‘The fantastic thing about art and music is that one can pose questions and conjure up visions at the same time.’ The words are those of the Swedish composer Jesper Nordin, who does exactly that in Emerging from Currents and Waves. A large-scale work for orchestra, clarinet soloist, conductor and live electronics, Emerging… is a collaboration between Nordin, Martin Fröst and Esa-Pekka Salonen. All three are interested in how new technology can – and will – influence art and artistic expression, and in exploring the intersection of mankind, music and technology. Emerging from Currents and Waves is in three parts, with the clarinet concerto "Emerging" at its center. In the work the electronic and the acoustic world meet on an equal footing. The sound of the live orchestra is recorded in real time, sampled, treated and played back, in processes that are controlled by both soloist and conductor with the help of motion sensors. The technology used for this is Gestrument (from ‘gesture’ and ‘instrument’), originally invented by Nordin as a tool for composition, but which here is used rather as an instrument.

The present recording was made at the first performance of the work, in Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen during the 2018 Baltic Sea Festival. In concert a visual element was added as images generated by the electronic music-making were projected onto several layers of transparent fabrics forming a specially designed sculpture that hovered above the orchestra.

:"Crepuscolo" is the final song in Ottorino Respighi’s song cycle Deità silvane (‘woodland deities’), but as an album title it also stands for the twilight during the interwar years of everything that Respighi represented, as various trends such as atonality, spiky neoclassicism, and Italian futurism flourished. In reaction to these developments, Respighi in 1932 famously signed a manifesto calling for music with a ‘human content’ – in other words, a continuation of Romanticism. His songs certainly live up to this: as Elsa Respighi, the composer’s wife, once said, it was to his songs that he ‘entrusts his heart’s hidden secrets, when he lets his soul sing freely.’ From L’ultima ebbrezza, composed when Respighi was only 17 years old, to the Four Scottish Songs from 1924, the songs recorded here attest to the variety of his musical interests, influences and styles, and are at turns lyrically operatic, expressionist, impressionist or symbolist. Respighi’s love of the Renaissance is also manifest in the Cinque canti all’antica, settings of poets including Boccaccio.

Timothy Fallon and Ammiel Bushakevitz have previously released a Liszt recital described as ‘superb’ in Gramophone. They have now devised a varied program which takes in three complete groups as well as a selection of individual songs, including Respighi’s most popular songs (Nebbie, Stornellatrice) as well as less well known ones.

REVIEWS:

With every new exposure to Respighi’s vocal music – whether opera or song – I find that his much better-known orchestral works fade in significance, especially with this new cross section of the composer’s songs...this newcomer makes a great case for a single-disc collection thanks to a smart sense of musical variety in the sequencing plus the passionate, elegant performances by lyric tenor Timothy Fallon and his longtime collaborator, pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz.

Fallon is no newcomer...but maintains a youthful sensibility that takes the poems at face value, never looking outside of them, aided by a warm, Italianate tone that lends itself to the musical simplicity of the Scottish folk songs as well as the operatic histrionics of ‘Stornellatrice’ (‘Balladeer’)...Bushakevitz’s sonority and sense of comprehension suggest the lilac-scented, silk-upholstered parlours seen in Luchino Visconti movies, but make such a good case for the more distilled piano versions that, at least for the moment, you wouldn’t want to hear the music any other way.

