This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. This first-ever complete recording of all his German-language Lieder – setting folksongs as well as more recent Romantic poetry – shows him bridging both French and German traditions with a style somewhere between Fauré and Brahms. Written early in Jaques-Dalcroze’s career, these songs span a wide range of emotions, from innocent rural idylls to the contemplation of existential pain and heartache.

love & light celebrates the 10th anniversary of the inspirational girls choir iSing Silicon Valley, and features a diverse range of sacred music from Hildegard of Bingen to James MacMillan, new works by South Korean Guggenheim Fellow Sungji Hong, multi-disciplinary composer Kenyon Duncan, and many more. iSing Silicon Valley, the inspirational Bay Area-based girls choir, emerged from the darkness of the pandemic to find love & light in this recording of sacred music both ancient and new, music that transcends and heals, with glorious sonorities by turns rapturous and haunting.

iSing’s spirit of diversity shines through on love & light. From O Sapientie, the ecstatic chant by Hildegard of Bingen to Sir James MacMillan’s gravity defying Os Mutorum, Lux Aeterna by South Korean Guggenheim Fellow Sungji Hong and chorea lucis (dance of light) by California-based multi-disciplinary composer Kenyon Duncan – and many more – every work on love & light recalls an emotion, instinct or value that came to feel significant, even urgent, during the separation imposed during the pandemic. iSing’s collaborators on love & light are virtuosa harpist Cheryl Fulton, and the versatile GRAMMYâ Award winning, soprano Estelí Gomez (Roomful of Teeth). love & light is released in celebration of iSing’s 10th anniversary.

REVIEWS:

This is impressive. A largely contemporary, contemplative and often complex programme is performed with exceptional poise by the girls’ choir and harpist Cheryl Ann Fulton. Sungji Hong’s mesmeric Lux Aeterna is the pick of several highlights

-- BBC Music Magazine (★★★★★)

Jennah Delp Somers has fashioned an impressive program with iSing…If more communities had this kind of program for young people, that fosters connections but cedes nothing of musical excellence, think of what America’s support for the arts would look like. Recommended!

-- Sequenza 21

 

Composer Eric Nathan's releases the ambitious cycle of works "Missing Words", featuring performances by some of new music's most prolific ensembles: International Contemporary Ensemble, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Brass Quintet, Hub New Music, and Neave Trio, as well as cellist Parry Karp and pianist Christopher Karp. "Missing Words" balances structural impulses befitting the epic scope of the set with Nathan's carefully considered approach to details of orchestration, harmony, and pitch.

Pianist-composer Bruce Wolosoff is a musical alchemist, organically mixing his multiple experiences in the worlds of jazz, rock, blues and classical music. His new solo album, Memento, melds the evolution of Wolosoff’s performance and compositional style into a genre that is all his own and true to himself. Wolosoff is a “formidable pianist” (Gramophone) who can tackle the great romantics like Busoni and Liszt. He can improvise like Bach and Beethoven as well as today’s jazz greats. His contemporary compositions are informed by his past whilst imbued with his current belief in “the primacy of lyricism and melody.” Memento takes the listener on a journey imbued by various genres. Throughout, Wolosoff opens his heart. His inner voice is his guide, and all his own.

Composer/vocalist Kate Soper teams up with longtime Wet Ink Ensemble colleague, composer, and electronic musician Sam Pluta in this bracing collection that explores the ever-shifting hierarchy between text-driven and music-dominated vocal work. Soper's characteristically clever approach to setting text is balanced by Pluta's ever inventive and sensitive marshaling of his unique arsenal of electronic textures. Writers set here include Franz Kafka, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, George Berkeley, and Parmenides.

Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer. Her work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been a featured performer with ensembles including the LA Philharmonic New Music Group, the MIVOS quartet, and the American Composers Orchestra. As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Massachusetts Review, and PAJ. She is a co-director of the Wet Ink Ensemble.

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as an historian of the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment. But he is an outstanding composer in his own right – a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humour, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal. Although the works recorded here represent his most recent harvest of orchestral music, for many of them he revisited material composed earlier in his career, using it as the basis for a series of new scores, some exhibiting a very English sense of whimsy, others concerned with deeper matters – one, indeed, inspired by the war in Ukraine.

