Gwenifer Raymond will release her third full length recording Last Night I Heard the Dog Bark (We Are Busy Bodies) on September 5th, 2025. Ahead of the release, she is sharing the track “Jack Parsons Blues.” A gentle vocal abetted by the tang of a strummed steel string acoustic guitar gradually gives way to layers of syncopated overlapping guitars. The intricate instrumental is typical of Raymond’s considerable capabilities as an instrumentalist. It may be hard to think of September releases at the outset of the Summer season but, when it arrives, Raymond is affording us ample consolation for encroaching Fall.
Summers have been getting progressively hotter in much of the world. Here in the Northeast United States, we have had a mild Spring, but anticipate that summer will be a scorcher. Happily, singer/songwriter Katie Schottland ‘s project Swimming Bell has returned to serenade the season.
Swimming Bell’s latest EP, Somnia (Perpetual Doom, 2025) adopts a summery vibe. “95 at Night” both embraces the heat with fevered blur and seeks to assuage it with soothing vocals, pedal steel, and an undulating beat. The end of a summer romance could find little better to accompany burgeoning tears than the ballad “I’m Always Down,” with honeyed vocal harmonies and the twang of loping surf guitar. “Found it at the Bottom of the Ocean” has a seaside ambience of gentle singing, guitar glissandos, and supple rhythm courtesy of bongo drums. The closer, “Mushrooms in July,” seems self-explanatory.
Somnia concludes after sixteen minutes, and many listeners will want more. Swimming Bell has recorded two full length albums, Charlie (Adventure Club/Permanent, 2024) and Wild Sight (Adventure Club, 2019), both well worth seeking out.
NEW YORK – Alisa Weilerstein is a supremely gifted cellist, and it is hard to imagine being anything less than riveted by her playing. At Zankel Hall last Tuesday, she made decisions for her Fragments project that seemed to be needlessly distracting.
There are six Fragments programs all told, each based on one of the Bach Suites, joined by new pieces commissioned for the project. Fragments 3 featured the third cello suite alongside pieces by Joseph Hallman, Thomas Larcher, Jeffrey Mumford, and Carlos Simon. A design team helped to bring Weilerstein’s concept to life. The set, by Seth Reiser was elegantly simple, a multi-sided screen behind Weilerstein, and costume designer Molly Irelan did a fine job creating a chic yet downtown look for the cellist. The effective lighting, also by Reiser, included various spotlights as well as a moving magic lamp that accompanied moments of intensity. Director Elkanah Pulitzer did not seem to overtly interfere with Weilerstein’s usual performing demeanor. Perhaps ordering and pacing were part of her remit.
The fragmenting of the pieces themselves is where things got challenging for listeners. Instead of presenting each of them in toto, individual movements of all of the pieces, Bach included, were excerpted out of order. In addition, audience members weren’t given a listing of the ordering of these sections, having to wait until after the concert to download a program, using a QR code found in the booklet. In remarks that were printed for consumption beforehand, Weilerstein exhorted the audience to “just listen.” This, by the way, is every reviewer’s nightmare – playing “name that tune” with pieces that you have never yet heard.
It is laudable that so many new works for solo cello have come from this project. However, one feels for the composers, who, instead of being given a bow, were represented by the fragmenting of their pieces into a mix without metadata. It can be said with confidence that all four of the commissioned composers know cello writing authoritatively, including a catalog of extended techniques that featured Weilerstein’s adventurous streak and admirable facility to excellent advantage. Indeed, Simon and Hallmark seemed to invigorate their writing with extra doses of well-integrated 21st century virtuosity.
It was a bit disorienting to hear the Allemande, the second movement of Bach’s suite, appear as the penultimate fragment. Out of order though its movements may have been, the performance of the Bach suite was engaging, played with consummate care and thoughtful phrasing. Most of the program relied on the juxtaposition of old and new music. Only Mumford, with a few ostinatos in an otherwise dazzlingly modernist endeavor, provided a hat tip to Bach. Weilerstein finished the recital with the third movement of Thomas Larcher’s now here, which culminated with a rocket-fueled flourish, dazzling lamplight included.
Photo: Richard Termine
In the bygone times of analog mixtapes, curation seemed a prerequisite. Playlisting mixes has now become the way that many people usually listen on digital platforms, often passively and without worrying about the aforementioned metadata. When it comes to music consumption, an encroaching facelessness of content seems to be what’s trending. Revising the recital is a welcome endeavor, and annotating program booklets needn’t be an ossified affair. When engaged, just listening is fine, and may be preferable to constantly rifling through the program notes instead of fully attending to the performance. Perhaps supertitles briefly listing who is being played could be a compromise, a mix without undue preconceptual baggage.
