempted to skewer perceptions of narrative, instrumentation…
Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument-an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here-has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice…
The Indonesian composer Eunike Tanzil has an interesting story. She was inspired to pursue film music when her father gave her an album of music by John Williams, who has made it to Medan in North Sumatra. Partly trained in the U.S., she has written music for The Addams Family 2 and the fantasy series Abominable and the Invisible City. One can hear her film music background on her debut album, The First of Everything. The album is said by Tanzil to be a “journey of self-exploration,” reflecting key moments in her life thus far. It opens with an orchestral-tuning-like ‘Opening’ that inventively morphs into fuller pieces, and the other 11 tracks are evocations of scenes or aspects of her experiences. Only one, a dark and direct orchestral ‘Requiem’ marking the death…
Living up to its titular promise, Susanna Mendlow‘s Travels with Cello features music from Georgia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Germany, and the United States. The hour-long travelogue’s distinguished by unaccompanied performances and ones partnering her, separately, with pianists Michael Angelucci and Stefan Petrov. Further enhancing the recording is the fact that some of the works are first recordings and some arrangements by the cellist herself. Interestingly, the project’s origin can be traced to the moment her husband, captivated by violinist Maxim Vengerov’s recording of the slow movement from Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Major, suggested she record the work for cello. And with that, the journey began.
Complementing the Mendelssohn work are…
Friends for two decades, their creative partnership began when Philip Glass invited Tenzin Choegyal to perform at Carnegie Hall, igniting a dialogue between their two distinct yet deeply connected musical worlds. Choegyal is an acclaimed Tibetan artist whose music bridges ancestral tradition and contemporary expression. Raised in exile and now based in Australia, he channels his lineage through his art — shaping powerful compositions and serving as an ambassador for Tibetan culture and stories.
Be the Sky features original works from Choegyal and Glass’s two-decade collaboration, with Glass performing on the title track. The 7-track recording also spotlights performances by Scorchio Quartet, actress Saori Tsukada…
Travis Laplante is quite the polymath — a composer, improviser, and saxophonist — he has led the acclaimed tenor saxophone quartet Battle Trance, as well as Subtle Degrees, his duo with drummer Gerald Cleaver, and is recognized as a composer of meticulous, long-form pieces.
His compositional skills are on full display in his latest release, a recording of two string quartets performed by the JACK Quartet, one of the most celebrated interpreters of modern classical music today.
With these string quartets, Laplante‘s role as composer is bolstered by his fascination with resonance. While reading W. A. Mathieu’s music theory book, The Harmonic Experience, Laplante was taken by a section at…
The composer Arlene Sierra has devoted several works to the musical representation of birds, and in this she is hardly alone; such pieces date back to the medieval era, not to mention similar concepts in other musical cultures.
Insects may be a bit less common, but here, too, she has predecessors. With this release, the fourth in a series by the Bridge label devoted to this rising American-British composer, listeners can hear an entire series of bird and insect works, and can focus closely on what Sierra does.
The animals depicted in each piece would be pretty identifiable even for a listener without the guidance of composer or track list, and indeed, it would be interesting to play the album for bird and insect enthusiasts.
Swiss Wandelweiser master reimagined by virtuoso flutist Manuel Zurria in stunning solo interpretations. Jürg Frey’s String Quartet No. 3 and four Extended Circular Music pieces (originally for various chamber ensembles) are transformed into ethereal soundscapes through Zurria’s conceptual approach inspired by Japanese Kintsugi art. Interweaving minimalism with radical experimentalism, these recordings draw startling scope from minimal material means – breath-length utterances dance among complex harmonic clusters, provoking suspensions of time.
…The completed work represents a “conjunction of these two artists” that has “activated a transformative form of experimentalism.” These renderings “dance with an airy…
No orchestra’s interpretation of a composer’s material is ever definitive, yet it would be hard to imagine another bettering the Orchestre National de France’s performances of works by Maurice Ravel. With its Music Director Cristian Macelaru conducting, the orchestra celebrated the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth by presenting his major orchestral works at an early 2025 Ravel festival in Paris, the first concert on February 28th and the last March 13th.