-- Gramophone

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of China’s leading contemporary composers. He has written music in a variety of genres, including symphonic and chamber works as well as scores for the stage. Ye has also composed music for films and the two works recorded here are both examples of this. Sichuan Image consists of 29 brief and atmospheric pieces composed to accompany a filmed travelogue of the scenic province in Western China. In preparation for the work, the composer visited mountains, river, villages and ancient historical sites in Sichuan. Lending further color to the large symphony orchestra, four Chinese musicians perform on traditional instruments. The album closes with Concerto of Life, a suite in five movements for piano and orchestra with Noriko Ogawa taking on the solo part. The work is based on the score for a feature film of the same name telling the story of a piano teacher and his students. Ogawa has also appeared on a previous album of Ye’s music alongside the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor José Serebrier – a release named Editor's Choice in the Gramophone, whose reviewer described the performances as 'superb' and Ye's scores as possessing ‘lyrical elegance, searching drama and depth of color…’

Christopher Glynn continues his series of Schubert in English releases with a new recording of ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill’ (Die schöne Müllerin) with acclaimed Scottish tenor Nicky Spence. Set to a new translation by writer and director Jeremy Sams, Willhelm Müller’s direct and emotionally-charged poetry became the basis of Schubert’s first cycle to tell a complete story over the course of its 20 songs. Nicky Spence is one of Scotland’s proudest sons and his unique skills as a singing actor and the rare honesty of his musicianship have earned him a place at the top of the classical music profession. Nicky won a record contract with Decca records while still studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then took a place as an inaugural Harewood Artist at the ENO. Christopher Glynn is a Grammy award-winning pianist, praised for his ‘breathtaking sensitivity’ (Gramophone), ‘irrepressible energy, wit and finesse’ (The Guardian) and ‘perfect fusion of voice and piano’ (BBC Music Magazine). He is also Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival, where he has been praised as a ‘visionary’ and ‘inspired programmer’ (The Times).

REVIEWS

"The Fair Maid of the Mill [is] extraordinary: For the first time, as a native English speaker, I found myself understanding this song cycle on a more intimate and revelatory level...The meticulousness of word-for-word accuracy is traded for emotional accuracy. Playwright and director Jeremy Sams was commissioned to write this new translation, and his background in both opera and musical theater lends itself well to finding the right words to convey poetic, emotional, and dramatic honesty.

Tenor Nicky Spence’s own sense of crossover theatricality heightens the immediacy and intimacy of the cycle and Sams’s new texts with a verdant tenor that blooms and contracts in emotional fits and starts. (These beats are both offset and at times juxtaposed by pianist Christopher Glynn...) As the journeyman’s dream begins to collapse on itself...Spence spits out his pleas in a fit of jealousy and panic. The clarity with which he delivers the words makes it easy to slip into the language of Schubert’s work and tap into the small details that render the story so devastating at the end—try listening to him sing of how his love 'loves hunting green' without your throat catching a bit. It’s these small details that make this English Müllerin so rich and compulsively listenable.

--Van Magazine (Olivia Giovetti)

This is the third in the Signum label’s sequence of Schubert song cycles using an English version of the texts by Jeremy Sams. His is in no sense a literal translation and is never in the least archly “poetic”, but is instead couched in relatively, plain, direct English which captures the spirit and directness of the original German while jettisoning any faux-Romantic or medieval archaisms such as “fain would I”. The translation is vernacular and quotidian but not modish or vulgar – and Sams does a fine job of reproducing the rhyming, strophic form of some songs, finding workable rhymes which do not sound forced, so in “Mine” we hear “sound, round, resound” and “found”, and “shine, wine, intertwine, combine” and “mine” sequentially to reproduce the effect of the German. The freedom of the English into which some songs are rendered might initially take the listener aback but a moment’s reflection will confirm the aptness and fidelity of Sams’ rendering; hence, the opening song begins “A miller loves to sit and dream of somewhere” rather than “To wander is the miller’s delight, to wander” or some such precious transliteration – and I know which I prefer. Sometimes the translation is both felicitous and amusing, as when in “Impatience” (Ungeduld) Sams picks up on the German: “ich möcht es sän auf jedes frische Beet/ Mit Kressensamen” (I’d like to sow it in every fresh bed with cress seeds) and translates that colloquially as “I want to sow the words in watercress” so that it rhymes with “happiness” in the next line, and in “The Hunter” the miller girl’s cabbage patch (Kohlgarten) is transformed into a “strawberry bed” so that “fruit” rhymes conveniently with “shoot”. Certain lines impress themselves immediately upon the mind of the listener by their memorability, such as the alliterative “The sound of rushing water has mesmerised my mind” in the second song.