All six installations of Fragments will be presented this week at the Spoleto Festival over four nights: May 26, 28, 29, and 31. Bring your cell phone and click on those QR codes as soon as the applause concludes.
Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn Perform Glass at Merkin Hall
Photo by Lisa Marie-Mazzucco.
Kaufman Music Center
Piano Dialogues
Simone Dinnerstein with Baroklyn
May 12, 2025
Published on Sequenza 21
NEW YORK – Last Monday, the pianist Simone Dinnerstein brought her Baroklyn project to Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall to perform an all Philip Glass program. Baroklyn is a string ensemble, augmented at the concert by harp and celesta, assembled by Dinnerstein from musician friends with an eye towards a mostly, but not exclusively, female group.
The concert opener was The Hours Suite, excerpted from the film score and arranged by Michael Riesman, a longtime musical director for Philip Glass. Unlike many film score segments, which are brief vignettes, the three movements here are substantial, evocative of the film but transcending it to morph into a symphonic triptych. Conducting from the piano, Dinnerstein’s gestures were clear, and Baroklyn’s musicians were responsive and performed in a well-coordinated fashion, even when in the midst of myriad metric shifts at high speed. The group’s keen intonation afforded the harmonies a lustrous quality.
Mad Rush is one of the most abundantly virtuosic of Glass’s piano pieces, and it has become a showcase for Dinnerstein’s superlative chops. The piece contains furious fast runs, with a concomitant sense of blissful austerity in the slower passages. Dinnerstein inhabited both demeanors authoritatively.
The concert concluded with Tirol Concerto, the composer’s first piano concerto. Prior to the performance, I had some misgivings about whether Baroklyn’s lithe approach had the requisite heft for the piece. However, I was won over by the powerful performance they mounted, right-sized for Merkin Hall but resolute and often jubilant. An interpretive challenge in the piece is the shaping of its dramatic arc. The first movement begins with a slow introduction and then picks up steam, and the finale is a brisk moto perpetuo, both straightforward in design. It is the central movement, a sprawling and content-filled quarter of an hour, that can all too easily imbalance the proceedings. Not so here, where the interpretation sliced it into a series of tableaux that would fit right in as passages for a Glass opera.
On May 30th, Baroklyn will release Complicité, a recording of J.S. Bach for the Supertrain imprint. They are joined by guest artists Peggy Pearson, who plays oboe d’amore, and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. Dinnerstein’s graceful arrangements of Bach arias for piano and ensemble are adroit tropes on cantata movements. The Keyboard Concerto in E major is an excellent vehicle for Dinnerstein, who plays it in period-informed fashion while suiting her touch and tempos to the modern grand. Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano voice is the centerpiece of Cantata 170, which is presented in full. She sings with rich tone and judicious use of vibrato, sumptuously phrasing long legato lines and dexterously performing melismatic passages. In the Air, composer Philip Lasser’s reworking of Bach’s Air on a G-string, is replete with tender ornamentations, and a pleasant valediction. Complicité is a recital disc that, even in arrangements and on modern instruments, shows Dinnerstein and Baroklyn to be gifted advocates for Bach.
The centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth has been celebrated with concerts, books and recordings. The Diotima Quartet’s Pentatone CD of Livre pour quatuor (1948-1949, 2017) is a distinctive offering in that it includes a previously unperformed version of the piece. With permission and supervision of Boulez, the composer Philippe Manoury assisted in completing the fourth movement for Diotima. Thus, this is the first complete recording of Livre pour quatuor. At nearly an hour long, it is one of the largest of Boulez’s early compositions.
Pizzicato and glissando are liberally applied in discrete sections, as are aggressive angular attacks in others. All of these can be traced back to the Second Viennese School. Often, there is a particularly Webernian pointillism at work, but elsewhere there are explosive gestures and effusive passages that recall Schoenberg and Berg. The use of complex rhythms likely was in part learned from Messiaen. Influences are distinctive, but so is the burgeoning individuality of Boulez’s compositional aesthetic.
To Manoury’s credit, the fourth movement is consistent with the rest of the work. At twelve minutes in duration, it is the longest movement, with a number of passages that recall music from previous sections. It serves as a summary of the quartet’s materials and climax of its dramatic arc.
Quatuor Diotima plays with extraordinary attention to the details of the score. At the same time, they also provide a rendition of the piece that is emotive and expressive, avoiding the mechanics one sometimes hears in performances of post-tonal works.
It seems hard to countenance, but Livre pour quatuor was first drafted when Boulez was only twenty-four. A highly personal and evocative piece, built with an organicism that allows it to hold, even command, interest for an entire hour, it is a great work from the early postwar avant-garde.
