Anna Thorvaldsdottir was a cellist before she became a composer, and this 11-section work includes two cello parts as well as one for piano and some electronics. The central figure in the work, however, is the flute of Claire Chase, who commissioned the work as part of her “Density 2036” series leading up to the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5. There are motives here recalling that work, but it is the more general resemblance that is most interesting, and it is safe to say that lovers of Varèse will be drawn to the new developments in the idiom here.
Ubique is not a solo work like that of Varèse, but the flute emerges from a neutral background in chunks of distortion, extended technique, and occasional lyricism. It is quite…
Category: classical
Inspired by the journey of his immigrant father from Cuba to the United States in 1959-60, Bryan Senti‘s La Marea takes on new relevance in the face of recent U.S. crackdowns. Once proclaiming, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the nation – despite being founded by immigrants who cleared a path for colonization by killing the natives – has now turned its back on immigrants and refugees, especially those of color.
Senti recalls a different time, an era of hope and idealism, during which people often made the wrenching decision to leave the communities and nations they loved in order to provide better lives for themselves and their children. The music is infused with a dual feeling of…
Luke Cissell always seemed destined for greatness. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was a fiddling champion at the age of eight and performed Mozart’s third violin concerto on his first honors recital soon afterward. Relocating to New York after college, he cut his teeth as a session musician for everyone from Ingrid Michaelson to Philip Glass. He performed at many well-known venues in the area, including Carnegie Hall, CBGBs, Radio City Music Hall, and Lincoln Center. While he is currently a teaching artist with the New York Philharmonic, he still finds time to record a slew of wonderfully eclectic albums, and his new one, String Quartets Nos. 1-5 is undoubtedly no exception.
Cissell‘s discography is a curious one, as it encompasses a refreshing brand of eclecticism.
Four years ago, violinist Nancy Dahn and pianist Timothy Steeves received the JUNO award in the classical composition category for their Duo Concertante recording of R. Murray Schafer’s Duo for Violin & Piano (Wild Bird, Marquis). With Dark Tales, the Canadian ensemble now presents another release featuring material by a Canadian composer, this time the highly regarded Alice Ping Yee Ho. Dahn and Steeves are comfortable performing material from the standard repertoire — a three-CD set of Beethoven’s complete sonatas for violin and piano attests to that — but are as committed to bringing new works into the world.
Active for two decades under the Duo Concertante name, Dahn and Steeves have delivered more than 700 concerts in North America,…
Helmut Lachenmann is 90 last month, but the event has gone largely unmarked in the UK, where his music remains little understood and rarely performed. Elsewhere in Europe he is recognised as one of the important and influential composers of our time, whose music has opened up a wholly new sound world with its forensic exploration of the way instruments are played and the further possibilities they might offer.
At the heart of that exploration has been Lachenmann’s three string quartets – ‘Gran Torso’, composed in 1971-72 and revised in 1988, ‘Reigen Seliger Geister’ (Round of Blessed Spirits, 1989), and ‘Grido’ (Cry, 2002) – which exploit every part of the string instruments, from scrolls to tailpieces, for their sound possibilities.
Taking a classical work and playing it on different instrument is not exactly new, but it can still be quite thrilling. Musician Chris Thile’s Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 doesn’t use piano or organ or guitar, but it shows the mighty mandolin. A rather plucky instrument that already thrums with a Baroque or Renaissance sound, it seems a good choice. Harp would have sounded overly dreamy and trumpet would have been totally out of the running (though maybe saxophone in the right hands). The release included Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004; Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005; and Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006, piece originally written for violin solo. And unlike his first volume of Bach in 2013, Thile has decided to take some liberties with the scores.
For the very first time, the complete studio recordings made by the iconic conductor Carlo Maria Giulini for Columbia and HMV (plus the two for Pathé and Electrola) have been remastered in high definition from original tapes and put together in a 60-CD box. Some recordings never published before are also included in the box: a Freischütz Overture from 1969, the stereo version of ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’ Concertos from the 4 Seasons, plus a rehearsal of ‘Winter’ (1955), and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony (1962).
This wide-ranging collection provides a comprehensive testimony of Carlo Maria Giulini’s collaborations with London’s most distinguished orchestras, his beloved Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic, later recordings…
On Across the Horizon, classical guitarist Nicholas Goluses assumes the role of venerable travel guide in hosting a musical odyssey that visits Argentina, Brazil, Greece, and the American Southwest, the journey long yet rewarding.
No one’s better qualified for the part than Goluses, an awarding-winning Professor of Guitar at the Eastman School of Music who’s delivered world première performances of more than 100 works and whose discography includes recordings for Naxos, BMG, Linn, and Albany.
