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…
Category: classical
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…
The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work — but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW — until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that…
Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…
The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of Drumming. This year, the great American composer turns 90, making this, the group’s fourth Reich album on Currie’s own label, a double celebration.
Sextet, hailing from 1985, features two keyboardists playing piano and synthesisers alongside four percussionists on marimbas, vibraphones, bass drums, crotales, sticks and tam-tams. Shifting patterns interlock with the precision of a Swiss watch across one of the composer’s typical fast, slow, fast, slow, fast arcs. Currie’s recording flickers with subtle nuances with a naturalistic sound less closely mic’d than in Reich’s own classic accounts.
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.
Both artists produce spiritually replenishing music of humanity, integrity, and authenticity. Consistent with To’s own comment that “running through all of it is a thread of hope,” her music chooses uplift over resignation. It’s not…
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant.
Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée in 1999. The title of the album comes from a piece of the same name that Ant wrote for the celebrated pianist Martha Argerich, who premiered the work in duet form in 2018. Gemini – Pieces for Piano includes Ant’s solo version of the track. Anthony Phillips has stayed the course, having long mastered the art of the quiet overachiever. While many of his contemporaries have settled into a predictable cycle of nostalgia, ‘Ant’ continues to operate as a singular moodsmith.
BODY SOUND brings frequent collaborators Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart together in a string trio format. The album’s pieces are all based in improvisation, and they’re all shaped by the spaces they were recorded in, which included two Chicago recording studios and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino helped out by manipulating tapes and sonically translating the unique qualities of the recording locations.
All of the pieces’ titles were drawn from Yoko Ono’s book of text scores, Grapefruit, and all consist of everyday items and actions. The compositions are intimate and delicate, yet they find ways to escape their confines, as if the musicians and their instruments are entranced and…
…Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from…
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all the instruments without any pre-programmed arrangements or loops, and he did the same with Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato. Following Solo Three, which included pieces by Glenn Branca, Laurie Spiegel, Charlemagne Palestine, and Reich, Hall released a different version of Canto Ostinato, this time performed with two of his regular collaborators, Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion.
Glorious Mahalia is Kronos Quartet‘s third release for Smithsonian Folkways. It follows 2020’s Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, and 2022’s Mỹ Lai. It’s an homage to gospel singer and activist Mahalia Jackson’s work, music, life, and friendships. The idea for the album appeared to Kronos founder David Harrington in 2013 after seeing Clarence Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter on TV discussing King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington. Jones provided King with written thoughts, about 15 paragraphs’ worth. As King spoke what he had been provided, Jackson, who had sung before him, was sitting near King and said, “Tell them about the dream. Tell them about the dream, Martin.”
Let’s look at the numbers: John Williams has been on this mortal plane for 93 years, and has been composing for visual media for 73 of those years. Compact discs have been a part of music lovers’ collections for at least four decades, and the “art” of John Williams on CD – a real, curatorial approach to his iconic film scores – began in earnest more than 30 years ago, when the 4CD box set Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology hit record stores in 1993. From basic compilations like Greatest Hits 1969-1999 to hefty box sets covering his material recorded with The Boston Pops and other orchestras on two labels between the ’80s and the ’10s – not to mention the Herculean restoration work of remastering and expanding Williams’ scores beyond…
In Raven Chacon’s music, listening is about paying attention to silence as much as sound. The composer, performer and installation artist presents this dichotomy across experimental noise, chamber and installation works that unfold through layered timbres and ample rest.
His pieces leave space for ideas to emerge in moments that could seem, at first, like quietude. But listen closer and find that so much lives inside: the weight of history, the power of protest, the resonance of performing spaces.
Voiceless Mass, recorded by Milwaukee-based ensemble Present Music, presents three of Chacon’s chamber works that each offer a different lens into his use of sound and silence, showcasing how listening extends beyond pitch.
How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, it seems a breeze, as his latest album Hymns showcases.
And yes, August also runs 99CHANTS, a label that is supposed to push boundaries between genres, but also art forms.
It seems that Hymns serves as some kind of career deconstruction/reconstruction move for August. Going back to his classical piano training, August moves from prime EDM to…
Fountain sees Emika delivering one of the most personal and emotionally resonant records of her career. Following a successful crowdfunding campaign to build a new immersive recording studio, the Berlin-based artist fulfills her promise to supporters with an album that feels both intimate and fully realized.
Over the years, Emika’s work has moved fluidly between classical composition and electronic pop, often leaning more heavily toward one side or the other. On Fountain, however, she brings these worlds together with striking clarity, revealing herself at her core as a songwriter. The result is a cohesive and deeply human record that captures her artistic identity more completely than ever before.
In 2017, in two batches of five, Another Timbre released ten albums of music by eight Canadian composers (two of the composers, Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller, each had a couple of albums among the ten) accompanied by a booklet about the composers. The intention was to improve Canadian composers’ reputations, one which was soon achieved. As well as Catlin Smith and Miller, with the help of Another Timbre, Canadian composers such as Mark Sabat and Martin Arnold gained in popularity.
Although Eldritch Priest is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and writes on sonic culture and experimental aesthetics, he is also a composer and improviser. He has a relatively…
…Jakob Ullmann was born in July 1958, in Freiberg, Saxony, East Germany, the son of theologian and politician Wolfgang Ullmann. After Jakob refused to serve military service in East Germany, he worked as a groundskeeper, boilerman and house painter in Dresden from 1978 to 1982. From 1979 to 1982, he studied church music in Saxony. He was denied official enrolment in Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts and so he studied composition privately with Friedrich Goldmann until 1984. Since the early eighties, Ullmann has been working as a freelance composer and author of self-published writings, also teaching classes at different universities on New Music, mediaeval music, history of Byzantine music as well as music philosophy. His works have ben performed at festivals of…
Jürg Frey album Je laisse a la nuit son poids d’ombre (“I leave to the night its weight of shadow” in English) is his thirteenth for the label, some as composer, some as musician.
…Impressive as Frey’s tally of releases with Another Timbre is, it is worth remembering that in his earlier years from 1996 to 2010 most of his releases were on Edition Wandelweiser, which also catalogues his compositions (currently up to 188 of them) varying from many compositions for a single piano up to several compositions for a full orchestra. The composition which gives this album its name dates back to 2019-20 and was written for two soprano voices, cello, violin, trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute,…