NEW YORK – Celebrating their twentieth year, the vocal ensemble Stile Antico brought a program dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s birth to Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series. The concert was held at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown, a space that Miller has employed to host a number of Renaissance music performances.
Stile Antico appeared with only eleven singers, instead of their usual complement of a dozen. Baritone Gareth Thomas was ill and couldn’t perform. Between numbers, several of the singers hid surreptitious coughs, leading one to think that a bug had plagued the group en route. The quality of the performance didn’t suffer: they still sang sublimely.
The centerpiece of Stile Antico’s latest recording, The Golden Era: Palestrina (Decca, 2025), is perhaps his most famous piece, Missa Papae Marcelli. A great deal of lore has grown up around it, with a story that Palestrina wrote it in part to convince the more conservative members of the Council of Trent that they needn’t ban polyphony and revert exclusively to plainchant in services. Composers could write in multiple parts and still clearly convey the text. While it is unlikely that the Pope Marcellus Mass served as a test piece, Palestrina took pains to write polyphony that never obscured the words. Many composers, some even generations later, imitated what had come to be called the stile antico style of declamation and use of dissonance.
Stile Antico’s performance of Missa Papae Marcelli on the recording is impressive, a standout that is among the best in a crowded field. Their diction is crystal clear, and the tone and blend of the ensemble is particularly beautiful. At St. Mary’s, the mass’s Credo was featured, and it was an expansive display that was well-paced to express the drama inherent in various passages of the piece.
A number of motets by the composer were also included on the program. Tu es Petrus and Exsultate Deo displayed fleet runs and ricocheting exchanges. Sicut servus was performed with fetching delicacy, and Nigra sum sed formosa was imbued with stately elegance.
Photo: Eduardus Lee.
Composers besides Palestrina who also served in Rome were on the program as well. Josquin’s Salve regina, with a stark bass motive and a texture frequently divided into duets, represented one of the most prominent elder statesmen of the early Renaissance. Jacques Arcadelt’s Pater noster is an example of the florid writing and frequent use of extra-liturgical texts and tunes that contributed to the aforementioned controversy at the Council of Trent. It is hard to lay blame at Arcadelt’s doorstep when hearing his music, which is pleasing in its bustling rhythms and multihued chords. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Trahe me post te and Orlando de Lassus’s Musica dei donum represented works by esteemed contemporaries. The former has an austere yet attractive manner and the latter, a six-voice motet, is more intricate in presentation. Christus resurgens was by Gregorio Allegri, a composer of the next generation, who continued in Palestrina’s footsteps, composing music in stile antico style. The piece’s use of antiphony is particularly striking. Another later composer, Felice Anerio, who succeeded Palestrina in the Papal Choir, combined passages of relatively homophonic declamation with expressive chromaticism in his Christus factus est.
The program also included a new work, A Gift of Heaven by the English composer Cheryl Frances Hoad, who used the preface to a publication by Palestrina, in which he flattered the dedicatee, as the text for her piece. Sumptuous polychords undergirded a solo tenor imparting what Frances Hoad describes as “buttering up a patron.”
Sadly, Stile Antico at eleven could not finish the program with the impressive 12-voice motet Laudate Dominum a 12. They substituted another Palestrina work, Surge Propera Amica Mea, with corruscating runs and an impressive final cadential section, creating an exuberant finale. The group returned to offer something completely different for an encore, “The Silver Swan,” a madrigal by the English composer Orlando Gibbons. It provided a delicately lyrical close to an evening of exquisitely well-performed music.
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, conductor
NMC Recordings
Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year (1988) has finally been recorded. The work was produced in Houston in 1989 and Glyndebourne in 1990 and then fell out of the repertoire. The Birmingham Opera performed it last year, and the NMC double-CD recording is of a 2024 live semi-staged production by the BBC Scottish Symphony, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.
New Year’s reemergence is propitious in timing. Combining elements of sci-fi, time travel, and fairy tales, it seems readily approachable for the streaming generation, with shows like Stranger Things, Time Bandits, and Severance providing a suitable backdrop. The opera also takes on social issues that remain important today, such as urban decline, poverty, racism, and Tippett’s ubiquitous concern for pacifism. However, the vernacular elements are the least successful of the piece, and the Jamaican accent adopted by one of the characters, Donny, played by baritone Ross Ramgobin, is cringeworthy today, and perhaps was back in the eighties too.