In being a global travelogue, Across the Horizon plays like a natural extension of concert itineraries that have taken him to North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Far East. His reputation as a new music aficionado’s…
A cover photo that makes the perfectly coiffed composer look like she’s prepped for a Dynasty cameo is merely one of many surprises this collection of Victoria Bond chamber pieces offers. In the three works featured on Dancing on Glass, the American composer exchanges the standard practice of adopting traditional templates as guides and instead gives freer reign to her imagination. That makes for music rich in originality and flair, not to mention performed with élan by violinist Pauline Him Harris, violist Chieh-Fan Yiu, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff on the titular work and by pianists Madeline Rogers and Florencia Zuloaga on the others.
Emblematic of Bond’s approach, she based the string trio setting Dancing on Glass on…
For around a decade, Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa has been constructing sonically experimental and thematically radical works of art. As Moor Mother, the musician and poet’s art often offers searing takedowns of structures of oppression and on the imperialism, colonialism and brutality that has resulted in generations of Black trauma. She delves deep into this on her 2019 album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, the sense of widespread socio-political discontent illustrated by the record’s brutal, auditory chaos. Now, in her latest release, Moor Mother reissues that same album as a brand new orchestrated edition, featuring the string quintet Wooden Elephant and The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, conducted by Dirk Kaftan, once again blurring the boundaries…
One of the challenges for a group like the Kronos Quartet is to keep finding new pathways to explore. They’ve spent a half-century commissioning works from cutting-edge composers, collaborating with unlikely partners, and stretching the boundaries of what a string quartet can do. Where else is there to go? Their latest release, Forgive Us For, has a few answers: Palestine, Iceland, and Ukraine. The album features three very different pieces, each topical in its own way.
The opener is “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal” (Going Up the Mountain), a traditional song that Palestinian women would use to communicate with men in prison. The album notes date it to the British Mandate; other theories trace it back further, to Ottoman times. More recently, vocalist…
This all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman’s extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it’s a fitting farewell to the group’s much-missed founder, who died in July.
It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer’s own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece ‘La Valse’: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music’s increasingly sinister nature.
The 1905 ‘Introduction and Allegro’ was a commission from a harp manufacturer, intended to make their instrument sound good – which…
Is there anything Marc-André Hamelin can’t do? In a recording career that now spans nearly four decades, the Canadian pianist has handled everything from Mozart sonatas to presentations of Ives, Ornstein, Feldman, and Rzewski. He has championed lesser-known names like Alkan, Henselt, and Medtner, and even offered a full-length album of his own compositions.
His latest release, Found Objects / Sound Objects, showcases his immense range. Hamelin performs works by seven composers, from John Cage to Frank Zappa to himself. Some of it is impressively difficult – the arrangement of Zappa’s ‘Ruth is Sleeping’ was originally made for two pianists, not one – but he has it all comfortably under his fingers. The virtuosity is…
Traditional music finds its popular, cosy home in the carol, despite the uncanniness that surrounds the nativity story, and the fraying thread back to the past that each winter brings. A veteran explorer of the season (in 2020’s sparkling Winter Rituals EP with cellist Kate Ellis, and 2022’s starker New Christmas Rituals, with amplified fiddle-playing from André Bosman), Laura Cannell sets out on her best and darkest journey yet here, exploring the time of year when, as she writes on the liner notes, “joy and heartache try to exist together”.
Named after the line in ‘Good King Wenceslas’ before the cruel frosts arrive, Brightly Shone the Moon begins at the organ – a nod to Cannell’s childhood Christmases in the Methodist chapels and churches of Norfolk.
The compositional scene of South Africa remains little-known to listeners outside that country, and it is notable that this collection of South African string quartets does not overlap in the least, not even by composer, with the most famous foreign investigation, the Kronos Quartet’s Pieces of Africa album of 1992.
A Dark Flaring covers music written over a span of more than 70 years, from Priaulx Rainier (1903- 1986) to Robert Fokkens (b. 1975); a poem written by the latter, accompanying his three-movement Glimpses of a half-forgotten future (2012), gives the album its title. They are quite a varied group, ranging from a unique virtuoso Impressionist language in Rainier’s quartet to angry rock inflections in Matthijs van Dijk’s…
There have been many iconic film director-and-composer pairings, among them Rota and Fellini, Morricone and Leone, Hisaishi and Miyazaki, and Williams and Spielberg, but none is greater than the one involving Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. To this day, the music he created for Psycho, Vertigo, and North By Northwest is the gold standard, even if the composer contributed to a great many more of the director’s projects than those three. In fashioning an album-length portrait of Hitchcock, it would have been easy for pianist Matteo Monico to assemble a programme featuring Herrmann exclusively, yet the pianist did something more interesting by including other composers too. To that end, the portrait not only includes selections from the aforementioned…