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…
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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, 
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.
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 
A central fixture in the world of string quartets for the past thirty years, the Zehetmair Quartett’s ECM recordings of Schumann, Hindemith, Bartók and Hartmann have received luminous praise — Gramophone lauded their Schumann as “Record of the Year”, while The Sunday Times described their Hindemith and Bartók performances as “playing of huge finesse in both pieces,” calling them “a real benchmark”.
“Cooperation, interdependence and kindness” are the qualities that Meredith Monk emphasizes in Cellular Songs, “as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now.” Of the work’s premiere performance the New York Times wrote, “Ms. Monk spun together divergent elements so fluidly that it created an unmistakable sense of hope. It’s much easier to conceive of bridging public divides — or even containing multitudes, as an individual — when you witness a synthesis like the one created in Cellular Songs.”
Composer, alone is a collection of twelve solo piano pieces by Swiss composer 
With Salt, the ever adventurous Maya Beiser turns her attention to the unnamed biblical figure of Lot’s wife, in the cellist’s eyes “a symbol of all the women who have been punished for remembering, for feeling too much, for refusing to move on … A woman who dared to turn around.” As recounted in “Genesis,” when angels instructed Lot and his family to flee Sodom, his wife “looked back, and she became a pillar of salt” (19:26). While some interpret the event as retribution for the choosing of worldly life over salvation, the greater meaning for Beiser lies in the turning to look, the “instinctual, human act of looking back at what you love, even as it’s being destroyed.”
The ever-exploratory composer Henry Threadgill is more restless than ever at 81 and, thank goodness, shows no signs of slowing down. 
Sun Triptych is the eagerly-awaited second ECM New Series album by British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova. The first, 2014’s String Paths, made an immediate impact, picking up a Grammy Nomination and superlative reviews, The Strad praising its “glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures,” while the Washington Times hailed it as an “exciting, deeply moving, original and triumphant” recording. The new album embraces a still broader expressive range, as is immediately evident from the opening Whispered Lullaby and Suite in Jazz Style, both for viola and piano, the first a yearning song, the second an imaginative chamber meditation on jazz gestures, atmospheres and textures. Spinning a Yarn, for violin and hurdy-gurdy, has a touching…
This CD is about quality not quantity – less than thirty minutes in total, but absolutely some of the most incredible music Zorn has ever composed. Dramatic, intense, mercurial, challenging, and endlessly virtuosic, Zorn’s writing for strings is amongst the most exciting ever achieved in the classical world.
A deluxe 4-CD box set bringing together the seminal Columbia recordings of Terry Riley. A landmark reissue from one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century music.