Trio Mediæval’s collection of hymns and lullabies — intimate songs as old as time and as new as tomorrow: this is music with no boundaries, celebrating our common humanity. We’ll never know the first song or the first singer, and we’ll never know what they sang about. But if time could unwind and we could hear it, perhaps we would witness a mother or a father singing the first lullaby. When we sing a hymn or a lullaby we become a link in a chain that began in the unknowable past and will stretch into the infinite future: a timeless continuum of solace and comfort. The new lullabies by Anders Jormin and Sinikka Langeland began in their heads as little musical gifts for real children, and are here sung for all of us by three singers who have sung many a lullaby to their own children, aided and abetted on this album by Trygve Seim, and Mats Eilertsen, fathers both. Hailed as a "fascinating journey with music of timeless beauty", Trio Mediæval’s highly acclaimed first album Words of the Angel in 2001 launched the group into the elite circles of early music ensembles and introduced them to a broad international audience. Formed in 1997, the Grammy nominated vocal ensemble consists of founder members Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Anna Maria Friman, and Jorunn Lovise Husan who joined the group in 2018. Trio Mediæval has recorded eight albums for ECM Records. Solacium is their first release with the Norwegian label 2L.

This album is the Polish phonographic premiere of works by three outstanding contemporary composers: Gubaidulina, Liebermann and Proto. The album presented by the performers is the outcome of ten years of cooperation, quest for a common sound, discovering new areas in music, artistic trips and creative interpretations. In their activities, double bass player Marek Romanowski and pianist Hanna Holeksa are guided by their common will to popularize new repertoire for this seemingly unobvious instrumental combination, proving its enormous potential.

Even 20 years ago, even in his place of work, Ludwigslust, where he held a prominent position in the famous court chapel of Duke Friedrich Franz I for a quarter of a century, nobody knew of Roman Patkolo’s extraordinary fellow citizen and most important double bass player of the Vienna School: Johannes Matthias Sperger! The “Sperger competition” for double bass, which has been taking place every two years since 2000, has not only drawn attention to Sperger, but above all to his compositional legacies. No double bass player has treated the instrument as virtuoso and compositionally as versatile as Sperger. This is evidenced by his 18 double bass concerts, of which the famous Slovak double bass player Roman Patkoló devotes himself to the 2nd and 15th concertos. The release is complemented by Symphony No. 30, in which the absolute closeness to Haydn's tonal language is striking. The concerts offer spirited, striking and profoundly moving melodies and extremely virtuoso sequences. In addition to Johann Baptist Vanhal's double bass concerto, the 15th concert is now one of the most valuable and now much played classical double bass concertos.

Arctic Dreams is critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams's uniquely beautiful and magical seven-movement work for a quartet of voices and a quartet of strings, with layers of digital delay that create 32-part canonic textures. It is dedicated to the composers friend the late writer Barry Lopez, and titled after one of Lopez's greatest books. The work, like most of Adamss works, reflects the composers passion for natures elemental forces. Adams writes about the piece: As in several of my later string quartets, all the string sounds are produced by natural harmonics and open strings. The sung text is composed of the names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and the seasons, in the languages of the Iñupiat and Gwichin peoples of Alaska. John Luther Adams's music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released eight recordings devoted to his work, including Lines Made by Walking, Everything That Rises, and The Wind in High Places. The performers: Synergy Vocals is a critically acclaimed vocal ensemble that has recorded music by Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Luciano Berio, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and many others and performed with the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. Their performances and recordings have been deemed amazing (New York Times); beautiful, haunting (Gramophone); and dazzling (The Observer). With Synergy is a quartet of notable string players: violinist Robin Lorentz, violist Ron Lawrence, cellist Michael Finckel, and bassist Robert Black.

October 29, 1923 - a date steeped in history. In the midst of a year of political and economic crisis, the age of public radio in Germany was ushered in with the first broadcast of the "Berliner Funkstunde", from the attic of an office building on Potsdamer Platz. The composers assembled on this album not only profited from these developments, but also, in part, actively shaped them.

The composer Ernst Toch experienced the crisis year of 1923 in Mannheim, where his "Dance Suite" op. 30 was premiered on with great success. In this work, Toch was able to realize his interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and new forms of expression. His imaginative use of instruments is one of the most fascinating aspects of the suite.

The "Frauentanz" for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon op. 10 by Kurt Weill, written in the summer of 1923, reflects the interest in chamber music line-ups typical of the time. The decisive factor was not only a new ideal of sound and expression, but also the experience that in times of crisis, pieces with small ensembles had better chances of being performed.

Ernst Krenek had found essential impulses for his work in Berlin; when the crisis came to a head in the summer of 1923 he composed the "Three Mixed Choirs" a cappella op. 22 on poems by Matthias Claudius. Krenek designed these folksong-like works written by a lyricist from the epoch of Empfindsamkeit as parables.

For the festive concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unification of the cities of Buda and Pest to form the capital and residence city of Budapest in the autumn of 1923, Béla Bartók created his "Dance Suite" for orchestra - a "rather touchy issue", as the internationalist-minded composer explained in a private note.

