Philip Glass Solo Philip Glass, piano Orange Mountain Music This is the second piano album made by Philip Glass. Solo Piano (1989) contains some overlap of tracks with the latest recording, Philip Glass Solo (2024), but there are distinct differences between the renditions on each. At 87 years of age, and in demand from opera houses, symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, and filmmakers for a steady spate of new works, a solo performance recording might seem like an unnecessary addition to Glass’s catalog. But it is in those aforementioned differences found in the music that he shares a different vantage point
Read moreSaturday, March 30th: Kafka Fragments at Tenri On Saturday at 8 PM, Kafka-Fragmente by György Kurtág will be performed at Tenri Cultural Institute (43A West 13th Street,New York NY), by soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber (tickets). Earlier this week, they performed it at another venue also abundantly supportive of contemporary classical music, Buffalo University. Kafka-Fragmente is based on aphoristic texts by Franz Kafka from his diaries and correspondence. As is his practice, Kurtág brought the composition together gradually, collecting fragments over time and completing the piece in 1985. At seventy minutes in duration, until his opera Fin
Read moreKinds of ~Nois ~Nois, Kinds of Kings Bright Shiny Things The Bright Shiny Things recording Kinds of ~Nois is the result of a six-year long collaboration between the saxophone quartet ~Nois (Julian Velasco, soprano; Hunter Bockes, alto; Jordan Lulloff, tenor; János Csontos, baritone) and the composer collective Kinds of Kings (Shelley Washington, Maria Kaoutzani, and Gemma Peacocke). The recorded works are generally in a complexly post-minimal style, but each composer has their own distinctive voice. ~Nois’s rich ensemble tone and dexterous rhythms serve the music quite well. One can readily hear that a lot of preparation was put into
Read moreBreve Euclid Quartet Afinat The Breve Quartet has been in residence at Indiana University South Bend for sixteen years. During that time they have recorded a wide range of repertoire. Like so many ensembles, their catalog was put on ice during the pandemic, and their latest since 2017 for Afinat, Breve, returns with eleven miniatures in disparate styles. Listeners are encouraged to shuffle them to hear in any order. Miniatures are often thought of as the fare of encores, but a full program of them suggests that small doesn’t mean insubstantial or merely flashy. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s C-minor
Read moreMartin Arnold Flax Kerry Yong, piano Another Timbre Martin Arnold’s solo piano work Flax has a sad backstory. It was originally commissioned by the abundantly talented new music pianist Philip Thomas, who shortly afterward became seriously ill and was unable to premiere the work. Kerry Yong performs the piece in his honor on an Another Timbre CD. The piece was already well underway when this transpired, but one cannot hear the considerable poignancy and elegant gracefulness of Flax without connecting it to Thomas’s loss of health. Arnold is a Canadian composer whose work is influenced by Morton Feldman
Read moreGuitarist Mike Skagerlind and synth-player Chris Romero, alongside electronic beats, perform as Venusian Motel Guests. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time listening to their upcoming EP, All Was Carbon, which will be released on April 24th. Today their first teaser track, “The Re-entry of Embers,” has been released (see the Bandcamp embed below to stream). It embodies just one of the many moods found on the EP, with a laidback groove featuring melodic guitar riffs and a bass synth providing a countermelody and occasional surges that add to the syncopated feel of the track. All Was Carbon by
Read moreJeffrey Mumford Echoing Depths Albany Records Jeffrey Mumford’s music channels high modernism into imaginative works that are luminously textured. His latest Albany release, Echoing Depths, features two pieces for orchestra and another for piano and ensemble. All three are concertos, a form that befits Mumford’s penchant for virtuosity. The cello concerto Of fields unfolding … echoing depths of resonant light is dedicated to the composer Elliott Carter, a centenarian who passed away in 2011. Carter has been a key influence on Mumford’s music and was one of his composition teachers. Christine Lamprea is the soloist with the Detroit Symphony, conducted
Read moreSkjálfti Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson Sono Luminus SLE-70031 Today, where the list of practitioners frequently overlap, how does film music translate to concert music adaptation? On the Sono Luminus release Skjálfti (translated: Quake), the Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson present a compelling album length suite that is more ambitious than the clip show often heard on soundtrack recordings. The cello concerto Quake is Pálsson’s best known piece, but Skjálfti doesn’t feature music from it. Instead, it is from Tinna Hrafnsdóttir’s film of the same name, for which Pálsson and Egilsson composed the soundtrack.
Read morePhoto: Rodrigo Pérez Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips, director Church of St. Mary the Virgin December 9, 2023 NEW YORK – It is the fiftieth anniversary of the renaissance ensemble the Tallis Scholars, directed during that entire time by Peter Phillips. Their annual December visit to St. Mary the Virgin Church in midtown often consists of a predominantly Marian program, both to suit that setting and church calendar. This year, there were two large pieces devoted to Mary – settings of Salve Regina by Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505) and Peter Philips (1560-1628; the early baroque composer, not the eponymous conductor
Read moreGerald Cohen Voyagers Innova Records One can think of few chamber ensembles better suited to contemporary music than the Cassatt String Quartet. Their intonation, musicality, and interpretive powers are superlative. Composer Gerald Cohen has enlisted them to record three of his pieces on Innova, two originally commissioned for Cassatt. Cohen describes himself as a storyteller, both in his vocal and instrumental music. The three distinct narratives here are populated by musical quotations relevant to them, yet they never seem like pastiche. The title work is about the two Voyager spacecrafts, which were sent out into our solar
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