Arvo Pärt is perhaps the most frequently performed contemporary composer, and part of the reason for that is the flexibility of his music. Not only do his works stand up to his own rearrangements into various forms, but his music holds up when performed by many kinds of singers and instrumentalists, even by amateur choirs, although it requires a certain technical tautness. Thus, with a performance by the historically oriented Concerto Copenhagen, one might object that Pärt was not a Baroque composer, but what is done on this performance by conductor Tõnu Kaljuste and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir does not break any boundaries. The Concerto Copenhagen strings avoid vibrato and have clear attacks that stand up to the vast atmosphere…
Category: classical
Moving Images invites the audience to explore the deep connections between sound and imagery, encouraging an introspective journey where the boundaries blur between classical music, cinematic storytelling, and mental imagery. Spanning sombre chamber pieces, ominous yet hopeful and hypnotic ambiances, soft solo piano interludes, poetic and playful flutes, to tension-laced cinematic strings and synths, Emil Friis‘ latest work transcends the conventional album release. The project expands into a collaboration with a group of filmmakers, exploring how music and film intertwine to provoke our interpretation, the sound we experience and our internal narratives.
Each track is paired with a corresponding film, with the filmmakers — including Kevin Brooks,…
It is a shame that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to bring attention to Valentin Silvestrov, the foremost Ukrainian composer of the day. Conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra have examined his orchestral output in a series of albums containing highly worthwhile works, and here is another, which made classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2025. Both works are receiving their world premieres here. Lyndon-Gee writes his own ambitious liner notes, which quote Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the nature of postmodernism and state that he had an overwhelming feeling during rehearsals that the Symphony No. 8, composed in 2012 and 2013, had a feeling of prophecy about what was coming next in Ukraine.
György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, Op. 24, have been recorded by various soprano-and-violin pairs. The work poses challenges for both participants, from extended violin techniques to Sprechstimme, large leaps, and yelping in the vocal part. Yet it is perhaps the shifting relationships between the singer and the violin, with the violin part containing elements of both accompaniment and dialogue, that is the greatest trick. Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber have performed the work together for some time, and they are quite sensitive to the roles played by the two parts. As the title suggests, the work consists of settings of brief texts from Kafka’s letters and other incidental texts. Some are less than 15 seconds long, and there is a mysterious…
An audacious collection of new music, Orbiting Garden features pianist William Hobbs performing pieces by Christos Hatzis (b. 1953) and Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988).
While three of its four pieces are by the Greek-Canadian composer, the one by the Indian-English composer Sorabji, Nocturne “Djâmi” (1928), is no footnote but instead a twenty-three-minute colossus. Adding considerably to the release’s value, the pieces by Hatzis, Through a Glass Darkly, Face to Face, and Orbiting Garden, have never before been recorded until now.
As different as the composers are, there are commonalities: each straddles two distinct cultures and attempts to synthesize them in his music, and, as Hobbs points out, each also…
With Polygon Reflections, Galya Bisengalieva has become the latest artist to release an entirely remixed and reimagined version of her latest album – virtually a new work – joining Glacier, The Cure and Hatis Noit, the later who also appears on this set. This is not only a great way to draw welcome attention to the original compositions, but to amplify subtle nuances and add fresh perspectives.
But first, it’s important to remind listeners of the album’s original intent: to focus our attention to the ravaging of sacred Kazakh land by the Russians, who irradiated the steppe known as the Polygon with 456 nuclear tests, destroying the local ecosystem, taking what they claimed was “uninhabited” and turning it into the uninhabitable.
The original “Alash-Kala,” the opening track…
On his newest recording for ECM’s New Series, lute virtuoso Rolf Lislevand turns to the revolutionary Baroque literature for archlute and chitarrone, interpreting 17th century lute composers’ works largely found in their first printed books – their respective libri primi. In striking solo performances, the Norwegian explores the progressive nature of pieces by the Italians Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini and Bernardo Gianoncelli as well as two Recerercadas of Spaniard Diego Ortiz.
Lislevand takes historically informed liberties in his interpretations, improvising frequently, as was custom at the time, and even contributes his own personal study of the challenging Passacaglia form with his “Passacaglia al modo mio”.
Remastered and reissued for the first time, Piano Studies 337 is a 1962-released private-press from spiritual teacher and chemist Willem Nyland, improvised on a bizarrely tuned baby grand piano after one of his weekly lectures.
In 1924, Nyland and his wife, the Hungarian-American designer, painter and illustrator Ilonka Karasz went to see notorious Greek-Armenian philosopher, mystic and composer George Gurdjieff speak on his first trip across the Atlantic. Impressed by his teachings, the Nylands began to work with Gurdjieff, hosting a group Stateside that disseminated his weekly teachings. In the mid to late ’60s though, long after Gurdjieff had passed away, Nyland broke ties with the Foundation, forming his own independent…
The three chamber works on New Thread Quartet‘s Saxifraga speak vociferously on behalf of the saxophone ensemble’s commitment to new music. Favouring texture and atmosphere over melody and traditional compositional forms, the group’s second New Focus release utilizes multiphonics, alternate tunings, non-pitched sounds, and other techniques to navigate unconventional sonic territories. Such explorations are consistent with the quartet’s avowed mission to present daring new music for the saxophone and to use its high-level playing in the service of living composers.
The NYC-based saxophone quartet comprises Geoffrey Landman (soprano), Kristen McKeon (alto), Erin Rogers (tenor) and Zach Herchen (baritone), though Jonathan Hulting-Cohen is…
Composer Catherine Lamb (b. 1983) deals with harmonic spectra and microtones in her work.
