Included in the booklet for The Planned Child is a personal note by its creator, Amsterdam-based Avishai Darash that, while brief, casts an illuminating light on the solo piano pieces presented on the 45-minute release. Conspicuous by its absence, however, is anything bio-related, which is perhaps surprising when his professional background is so varied and extensive. Reviewing the experiences he’s had allows for an enhanced appreciation of the music he created for the release. By his own admission, The Planned Child came together over the past year, but “has been more than sixteen years in the making.” It makes sense, then, to first acquire some impression of what happened in the time leading up to the album’s creation before turning to its contents.
Category: classical
The multi-talented musician, bandleader, and entertainer Jon Batiste gets so much acclaim as a pop-jazz headliner that his piano talents are sometimes overlooked. Yet, this four-part series of solo piano recordings has already begun to change those perceptions. Batiste issued his first volume, the highly acclaimed and top-charted Beethoven Blues, in 2024. To follow, he now presents three more volumes: Black Mozart, Vol 2, and Monk Mediations and Monk Movements, comprising Volumes 3 and 4.
Batiste is by no means the first jazz pianist or jazz artist to draw the linkage between classical composers and Thelonious Monk. Yet, given Batiste’s New Orleans upbringing, he brings a more comprehensive palette to the music.
Akira Kosemura‘s second volume of archival works testifies to the Japanese composer’s inexhaustible creativity. Since making his recording debut in 2007, Kosemura has produced a prodigious amount of work, not only solo recordings but scores for video games, television, and movies. It’s safe to presume that the nineteen pieces featured on Diary 2020-2022 are but a sampling of the total amount of material he created over that span. It’s a Kosemura project full stop, as it was composed, arranged, produced, and performed by him. One comes away from the release amazed at the seeming effortlessness with which music emerges whenever this entirely self-taught artist places himself in front of a keyboard.
That the pieces have been issued under…
Getting ahead of next year’s 90th birthday celebrations, American pianist Simone Dinnerstein presents two works by Philip Glass, performing alongside her own string ensemble.
Baroklyn – the name conflates her home borough of Brooklyn and the baroque sensibilities of J.S. Bach – take a far-from-mechanical approach to the composer’s minimalist tics. Their aim is to emulate the passage of time like sand through an hourglass (hence the title) rather than chopping the music into segments like the hands of a clock. And it works.
Arranged by Michael Riesman, Suite from The Hours splices Glass’s score for Stephen Daldry’s film into an almost symphonic three-movement work. The story’s pain and poetry is…
Terry Riley has always had a propensity for cosmic whimsy. As such, and given the fluidity of his work over the last decades, it comes as no surprise that his contribution to flautist Claire Chase’s multi-decade Density 2036 project arrived not in the form of Sibelius-drafted PDFs but as a colourful sketchbook of caricatures, flying creatures, and doodled marginalia.
Expectedly, Riley’s non-conformist approach resonated deeply with Chase’s vision of a future flute repertoire – one that lives outside the rigid boundaries of classical music academia.
Fittingly, The Holy Liftoff spends most of its time in breezy motion and joyous buoyancy, where the eight-part flute chorus, multi-tracked by Chase, and JACK Quartet’s strings generate…
Arvo Pärt’s four symphonies occupy a distinctive place within his output. Written over a span of 45 years, they chart not so much a linear evolution as a series of aesthetic ruptures, from the serial experimentation of the 1960s to the austere spirituality of the Fourth Symphony. By bringing together the complete cycle on a single recording, Eva Ollikainen and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra offer a compelling survey that emphasizes the striking contrasts between the works rather than imposing an artificial sense of continuity. The album joins a still relatively modest discography, long dominated by the various recordings from the Järvi family and Tõnu Kaljuste’s complete cycle. From the opening bars of the First Symphony, Ollikainen adopts an approach…
If Irish violinist Darragh Morgan’s latest release is any indication, Northern Irish contemporary music is not just alive and well but thriving. With the violinist partnering with the Ulster Orchestra and conductor David Brophy, the smartly curated Spin presents four fiercely imaginative works for violin and orchestra written expressly for Morgan by long-time collaborators Bill Campbell, Brian Irvine, Ryan Molloy, and Frank Lyons. Northern Irish musical heritage and traditional classical structures are drawn upon, but the music on Spin, all four pieces world premiere recordings, is in no way constrained by geography or the past when the composers present vivid works emblematic of their distinct personalities.
