…The long-standing duo of percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys, hereafter GBSR and augmented here by flautist Taylor MacLennan, offers Morton Feldman’s homage to his erstwhile artistic comrade Guston, along with Why Patterns? (1978) and Crippled Symmetry (1983) in a wonderfully annotated six-disc set commensurate with the label’s other Feldman and Cage boxes, for which all involved have been justly lauded. The label has made a specialty of these two composers who are, clumsily and too often, still associated with the New York School, a designation that does the individuality of their work no justice. It is, however, music for which performance traditions are still in formation, making these sets doubly important for the deep dives…
Category: classical
This exceptional homage to jazz pianist Bill Evans (1929-1980) honours him in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin. Pianist Thomas Clausen, bassist Thomas Fonnesbæck, and drummer Karsten Bagge channel the spirit of Evans’ own great trios, from the classic, template-setting iteration with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian to ones involving Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera, Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker, and Eddie Gómez and Marty Morell without imitating any one of them. Trumpeter Anders Malta also adds to the release and through his involvement recalls the landmark collaborations between Gil Evans and Miles Davis, and the versatile Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and conductor Jean Thorel help distinguish the release by partnering…
Yamila Rios is a kind of sound vessel — a composer, singer, and cellist who has the ability to conjure ethereal beauty in multiple contexts, carving out a space where gauzy textures, elegant melodic gestures, an almost subversive rhythmic presence, and trippy incantations mingle, collide, and pull apart. While she makes drifty, ambient pop as Yamila, she’s also been actively collaborating with choreographers and dance companies. Despite placid surfaces, her music pulses with movement. Splitting her time between Madrid, in her native Spain, and Brussels, Belgium, Yamila has found strong collaborators in the Echo Collective, whose founding duo — violinist Margaret Hermant and violist Neil Leiter — has established it as one of the go-to string ensembles in…
“These performances, by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, are simply astonishing in their fluency,” wrote UK magazine Gramophone of Holliger’s album Zwiegespräche, and the description applies with equal pertinence to con slancio, with its inspired and inspiring play of energies.
The title piece, which opens the programme here, was written by the Swiss composer and nonpareil oboist as a tribute to musical partner Schüpbach: “Since I began playing in duo with Marie-Lise, I’ve been fascinated by the way our two instruments expand each other’s range and palette of tone colours. New sound paths have opened up for me.”
The album includes premier recordings of six Holliger compositions written between 2018…
Written in the 1970s, Zorn’s earliest game pieces are legendary (often discussed and workshopped in secret but rarely performed in public) and Curling from 1978 is one of the most elusive and hermetic.
Focusing exclusively on long tones, it is quite unusual in Zorn’s canon-meditative, minimalist, and hypnotic.
Performing here are two ensembles from the Bay Area that have had close ties with Zorn for over forty years and are perfectly suited to execute this challenging and beautiful work.
This recording brings together two Bay Area ensembles with deep, decades-long ties to Zorn’s music: the Rova Saxophone Quartet and the William Winant Percussion Group.
Most of the music recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and its founder, Artistic Director, and conductor Gil Rose appears on their own BMOP/sound label, but issuing an album on New Focus Recordings can’t help but enhance appreciation for the incredible work they’re doing and legacy they’re building. While the contemporary focus of the release certainly dovetails with the BMOP’s own modus operandi, The 21st-Century Orchestra presents the work of four composers, not one, with each on faculty at Brown University. Even a single listen to the release shows the institution is fortunate to have such distinguished figures as Wang Lu, Anthony Cheung, Eric Nathan, and Butch Rovan on staff.
Recordings featuring their work have appeared…
What if insomnia were a great black black ball of smoke, drifting above thoroughfares, slowly unfurling into ovoid shapes before spreading its tentacles across the land? What if it were to descend upon the general populace, creeping insidiously lower and lower until it cloaked local buildings and was inhaled by those below? What if it became virtually indistinguishable from the night? Yuki Murata’s video for Takahiro Kido‘s title track may be seen as a metaphor, but the subject might be extended to depression, apathy, or even the state of the world today. The music follows suit: foreboding, patient, enveloping. On this track, Kido is joined by other members of Anoice, who will reappear throughout the set. Insomnia contains tracks with the full band and…
A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher.