Multi-award-winning violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins is the entrepreneurial spirit behind Music Kitchen, the pioneering project that brings top classical music and musicians into homeless shelters, sharing the inspirational, therapeutic, and uplifting power of music with those experiencing homelessness. Founded in New York City, Music Kitchen has presented over 100 concerts to more than 30,000 homeless shelter clients coast to coast, including in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Oakland, Rochester, and internationally in Paris, France. According to the New York Times, “The concerts have an air of authenticity and directness that sometimes does not exist in concert halls.”

Forgotten Voices is a song cycle commissioned by Music Kitchen – Food for the Soul, with support from Carnegie Hall, comprising works by 15 of today’s foremost composers featuring evocative and poignant texts by homeless shelter clients that have provided a profound source of inspiration and reverence. Forgotten Voices premiered to a sold-out Carnegie Hall audience in March 2022 and inspired a short film that has won multiple awards at festivals around the globe, including Winner: Best Cause-Driven Film and Finalist: Best Director and Best Documentary at the Cannes World Film Festival, Winner: Best Short Film at the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival, and Winner: Best Short Documentary at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.

REVIEWS:

Violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins is the entrepreneurial spirit behind Music Kitchen and the composer of one of the songs. She and 5 other string players, supply accompaniment to the 4 singers. I presume it is she who plays so nimbly in `Music Kitchen Interplay’ by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich with a text from a client who is amazed at what a violin can do and who gives thanks for how Music Kitchen “was a blessing to my hungry body and soul”.

The longest song of the album, Jeffrey Scott’s `Für Mein Vater’, is a setting of the poet’s fond remembrance of his father’s love of Mozart and Brahms, which was rekindled by hearing Music Kitchen perform it. It is sung sensitively by Allison Charney. Each time I listen to these songs I hear something new to like.

The program ends sublimely with Paul Moravec’s `Music is Love’. The words offer a strong statement about the values of this project and of music itself: “Music is love. It’s freedom, awakening. Music is universal. Music unites us all. Music expands our horizons. Classical music enables you to discover yourself.” After about a 20-second pause the song is repeated in a longer version for all four singers in harmony. I suspect this was sung as an encore at the concert. These final two tracks are especially lovely.

Each of the songs brings a message of gratitude or hope even in the midst of personal struggle. Collectively the album conveys consolation and the healing power of love. The songs call for excellent string playing, and these folks produce it brilliantly. The two sopranos sing with great expression and are especially poignant in their softer singing...Blumberg...begins the program with a tender reading of Steve Sandberg’s `Thank You’. Songs texts are included, though they are hardly needed—the singers’ diction is very clear most of the time. I find the songs appealing. I find the mission of Music Kitchen even more appealing.

-- American Record Guide

Dom Pedro I was the first Emperor of Brazil, proclaiming its independence from Portugal in 1822. A gifted musician, Pedro I is one of only a few monarchs to have become known as a composer. A performance of his Abertura (‘Overture’) was organized in Paris in 1832 with some in the audience convinced that it had been composed by Rossini, while the Hino da Independênciado Brasil (‘Hymn to the Independence of Brazil’) remains one of the country’s best-loved anthems. Operatic in character, the Te Deum celebrated the baptism of Pedro’s first son, and the joyous Credo is one of his most frequently performed works.

REVIEW:

Pedro’s capable works serve as reminder about the potent—if all too natural—mix of politics and music history. Brazil’s first emperor showed considerable musical talent as a child. Stories abound about his rich singing voice and fine technique on several instruments. He studied composition in the Rio de Janeiro court with Marcos Portugal, who had achieved fame in Europe for Italian opera. He also learned from Sigismund Neukomm, once a pupil of Joseph Haydn.

The Te Deum and Credo on this recording are two of Pedro’s largest extant works. Both show an affinity for theatrical flair and bel canto styles. The composer’s mastery of dramatic contrasts reveals a unique blend of religious reverence and celebratory zeal.