REVIEWS:

Given [the events of 1923 in central Europe], you might imagine a CD of mostly German music entitled 1923: Wild Sound of the 1920s might sound a bit, well, wild. Far from it. If anything, it shows the opposite: surrounded by violence and the threat of chaos, the four composers represented here by works they composed in 1923 responded by raising their art to the nth degree of refinement and subtlety. Take Ernst Krenek, a composer who nowadays is remembered for a smash hit opera about a Black jazz musician, and for writing later in life some of the most fearsomely intellectualized, complex works in the entire history of music. He’s represented on this disc by three settings for choir of the 18th-century poet Matthias Claudius, of a ravishing otherworldly beauty caught to perfection in these performances.

Kurt Weill, known to the world for his bitingly satirical music dramas, appears as the composer of seven exquisitely allusive, bittersweet songs based on medieval German poems. Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is a brilliantly imagined set of six “character” pieces for just a handful of instruments, with titles like The Red Whirling Dance and Idyll. Standing somewhat to one side of all this German romantic/modernist intensity and compression is the Dance Suite by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, with its rumbustious evocations of Balkan and North African Music.

The occasional whiff of expressionist harshness or a gently satirical distortion of a waltz shows these composers were not completely cocooned in their composing studios. They were alert to the jarring, shifting currents outside. But what the CD reveals most strongly is how much these composers were focused on their own internal, imaginative world – and how much they cared about craftsmanship. Every bar in all four pieces is exquisitely made, and that quality is caught in the performances, which are all of enormous refinement.

-- The Telegraph

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the “Berliner Funkstunde” station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill’s Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focused, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The ‘antique’ sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favorite works: Vaughan Williams’ G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok’s Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we’re talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

-- Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)

Nils Ferlin is one of the Swedish poets whose poetry collections have been published in the largest editions. He is also one of the poets, whose poems most often have been set to music, despite they are often grave with dark motifs. He is one of the eternally living names of Swedish literature and the song treasure, a “people’s poet”.

Composer Eric Richards approached listening as an embodied activity, an amalgamation of the auditory, psychological, and emotional experience we have hearing artistic sound. This album, produced by Andy Kozar and Jeffrey Gavett, features several of Richards's entrancing chamber works performed by Ekmeles, loadbang, Gavett, and Kozar as well as a host of New York based freelancers, and shines a light on a composer whose poetic approach to compositional, observation, and technology has been widely overlooked previously.

This new release is a brilliant collection of chamber music works by Polish composer Józef Elsner and his disciples Józef Władyslaw Krogurski and Ignatzi Felix Dobzinski. Known as Chopin's teacher, Elsner was also active as a violinist and conductor, and was also a renowned educator. He established the Warsaw Conservatory and taught excellent composers. On this release, enjoy a number of very beautiful works by these early Polish Romantic composers. Also notable is the participation of Yakubu Kushrik, a virtuoso who won the 4th place (the highest Polish person in the competition), which is the same as Aimi Kobayashi at the 18th Chopin International Piano Competition in 2021

“Darkness and Scattered Light” presents celebrated Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams’s mesmerizing; elegant; virtuosic music for double bass—two solos and a work for five basses—written for and all performed by bassist extraordinaire Robert Black. “This is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard in years.... It would be hard to imagine a better match of composer and performer than John Luther Adams and Robert Black.”(David Lang; Pulitzer-winning composer); John Luther Adams’s music has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic; the Chicago Symphony; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Seattle Symphony; the and the JACK?Quartet. Cold Blue Music has released ten recordings of his work; including Houses of the Wind; Arctic Dreams; Lines Made by Walking; Everything That Rises; and The Wind in High Places. “John Luther Adams ... one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” (Alex Ross; The New Yorker) “His music . . . is an elemental experience.” (The Guardian). Robert Black tours the world collaborating with composers; musicians; and other artists. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars; his recent collaborations have been with Philip Glass; Eve Beglarian; and Joan Tower. “No one on the planet can make the double bass sing; dance; sound like a drum; spin like a top; like Robert Black. Robert has single-handedly reinvented the technique and repertoire of the Double Bass; bringing it bursting into the 21st century.” (Michael Gordon)

The Piano Quintets, opp. 70 and 76, are substantial and full bodied dramatic works in classical style.

George Onslow’s grandfather was the first Earl of Onslow. Onslow’s father had been forced to leave England after a family scandal, continuing his life as a nobleman in France. George was born there and grew up in the magnificent castle of Chalendrat in Clermont-Ferrand, where he followed his father as lord of the manor. At the age of 22 he discovered the operas of Mehul and decided then that music was his vocation.

Onslow’s musical style was very different from that of his colleagues and contemporaries. With his strict classical style, he was unique in Paris, concentrating on instrumental works, primarily chamber music. Schumann described Onslow’s quartets as worthy successors to those by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. This recording combines two Piano Quintets, the opus 70 and 76, substantial and full bodied dramatic works in classical style.

Founded 1999, the Nepomok Fortepiano Quintet play on original instruments, the piano an exceptionally fine period instrument from the famous Edwin Beunk collection.