This expansive three-hour document of the shows includes Ma Mère l’Oye, Le Tombeau de Couperin, and the complete Daphnis et Chloé (with the Chœur de Radio France joining the ONF for the latter), plus stellar renditions of La Valse, Une barque sur l’océan, Pavane pour une infante…
British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno’s releases his 3rd album for DG Without Wind, Without Air. The project follows on from the success of The Turning Year (2022) and the skies, they shift like chords (2023). The latter was described by Spectrum Culture with the words: “a remarkable release that unsettles with haunting lines and simultaneously makes one tingle with warmth at a display of beauty”.
The new album includes both solo piano pieces and tracks orchestrated for various combinations of clarinet, guitar, bass, strings, synths, percussion and electronics. There are guest vocal appearances from soprano Grace Davidson and Roger’s daughters Cecily and Lotti Eno, with Roger himself singing on The Moon And The Sea.
Unfolding is Jessica Moss’s most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montréal violinist/composer’s decade-spanning discography that could properly be called ambient. The ex-Silver Mt Zion member and Black Ox Orkestar co-founder draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways: this is not abstract ambient music. Layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, yield deeply emotive genre-defying compositions, guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfolds in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint.
Unfolding is dedicated to “a free Palestine in…
Whereas Rudersdal Chamber Players focused on chamber music by Poul Ruders on its 2022 debut recording, the quintet’s latest concentrates on works by Elena Firsova (b. 1950) and Dmitri Smirnov (1948-2020). Their story is as fascinating as their music, so much so that no appreciation of the latter is complete without some familiarity with their histories as marriage partners and creative artists. But first a few words about the Nordic ensemble Rudersdal Chamber Players (RCP), whose 2017 founding by violinist Christine Pryn came, interestingly enough, at the behest of Lera Auerbach. While visiting the festival Rudersdal Sommerkoncerter, the Russian-American composer suggested that an ensemble of high-profile chamber musicians could…
As two of the three works on Pacific Triptych illustrate, Peter Scott Lewis, like many an American artist has before him, finds creative inspiration in the landscapes of the great country he calls home. The three-part title composition is the San Francisco-based classical composer’s attempt to render the grandeur of the ocean and the limitless sky above it into musical form, whereas the four-movement first book of An American Travelogue draws more broadly for inspiration from places in the western, southwestern, and Gulf Coast parts of the United States. The recording’s third piece, on the other hand, was written with uncut gemstones in mind and is thus aptly titled Seven Nuggets. All three pieces, as diverse as they are, collectively provide a solid account of…
The Orchestra of the Swan has recorded its share of repertory material, much of it from the 20th century, but the 2020s have brought some highly effective thematic recordings from the group and its conductor, David Le Page.
Some of these, including 2025’s Light and Shadow, have been denoted as “mixtape” albums, and these feature arrangements and a generally personal flavor created by Le Page. The general Light and Shadow title doesn’t quite get to the specific nature of the program, which is film music, mostly arranged by Le Page except where the lush originals by Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann already fit the general mood. Hermann’s pieces for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo express that mood perfectly. Not all the pieces were written…
The album title is a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which includes the phrase “what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.” Cellist Clarice Jensen regards the image as a metaphor for the creative process, which often begins in isolation before its public unveiling.
The title track is separated into two parts, a trio of other tracks in-between. One can hear an obvious appreciation for Bach, although the compositional process is vastly different; the cello lines are played, layered and looped to create the illusion of a small ensemble. After a melodic base is established, the counter-melodies begin to develop, growing ever more assured. If a track could be recorded behind closed doors,…
Faten Kanaan‘s music has a transporting quality that is hard to define. The manual repetition of her approach — performing looped keyboard parts entirely by hand — lends her electronic compositions a human feel, as does her choice of organic-leaning sounds and tones. But there is always something otherworldly about them, an abstraction that suggests a natural world shimmering just out of reach.
Diary of a Candle, Kanaan’s sixth album and third for U.K. indie Fire Records, may be her most enigmatic release yet. Its mystique is undeniable — each piece unfolds like a chapter in a dark fairytale that goes nowhere and everywhere. Tracks like “Afternoon” and “Celadon” have a curious, questing nature, though it’s unclear…