A world-premiere recording, the Te Deum offers both intensity and reflection. Conductor Fabio Mechetti and the modern-instrument Minas Gerais Philharmonic convey seismic urgency throughout. The soloists are likewise superb. Soprano Carla Cottini finds the melancholy of “Tu ad liberandum.” The dark blend of mezzo-soprano Luisa Francesconi and tenor Cleyton Pulzi tease out the pathos of “Te ergo.”

Lighter in style is Pedro’s Abertura, an overture famously performed under Rossini’s baton at the Theatre Italien in Paris in 1832. Here, the emperor shows his greatest debt to the celebrated operatic composer. Strings and winds dance gracefully as Mechetti and the orchestra convey joy and exuberance. They do the same in the Hino da Independência, Pedro’s familiar anthem to Brazilian independence. Chorus and orchestra reveal all its pomp and ceremony, a timeless call for unity in the wake of the current political turmoil.

-- Early Music America (Aaron Keebaugh)

This disc is a riot. Pedro I (1798-1834) was the first Emperor of Brazil, and he also fancied himself a composer. His style is pure Italian, as in Rossini, and the fact that the two major works on this disc are (theoretically) liturgical matters not a bit. They are pure opera buffa. If you thought the style of Haydn’s and Mozart’s Masses and other sacred works unsuitable for the Divine Service, then you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Pedro was not at all interested in counterpoint, just “the tune,” and there are some delightful ones here, provided you can forget the words entirely. Both the Credo and Te Deum divide the texts into a series of arias and choruses, with recurring themes and orchestration that features solo woodwinds floated atop simple dance rhythms. The brief Ouverture comes across as a parody of the Italian opera style of the day, with an over-enthusiastic bass drum vulgarizing the texture most entertainingly, while the Hino da Independência do Brasil does exactly what you expect it to.

The performances here are quite confident and enthusiastic. Soprano Carla Cottini has the most solo music to sing, and she does it very well. In fact, all of the soloists have pleasing voices, except for tenor Cleyton Pulzi, who is pretty bad, but the chorus is just dandy, and the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra under Fabio Mechetti acquits itself admirably. Look: no one is going to claim that this is great music, but it’s lots of fun, and it sheds light on a fascinating corner of the world that few of us know anything about, especially during this period. It’s delightful to hear what can be done with these timeless texts when one ignores considerations such as, well, taste. In short, the music has a wonderful period flavor, and you’ll enjoy the opportunity to hear it.

--ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

The reputation of the Anglo-Scottish composer William Wordsworth (1908–88), great-great-grandnephew of the poet, has recently been restored by a series of Toccata Classics albums of his orchestral music. His piano music, too, was poorly known before now, none of it recorded since a handful of pieces appeared on LP 60 years ago – though his epic Piano Sonata is a work of major importance. This first ever complete recording reveals an honest, unfussy approach to the keyboard akin to that of two other major symphonists, Sibelius and Rubbra: like them, Wordsworth’s primary concern seems to have been the expression of deep feeling – which makes the gentle story-telling of his miniatures for children all the more surprising.

Multi-award-winning Canadian composer Christopher Tyler Nickel has created a truly unique magnum opus: The Gospel According to Mark, a seven-hour oratorio setting the disciple’s text from the King James bible in its entirety.

What originated as an idea to distill the text, as most passion music does, Chris quickly became more interested in setting the complete prose. He chose to compose a work employing an English Protestant text, rather than the more traditional Latin or German, envisioning The Gospel According to Mark as a seven-hour-long prayer. With the text as Chris’ starting point, the musical motifs and melodies followed, setting concepts including the themes of teaching, healing, miracles, forgiveness, death, and resurrection.

The scope of the text is illuminated by scaled-down forces – chamber-sized string orchestra plus two horns, oboe (doubling oboe d’amore) and cor anglais (doubling bass oboe), with soprano, alto, tenor and bass solo voices. Unlike other oratorios, the singers do not represent any particular person but rather act as a chorus of storytellers. Chris explains, “This nebulous use of the voices, which sidesteps role assignment, keeps the vocal parts more abstract and hence the listener focused on the text.” With Chris’ faith as his guide, The Gospel According to Mark takes the listener a journey through the contrasts of peacefulness and agitation, darkness and light.