Even by the composer’s standards, New Year is abundantly eclectic. Electric guitars, a large percussion section, and electronics combine with a traditional orchestra. Pop styles from the late eighties, notably rap and reggae, are enfolded in an otherwise modernist score with complexly chromatic parts for both soloists and chorus. The narrative itself is circuitous, with one part featuring a time traveling spaceship and the other a dystopian urban landscape. Thus, the challenges, never mind the costs, for any production are substantial.
Brabbins and company surmount most of them in a dedicated and well-prepared performance. The soloists are excellent, in particular soprano Rhian Lois, who plays the principal character Jo Ann, and Robert Murray, who plays the time traveller Pelegrin, both vibrant singers with considerable charisma to match their voices. Susan Bickley, the foster-mother to Jo Ann and Donny, is a warm presence, perplexed by their challenging behavior, agoraphobia for the former and misbehavior for the latter, and yet as nurturing as she can manage. The other time travellers, Merlin, played by baritone Roland Wood, and Regan, played by soprano Rachell Nicholls, provide excellent characterizations of their roles. Tenor Alan Oake as the Voice, the presenter of the action, is an authoritative presence.
New Year is a multifarious and, in places, problematic piece. But one can scarcely imagine a better effort to present it to best advantage than this recording.
Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign was one of my favorite recordings of 2024. Released today, the Thai funk by way of Texas artists Khruangbin have made a remix of one of the album’s most memorable tracks, “raat ki rani.”
As a bonus, here is another favorite from Aftab, live in London playing with Anoushka Shankar:
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Aftab’s Night Reign Tour 2025 begins late March in North America, Brazil and UK/EU:
NORTH & SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES
3.27.25 | Union Stage | Washington, D.C
3.29.25 | Big Ears Festival 2025 | Knoxville, TN
5.22.25 | C6 Festival | São Paulo, Brazil
5.29.25 | Spoleto Festival 2025 | Charleston, SC
6.15.25 | Bonnaroo | Manchester, TN
6.21.25 | Fine Line | Minneapolis, MN
6.22.25 | Old Town School of Folk Music | Chicago, IL **2nd show added**
6.24.25 | Toronto Jazz Festival | Toronto, Canada
6.25.25 | Ottawa Jazz Festival | Ottawa, Canada
6.26.25 | Festival International De Jazz De Montreal 2025 | Montreal, Canada
UK/EU TOUR DATES
4.4.25 | House of Music | Budapest, Hungary
4.5.25 | Rewire Festival | Den Haag, Netherlands
4.7.25 | WOW Festival | Kallithea, Greece
4.12.25 | Sogodbe X Kino Šiška | Ljubljana, Slovenia
4.14.25 | Auditorium Parco Della Musica | Roma, Italy
4.15.25 | Teatro Della Triennale | Milan, Italy
5.2.25 | Polygon Live 360º | London, United Kingdom
5.5.25 | Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival | Belfast, United Kingdom
5.7.25 | Brighton Music Festival 2025 | Brighton, United Kingdom
5.9.25 | Norfolk & Norwich Festival | Norwich, UK
5.11.25 | Jazz à Liège 2025 | Liège, Belgium
7.6.25 | Love Supreme Festival | East Sussex, United Kingdom
7.9.25 | Ravenna Festival | Cervia, Italy
7.31.25 | Midzomer Festival Openair | Leuven, Belgium
8.2.25 | All Together Now 2025 | Waterford, Ireland
François Pinel, piano duets, Marc Mauillon, baritone
Harmonia Mundi
In 2025, substantial attention is being paid to the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth. Pianist Alain Planès has instead decided to celebrate the centenary of Erik Satie’s passing with a recording of music from the various stylistic periods of the eclectic composer’s oeuvre. Most of the music are works originally for piano and transcriptions, but there is a set of four-hands pieces and another of songs.
At age seventy-seven, Planès has maintained his technique and interpretive skill, accommodating the varying demeanors – lyrical, enigmatic, bumptious, and virtuosic – of Satie’s music. Historically informed performance has extended into the twentieth century, and the pianist observes this by using a 1928 Pleyel, a piano similar to those Satie would have played upon.
There are pieces that recall Satie’s work in cafes and theaters, such as the Valse-ballet, which opens the recording. Even in idiomatic genre pieces, there is a quirkiness to the dynamics and phrasing. Two song transcriptions, La Diva de L’Empire, and Satie’s “hit tune” Je te Veux, close the recording in a similarly light-hearted vein. The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes, some of the composer’s well known and best-loved works, figure prominently in the program. Planès plays them with delicacy and small touches of rubato and dynamic inflections, exactly where the score indicates these fluctuations in phrasing.