Slow, staggered presentations of overtones unfold into rich vertical sonorities, with the tiniest shift in intonation serving more as an event than an inflection. Ghost Ensemble (Margaret Lancaster, flute; Sky Macklay, oboe; Ben Richter, accordion; Lucia Stavros, harp; Chris Nappi, hammered dulcimer; Martine Thomas, viola; Tyler J Borden, cello; James Ilgenfritz and Gregory Chudzik, contrabass) is a go-to for adventurous music-making, and they take to Lamb’s with commitment and precision.
Interius/Exterius (2022) is a large-scale piece in which Lamb deals with the spatiality of sounds. As the title suggests, the juxtaposition…
Although she has been releasing albums since 2011, the Serbian-born New York resident, composer, pianist, performer and improviser Teodora Stepančič is here making her second appearance on Another Timbre — the first as a composer as her previous appearance on the label was as the pianist who performed Mark R. Taylor’s compositions on his album Aftermaths (Another Timbre, 2018).
In the years between that release and O A | F G, years which included the COVID disruption, Stepančič self-released an impressively varied 14 albums digitally. One of those featured “OA” performed by the ensemble Ordinary Affects and Douglas Farrand + people buying books at MIT bookstore Boston, released in December 2018.
The frightening ubiquity of artificial intelligence can be enough to concern any artist who possesses even a modicum of creative dignity. However, acclaimed Canadian composer Andrew Staniland offers a refreshing deployment of innovations; one that, in the words of a recent press release, “emphasizes rather than approximates humanity”.
In collaboration with the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab (MEARL) at Memorial University College in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Staniland has been working for the last several years on the digital instrument JADE, a versatile tool that, according to the press release, “expands upon conventional tactile means of performing music, employing sensors that measure environmental traits such as humidity, temperature…
Composer Sven Helbig has stated that the letter A in the title of this work stands for the German words Atem (“breath”) and Anfang (“beginning”), both of which play roles in the text of his Requiem A. Listeners are encouraged to invest in the physical version of his album, where he speaks at greater length about the name; the notes are framed as a conversation between the composer and his 14-year-old daughter, and it was she who suggested the name, pointing to the sense of renewal as well as memory that characterizes the requiem mass. It is a remarkable work.
One could listen to it as an attempt to write something for a durable German choir, here, the Dresdner Kreuzchor, akin to the contemporary music being offered to British choirs.
Performing with veteran free improv percussionist William Winant, Zeena Parkins – probably one of the greatest living harpists – returns with a poetic, magickal set inspired by visual artist Jay DeFeo.
Always reliable, whether she’s working alone or with regular collaborators like Ikue Mori or Fred Frith, Parkins is an incredibly distinctive player. We can’t think of many other artists who can make an instrument like the harp sound so different and so open-ended. And playing against Winant’s microtonally-tuned set of bells and gongs she sounds fully refreshed, playfully following his resonant chimes with plucks and runs that skewer perceptions of the instrument. It’s almost too easy to label Modest of the Magic Thing as hypnotic, but Parkins has a way of casting…
Many releases highlighting women composers have appeared in recent years. What distinguishes the latest one from violinist Laura Kobayashi and pianist Susan Keith Gray (aka The Kobayashi/Gray Duo) isn’t therefore its programming concept but instead the specific composers featured. The musical partners have made inspired choices in coupling works by living composers Nicky Sohn, Angela Elizabeth Slater, Rhian Samuel, and Gwyneth Rollin with ones by Florence Price, Ethel Barns, Borghild Holmsen, and Hilda Jerea. Adding considerably to the release’s value is the fact all of the pieces are world premiere recordings. The music of Price has recently received a great deal of attention, so the inclusion of her ‘Three Negro Spirituals’, while welcome, isn’t all…
Teddy Abrams is a restless, creative spirit.
While occupying the world of contemporary classical music, his works – ranging from his Grammy-winning Piano Concerto (2022) to the esoteric song cycle The Order of Nature (featuring vocals from My Morning Jacket‘s Jim James) – are unique and boundless. For his latest work, Abrams is working on a much smaller scale, as Preludes comprises 16 solo piano pieces, ranging in style, mood, and execution.
As Abrams explains on his Bandcamp page, each piece “comes from an improvisational exercise that turns into completed work by refining the spontaneously created material, stripping away unnecessary and superfluous elements”. He further describes Preludes as “a study in…
The music of Estonian composer Toivo Tulev has been described as minimalist, and it has been conducted by the likes of Paul Hillier, who might seem ideal for getting its sparse, precise textures. However, the music on this 2025 release really isn’t minimalist (and nor is it nationalist music of the old Soviet type). It is more or less programmatic, for one thing, with each of the four works on the album having specific extramusical references; the album’s title work is clear enough in what it depicts, and the colors of the music, though they emerge slowly, are highly varied. Two folk flutes appear on the album, the ney in the solo title work and the kaval in Black Mirror, which is written for an entire symphony orchestra. The final Fana is for the unusual combination of voice and viola.
Joe Hisaishi Conducts… documents a concert given at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on 31 July 2024. There Hisaishi performed his own ‘The End of the World’ suite in a version as well as his friend and colleague Steve Reich’s ‘The Desert Music’.
Inspired by a visit to New York City in 2007, Hisaishi composed ‘The End of the World’ as a three-movement suite that explores the chaos resulting from the collapse of global order in the aftermath of 9/11. By 2015, Hisaishi had transformed the suite into a five-movement work. Reich’s ‘Desert Music’ was inspired by three American deserts with historical and personal significance.
For the concert, Hisaishi was joined by Future Orchestra Classics, an orchestra of young…