"DEFINITELY year's-best list material." --Iowa Public Radio

The Knights, the bold Brooklyn-based orchestral collective, embody the spirit of exploration with The Kreutzer Project, a program that posits Tolstoy’s response to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata: What exactly is it? I don’t understand. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does?

Beethoven and Tolstoy in turn inspired Czech composer Leoš Janácek, whose first string quartet is also called “Kreutzer Sonata”. The Knights’ response to these iconoclastic touchstones is to reimagine the Beethoven as a “Kreutzer Concerto”, arranged by The Knights’ co-founder Colin Jacobsen, who is also the orchestrated version’s violin soloist; and the Janácek as orchestrated by The Knights’ co-founder and conductor Eric Jacobsen. They keep the canon going with Colin’s newly-composed “Kreutzings”, which makes buried allusions to both Beethoven and Janácek; and a commission from Anna Clyne, whose piece “Shorthand” takes its title from a line in Tolstoy’s novella: “music is the shorthand of emotion”.

REVIEW

Arranged by Colin Jacobsen as an orchestral concerto, the “Kreutzer” Sonata explodes into a promethean supernova. The opening bars (also performed by Jacobsen) are played with familiarity and a seemingly deliberate avoidance of showmanship. But then the expected texture of a piano is replaced by woodwinds, offering even more melancholy in the minor key through the hints of oboe and bassoon. The call-and-response echoes aspects of Beethoven’s actual Violin Concerto, and underscores a line in Tolstoy’s own Beethoven-inspired The Kreutzer Sonata: “It seemed to me that he was weary of his solitude.” 

The dramatic potential that can get lost with the wrong pianist (or even simply the wrong listening session) is fully unpacked here, laid out like a sprawling dinner service for 20; crystal stemware gleaming, flatware catching the glint of tapered candles.

The Knights’s “Kreutzer Project” is built on the foundation of Beethoven, bookended by Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata.” This work owes more to Tolstoy’s story, which focuses on a man who kills his unfaithful wife in a Beethoven-fuelled frenzy.

The Knights are no strangers to making orchestrated chamber works come to life in glittering multidimensionality...[but] it could have been overselling to call two works a “project.” Which is why they’ve recorded four, with Colin Jacobsen’s “Kreutzings” and Anna Clyne’s “Shorthand.” Clyne [introduces] the weedy world of Janáček while also riffing on the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata. Her natural predilection for thorny timbres and phantasmal texture work well with the Czech composer’s overgrown paths and houses of the dead, and soloist Karen Ouzounian plays with a voracious, burnished tone, as though the 11-minute work were a full concerto. Perhaps it should be.

--Van Magazine (Olivia Giovetti)

A New Yorker Notable Recording of 2022!

Twice Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan is “one of the world’s most remarkable singers” (Boston Globe). Nico Muhly is one of today’s most sought-after composers. Nick and Nico’s collaboration began with a commission when Nick curated a series for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in 2020. The resulting song cycle, Stranger, finds common ground in the musicians’ reflections on identity and immigration, themes that resonate as much today as they have through the centuries. This world-premiere recording of Stranger compliments Nico’s Lorne Ys My Liking, a setting of the 19th Chester Mystery Play, and Impossible Things, a triptych of poems by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. Nick has recorded with a roll call of collaborators: the adventurous string quartet Brooklyn Rider, shimmering countertenor Reginald Mobley, bold pianist Lisa Kaplan, and transformative Brooklyn-based collective The Knights led by brothers Colin and Eric Jacobsen.

REVIEWS

The heart immediately opens at the sound of Phan’s voice … Stranger is a must. I, for one, will be listening to it over and over.