Avant-dernières pensées (“Penultimate Thoughts”), Chapitres tournés en tous sens (“Chapters Turned Every Which Way”), and Embryons desséchés (“Dessicated embryos”) are three humorous piano suites from the 1910s. The earlier Pièces froides (“Cold pieces”) exhibit similar jocularity. Even when going for musical jokes – quotations, weird juxtapositions, and sudden dynamic shifts – Satie always creates music that is well wrought for the instrument and its player. Planès presents the humor wryly, never overdoing it to go for a cheap laugh.
Trois morceaux en forme de poire (“Three pieces in the shape of a pear”) is for piano four-hands. The first resembles a Gymnopedie with a jaunty flourish at the end, the second has digressive flurries of runs punctuated with staccato chords and an emphatic bass line, and the third juxtaposes a lilting duple time dance with stentorian cadences. François Pinel is an amicable duet partner. Baritone Marc Mauillon joins Planès for Trois Mélodies, his voice easily navigating the high tessitura of the music with expressive nuance. The first, “La Statue de Bronze” (“The Bronze Statue”) recalls the oom-pah ostinato of popular Parisian fare.“Daphénéo” is more impressionist in tone but still peculiar, with some of its text not easily translatable. “Le chapelier” (“The hatter”) is in a lilting compound time until its forte climax, which is followed by a delicate coda.
Satie is worth yet more anniversary commemorations, but if the only one were to be this excellent recording, it would still provide a significant homage for his influential music.
NEW YORK – If you think that audience development is a relatively new practice, then you may not have heard of Rug Concerts. In the 1970s, during Pierre Boulez’s tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, these were an experiment to attempt to attract young people and downtown artsy types to try a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Instead of rows of seating, rugs were strewn about the hall, inviting audience members to lounge in informal fashion while hearing a concert. Revisiting the first of these concerts, its program was presented in its entirety, albeit to audience members in the conventional seating setup of David Geffen Hall: no rugs rolled out.
The first half of the concert featured repertory works. J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major was given a period-informed performance by a small ensemble. Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, providing the aphoristic solo part with suave elegance, and bassist Timothy Cobb and harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon were an incisive continuo pairing.
Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in B-flat is an impressively beautiful piece, especially considering that it was completed when the composer was just eighteen. I have heard three different conductors lead this symphony with the NY Phil, a proto-romantic and broadly lyrical rendition from Kurt Masur, a breakneck-pace version informed by early music practice given by Alan Gilbert, and Robertson’s, which deployed a chamber-sized orchestra and emphasized the classical elements in Schubert’s early instrumental music. One hesitates to make a Goldilocks comparison, but Robertson’s interpretation felt just right.
The second half of the program consisted of music from the twentieth century. Anton Webern’s Symphony, completed in 1928, was a totemic work for the postwar avant-garde, notably Boulez. It is a set of variations that uses the 12-tone method in a way that points toward the systematic organization of serialism, and is also filled with canons, reflective of Webern’s dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. The piece is aphoristic with a thin texture, but deceptively challenging to perform, to connect the web of its lines in convincing fashion. The NY Phil navigated these demands under Robertson’s detailed direction with an ease of delivery that one seldom hears in the performance of Webern. Principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, who was given particularly disjunct lines to play, demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of legato in the piece, even when leaping through dissonances.
Photo: Brandon Patoc
Boulez’s Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, composed in 1957, was one of the pieces that put him on the map as an important creator. Its vocalist is tasked with significant interpretative challenges and a detailed and rangy score. Jana McIntyre performed commandingly, rendering the surrealist poetry with a wondrous exuberance for its strangeness, singing clarion top notes and plummy ones below the staff. A singer to watch for. The percussion section, which channels more than a bit of gamelan influence, played superlatively. Robertson was a close colleague of Boulez, and is a former director of Ensemble Intercontemporain. His conducting of Pli selon pli is the most authoritative that we have left since the composer’s passing.
The concert concluded with Igor Stravinsky’s concert suite version of L’Histoire du Soldat. Composed in 1918, it is for a septet of musicians and includes eight sections from the larger piece. One of the last pieces in Stravinsky’s Russian period of composition, it mixes folk tunes with prescient shadings of the neoclassicism that was to follow in his music. Three dances, a tango, waltz, and ragtime, were particularly well-played, with Staples animating the characteristic rhythms of each. Trumpeter Christopher Martin and trombonist Colin Williams played with crackling energy, McGill and bassoonist Judith LeClair navigated dissonant intervals with laser beam tuning, and Cobb and percussionist Chris Lamb imbued the march movements with propulsive kineticism.
It is fortunate for the New York Phil that Robertson works in the neighborhood, just across the street as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School. One hopes that they continue to avail themselves of his considerable talent and warm presence on the podium.