The personnel involved in the project is…
Anyone looking for an excellent recording of Handel’s masterpiece can find it here. The Irish Baroque Orchestra, led by Peter Whelan, aims to bring the magic and drama of the first performance of this piece, which took place in Dublin in 1742. The orchestra members perform on period instruments, lending the sound a warm, glowing quality throughout. The chorus is relatively small by the standards of many Messiah recordings, in keeping with Handel’s lean yet first-rate forces for the premiere. As a result, individual lines stand out with unusual clarity, aided by excellent recording quality. In addition, the diction across the ensemble is exemplary, such as in “His Yoke is Easy” and the brief “The Lord Gave the Word,” where the chorus dispatches Handel’s plentiful…
The latest entry in Wild Up’s complete account of music by Julius Eastman focuses exclusively on one of his greatest works, 1979’s Gay Guerillia. Although the score is open to any group of instruments of a similar timbre, Wild Up director Christopher Rountree stretched those definitions a bit to forge an orchestral version with four loose instrumental categories.
As Rountree explained, “Our idea for our interpretation is to reach toward one another timbrally so that the instruments begin to blend and transcend their characteristic sounds.” The resulting arrangement recasts the music with fuller voicings and enhanced richness, while still transmitting an essential power and drive. Structured like a chorale fantasia based on…
Since 2024, Kou Records, a label co-run by vocalist Charmaine Lee and sought-after producer and composer Randall Dunn, has been “dedicated to artists who have built their own musical language”. A listen to their small but potent roster bears this out. From Lee’s processed, often violent vocal contortions to Aliya Ultan‘s foreboding song cycle for cello, these are serious artists with daunting resumes. These musicians have often grounded themselves in classical forms, so they know exactly what rules they are breaking.
Taiga Ultan, a classically trained flautist who now creates her own tight constrictions only to break free of them constantly, creates music perfect for the Kou label. With her debut, Shade Zero, she makes a strong argument for…
Arguably no contemporary vocal ensemble is more daring than NYC-based Ekmeles (Charlotte Mundy, Elisa Sutherland, Timothy Parsons, Tomás Cruz, Steven Hrycelak, and Musical Director Jeffrey Gavett). As if its earlier releases, A howl, that was also a prayer (2020) and We Live the Opposite Daring (2024), didn’t already argue that point, it’s rendered incontrovertible by its third, Nonsongs, and the trio of works George Lewis, Wolfgang Von Schweinitz, and Katherine Balch fashioned expressly for it and the ensemble. Whereas another vocal outfit might focus its attention on harmonizing celestially, Ekmeles leaves standardized singing behind for microtonality, extended techniques, and other innovative strategies. As challenging as the music is, it’s all…
With No Resting Place, The Tallis Scholars devote an entire album to the music of Nico Muhly, bringing together six works written for the ensemble at the invitation of Peter Phillips. Often associated with contemporary minimalism, Muhly reveals in this program a far more intricate musical language, shaped as much by his engagement with liturgical traditions and ancient texts as by contemporary concerns surrounding memory, displacement, and cultural identity. The composer’s close affinity with early choral music is evident from Recordare, Domine, the first work he wrote for the ensemble. Without ever resorting to historical pastiche, Muhly appears instead to draw on certain contrapuntal techniques of the Renaissance masters, combining them with more unstable…
Three years ago, saxophonist Jeff Lederer issued Schoenberg on the Beach, an audacious jazz song cycle based on music of the Second Viennese School and performed by Lederer and his partner, vocalist Mary LaRose, alongside jazz artists Hank Roberts, Patricia Brennan, Michael Formanek, and Matt Wilson. It would appear that blurring the lines between jazz and classical comes naturally to Lederer as his latest project There’s a Yearnin’ does something similar, if from the opposite direction. This time, pieces by jazz alto saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Oliver Nelson are delivered in a chamber-like manner, with Lederer (on clarinet and alto saxophone) and LaRose now augmented by the Brooklyn-based Wildebeest Wind Quintet: flutist Michel Gentile,…
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
…Johanna Summer’s collaboration with producer Andreas Brandis has been steadily building traction. Their first venture was a highly acclaimed solo album, “Resonanzen”; that was followed by “Cameo”, a duo album with saxophonist Jakob Manz, and the concert in Lucerne became the catalyst for the new album “Dialoge” (dialogues). The context here is four duos. Each of them features Summer on one of two grand pianos, with another pianist – Claire Huangci, Kit Armstrong, Danae Dörken and Igor Levit – on the other. The objective is to create an open-ended conversation between tradition and the present, between composition and improvisation. As for the repertoire, Summer’s studio guests were encouraged to take as much liberty…
“Walden consists of a series of musical sketches inspired by the 1854 novel of the same name by Henry David Thoreau”, thus reads the short description of this project by Heiner Goebbels. But those familiar with the oeuvre of the German trans-media conceptualist and composer know that with Goebbels it’s never quite that simple. In his 1998 creation Walden, composed for expanded orchestra with speaker, Goebbels incorporates a wide-flung stream of inspirations and approaches, spanning excerpts from Thoreau’s “Walden”, soundscape-design in the spirit of audio plays, arsenals of outlandish instruments and sonic layouts as much at home in the avantgarde as they borrow from popular music, all brought to life with Peter Eötvös conducting and Bob Rutman…