--San Francisco Classical Voice

...an album that guarantees a gripping listening experience and, first and foremost, once again shows Nicholas Phan to be an outstanding singer with clear diction and impeccable vocal delivery who excels in the song repertoire. ★★★★★

--Pizzicato

Composer Nico Muhly has been on concert bills all over the U.S. and beyond in the early 2020s, and one reason is that he has a knack for creating music for the right performer at the right time. Tenor Nicholas Phan is a rising star who here contributes an essay about his difficulties, when performing at the Singer of the World competition in Wales, in coming up with a song that reflected his "American" identity, inasmuch as he is Chinese Indonesian on one side, and Greek American on the other. He would have found the perfect solution in Muhly's seven-section Stranger, for voice and string quartet. Muhly, himself the product of a highly multi-ethnic background, sets writing about the experience of immigration from various sources, including an interview with a Sicilian woman who arrived at Ellis Island in 1911 and a letter from a Chinese American about discrimination. All are in different registers, and Muhly's sensitive handling of text adds variety even as his musical language remains consistent. Phan's commitment to these pieces is palpable, but he shifts gears effectively in the other works on the program, Lorne Ys My Likinge, a setting of the Chester Mystery Play inspired by Britten's Abraham and Isaac, and Impossible Things, which sets translated texts by poet C.P. Cavafy. Phan's duet work with countertenor Reginald Mobley in Lorne Ys My Likinge is absolutely delicious, and the accompaniment by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and the New York chamber orchestra The Knights, is intimate and close. This marks a major step forward for Phan, and anyone who hasn't been following Muhly's music, which combines rigor with tremendous audience appeal (sample the ravishing "My Love" from Stranger), might do well to start here.

--AllMusic (James Manheim)

The final volume in this critically acclaimed series presents the last 18 of the one hundred magnificent and varied secular vocal works contained in the so-called Guerra Manuscript. Seven of these tonos (secular Spanish songs) – five of which were written for the stage – are by Juan Hidalgo, one of the leading composers of the Spanish Baroque. Great care has been taken over the use of historically informed instrumentation of the plucked strings and especially the harp, bringing vividly to life the golden age of 17th-century Spanish composition.

The star of tenor John Matthew Myers is rapidly in the ascendent. His debut album, Desiderium, coincides with his Metropolitan Opera debut in Brett Dean’s Hamlet. Desiderium – “an ardent desire or longing, a feeling of loss or grief for something lost” – beautifully showcases Myers’ mellifluous voice.

His thoughtful program of works by American and American émigré composers opens with Samuel Barber’s yearning Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – rarely heard sung by a tenor – and transitions to Charles Griffes’ similarly searching settings of 3 Poems of Fiona Macleod, and Andre Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano. What follows is A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, set to the words of a poignant letter by an American Civil War officer, by John Kander (of Kander and Ebb musical theatre fame). Rounding out the recital are 4 Walt Whitman Songs by German-born composer Kurt Weill, including the classic O Captain! My Captain! John Matthew Myers says, “Call me a big-hearted Romantic. Each song on this album conveys yearning, separation, loneliness or distance but also a sense of intimacy and longing for connection.” It certainly does. Desiderium is an auspicious debut album, and one especially attuned to our times.

REVIEW:

For his debut recital disc John Matthew Myers has chosen songs and groups of songs by five American composers, active during the 20th century. The common denominator is a feeling of loneliness, and it all stemmed from Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, which is the only really well-known work in this album.

It goes without saying that the overriding mood is that of melancholy and gloom, but the texts and the musical expressions differ greatly, which vouches for a varied program. Barber’s Knoxville was composed in 1947 for a high voice and orchestra, and has almost exclusively been soprano territory. Since James Agee’s dream-like prose poem from 1938 is written in the persona of a 5-year-old male child, it’s logical to have it performed by a tenor. John Matthew Myers sings the many lyrical sections with soft beautiful tone, but he is also apt at expressing the desperation and sorrow in the work's crucial lines. It is a deeply felt reading.

Composed in 1918 The three Griffes songs, to poems by Fiona Macleod (William Field), were orchestrated in 1919. Like Barber’s Knoxville the orchestration has an attractive colouring that the piano cannot measure up to, but still it has its own attraction, and since it is the original it’s valid and gives the music a more intimate image, more chamber music like. I am happy to have both versions in so convincing readings.