2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
Since their founding in 2012, the vision string quartet has stood out for its genre-defying approach and fearless flexibility — performing classical repertoire from memory, composing its own works, and blurring boundaries between classical, rock, jazz, and minimalism.
In the Fields is the young quartet’s bold return — their ACT debut and first recording in five years. It’s a single, choreographed journey that fuses the spirit of folk, the pulse of dance, and the depth of classical tradition into one seamless arc.
Inspired by Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet and its dramatic five-movement form, the album reimagines the string quartet as a living, breathing band — one that thrives on improvisation, rhythm, and fearless experimentation.
Although James Opstad first recorded on double bass at Eastcote Studios, London, in September 2006, on an album entitled Interpretations (2006) credited to a drummer named Jon Opstad, James Opstad did not release an album under his own name until Drift (2025).
In the intervening years, the bassist had played or recorded with Apartment House — for instance, he played on the title track of O, Zomer (2018) by Cassandra Miller — with saxophonist Joe Wright in the duo called duck-rabbit, and in the quartet Jack Davies’ Flea Circus.
On Drift, which was recorded by Simon Reynell in London and Birmingham from 2020 to 2024, a selection of musicians played five Opstad compositions, ranging in…
Given the fact that Matteo Pagamici and Michael Künstle have already composed for TV and film, it’s no surprise that their debut album is cinematic. The bonus is a 92-piece orchestra, which makes every piece sound like a film trailer or theme.
Together, the tracks form a “Musical Travel Diary,” excerpts of which are found in the accompanying book; each is accompanied by a photo and a brief essay.
This being said, one may wish to make their own associations, especially in the opener, “Abstract 2.0.” The tone is Jurassic Park, widescreen large, bursting when the drums and brass advance. Inspired by the overstimulation of a big city, the piece also promises adventure and teems with possibility. In this world, anything…
There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music-a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. Solo Three, the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.
Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated…
Buyers of the physical version of this album, which made classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2025, will get an explication of the contents, much of it from composer Hannah Kendall, that contains a good deal of language aimed at the ideological environment of Columbia University, where Kendall received a PhD; one hears of “creolised sites of connectivity” (not to mention “créolité”), “the Plantation Machine and its ongoing feedback loop system that continues today,” and more in this vein. The deployments of the instruments in Kendall’s compositions reflect these ideas and embody imagery associated with them (“The timbral qualities of the radio feedback and interference” in the opening shouting forever into the receiver, for example, “serve to emulate…
Few musicians have scaled the progressive rock battlements with such elegance as Jo Quail. From multiple collaborations with post-rock and metal bands – MONO to Enslaved and beyond – to her own steady flow of extraordinary, genre-melting releases, the cellist is acknowledged as an essential player in the creative underground.
Part of Quail’s charm is that her music is pointedly alive: a never-ending work-in-progress that she returns to in performance, feeding off the tunes, tones and spontaneous ideas that appear to magically coalesce in her songs.
This is particularly prominent on Notan, which features a brand-new version of ‘Rex’, a song originally found on her solo debut From the Sea. In its earlier form, ‘Rex’ was dazzling but…
Is Abel Selaocoe the most exciting musician in the world right now? Adding to the growing case is his third album, which presents his 2023 cello concerto, recorded live in London this year with the Aurora Orchestra. Here the prodigious Selaocoe, classically trained in Soweto and Manchester, interweaves South African ancestral and hymnal traditions with Western classical music, to inimitable effect.
Opening with a cascade of percussion, the first three movements are propelled by rhythm and energy, enhanced by regular collaborator Bernhard Schimpelsberger. It’s richly varied, with angular strings, guttural throat-singing, explosions of brass, and even a vocal percussion battle. He makes sparing use of the orchestra,…
In his work with images and sounds, Bruno Duplant courts mystery. The French polymath’s photos are blurred, smudged, and absent of color; his music proceeds from bare suggestion and generally covers its tracks. Judith Wegmann, on the other hand, engages with the immediate. The Swiss pianist is active in both new music and improvisational circles, and even her recent foray into electronically affected sound, a recording of Stockhausen’s Kon.Takte, was recorded in just a couple days. They may not sound like an obvious pairing, but Univers Parallèles: Des Nuits Et Des Jours is their second record.
The revealed details of their collaboration leave a lot to speculation. It was “recorded in 2024 at Judith’s atelier in Biel, Switzerland and…