I must say that André Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano is a harder nut to crack. Composed in 2004 they are dressed in a rather knotty harmonic language. The mood is gloomy, also in the up-tempo last song, The Revelation. I believe that repeated listening might open them up, but at present I must content myself with admitting that the singing and playing are of the highest order. As far as I have been able to find out, this is a first recording, even though the liner notes don’t specifically say so.

The setting for John Kander’s A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, a major in the Civil War, is wonderful and gripping. John Kander is known, at least to Broadway musical enthusiasts, for his collaboration with Fred Ebb in Cabaret, Chicago, and other Broadway successes. Here, in a quite different vein, he catches all the shifts and nuances of the letter so sensitively. There are certainly echoes from his musical background, which in no way is a drawback. John Matthew Myers reading is appropriately sensitive.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 triggered Kurt Weill to set three of the Walt Whitman poems recorded here. He “structured the original three as a gradual decrescendo of militarism from the bullish opening to the wistful intensity of the final dirge”, as Julian Haylock says in his notes. Five years later he added Come Up from the Fields, Father, which here is placed third in the suite. Weill was a great admirer of Whitman, and said as early as 1926 that he was “the first truly original poetic talent to grow out of American soil.” The music is warlike and sturdy in the first song, reminding me of his style in the 1920s, the second song is a funeral march, and the whole suite – I wouldn’t call it a cycle – is deeply engaging.

John Matthew Myers can feel satisfied with his debut album, and he is excellently supported by Myra Huang’s accompaniment.

-- MusicWeb International (Göran Forsling)

Bo Linde (1933-1970) was one of his time's most gifted Swedish composers and composed very advanced music already in his teens. Due to his expressive preferences he became more or less a musical outcast since the strongly politicized Swedish music life in the 1950s demanded avantgardistic music which under no circumstances should be satisfying to the listener's ear! Many of his works were neglected, until now, when some of Scandinavia's foremost chamber musicians, Ylva Larsdotter, Torun Saeeter Stavseng, and Peter Friis Johansson have made the world premiere recordings of Linde's Piano Trio No. 1 and Six Character Pieces. Furthermore, the Divertimento Op. 25 is for the first time presented in a version for violin, cello & piano. Don't miss out on these astonishing finds!

The 20th century saw an abundance of notable Russian cellists inspiring an extensive repertoire by Soviet composers. In the cello sonatas by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both composers explore the rich and emotive timbre of the instrument with expressive subtleties and bittersweet emotions, alongside their typical touches of wit and irony. Internationally acclaimed pianist Evgeny Kissin has recently returned to composing, and his Cello Sonata is akin to a ballad in its restraint and introspection.

Check out this Naxos Live Q+A with the artists!

From the virtuoso Essercizi (K.12 and 15) to the touching cantabile eloquence of the Sonata in G major, K.144, most of the repertoire on this album consists of lesser-known works incorporating elements of dance forms from Spain and Portugal, with the Sonata (Fuga) in D minor heard here in its world premiere recording.

In 2019, Jessica Meyer’s first composer/performer portrait album Ring Out highlighted her lyrical, expressive works that celebrate the arts of interpretation and performance. In her sophomore effort, I long and seek after, she focuses solely on vocal music that features poetry by female and underrepresented writers who tackle universal themes such as loneliness, desire, love, heartbreak, justice, and the courage to embark on a journey of discovering oneself.

Virko Baley was born in Ukraine in 1938 and came to the USA as a refugee in 1949, eventually making his home in Las Vegas. He has long been fascinated by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as can be heard in the two moving works recorded here – one an orchestral song-cycle setting her texts, the other a suite for violin and piano inspired by those settings. They display an acute ear for orchestral colour, a fondness for dramatic gesture and a strong sense of lyricism, occasionally inflected by distant echoes of Baley’s eastern European origins, the richness of the song-cycle placing him downstream from Mahler and Berg and the restraint of the Songs without Words occasionally evoking Arvo Pärt.