Nicky Spence’s diction is so pellucid as to render the provision of the English texts almost superfluous but such thoughtfulness on the part of the label remains a welcome gesture. [Spence's] beautiful, flexible, easily-produced sound...never falters; his tone encompasses both sweetness and power as required and his knack of placing just the right emphasis or applying a momentary pause in the words without unduly disrupting the vocal line is apparent throughout. I particularly like the way he can introduce a desperate sighing note into his timbre without it turning mawkish. Christopher Glynn supports him with some of the most subtle and sensitive pianism I have even heard applied to this work; his playing is by turns as fluid, sparkling and turbulent as rushing water. He and Spence make an ideally matched partnership – fresh and immediate, presenting it in a manner which could easily win new adherents to this miraculous song cycle but, in Glynn’s words, is also capable of 'offering a new perspective to those who know it well.'

--MusicWeb International (Ralph Moore)

All World Premiere Recordings

Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion, whose artistry blends “creative fearlessness with reverent precision” (BBC Music Magazine), offers an album of enterprising collaborations and world-premiere recordings of works written or arranged expressly for the Chicago-based percussion quartet, representing four different approaches to composing concert music.

Danny Elfman’s Percussion Quartet, structured like a four-movement symphony, shares distinctive traits heard in his Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated films scores, as well as hints of African balofon, Indonesian gamelan, and Shostakovich. Great admirers of composer Philip Glass, Third Coast arranged Glass’s solo piano Metamorphosis No. 1 for marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and melodica. Rubix emerged from Third Coast Percussion’s improvisational collaboration with virtuosic, cutting-edge flute duo Flutronix, who also perform on the recording. Critically acclaimed electronic musician and composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) composed her seven-movement Perspective as electronic tracks, without music notation. Third Coast transformed this work of “beautiful complexity” into a version they could perform live as a quartet.

REVIEW:

Unlike a lot of academic music for percussion ensembles, Danny Elfman makes his quartet sing sweetly, leaning heavily on the warm sounds of the marimba interlocking with tinkling tubular chimes and pitched metal pipes.

The flute duo Flutronix's piece, Rubix, features punchy flutes dancing over a chilled out vibraphone, and foggy episodes where marimba, whirly tube and bowed flexatone provide an evocative backdrop of light and shadow.

Footwork is the hyper-beat music born in Chicago's underground dance competitions and house parties in the late 1990s. On Third Coast Percussion's album, the style undergoes a mesmerizing transformation in a seven-movement suite called Perspective, by Jerrilynn Patton, who goes by Jlin.

Third Coast Percussion, with albums like Perspectives, continues to push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners.

-- NPR. org (Tom Huizenga)

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)

Between 1803 and 1968, the Grand Prix de Rome marked the zenith of composition studies at the Paris Conservatoire. In Maurice Ravel’s time the competition included an elimination round (a fugue and a choral piece) followed by a cantata in the form of an operatic scena. The entries were judged by a jury which generally favoured expertise and conformity more than originality and Ravel’s growing reputation as a member of the avant-garde was therefore hardly to his advantage, and may explain why he never won the coveted Premier Grand Prix, and the three-year stay at Rome’s Villa Medici that went with it.

The present set brings together all the vocal works that Ravel composed for the Prix de Rome – five shorter settings for choir and orchestra and three cantatas, each with three characters taking part in a plot which followed a more or less fixed sequence of introduction, recitative and aria, a duet, a trio and a brief conclusion. First published more than half a century after Ravel’s death, these test pieces for the Prix de Rome have never acquired the popularity of his other early works, such as Pavane pour une infante défunte, Jeux d’eau or the String Quartet. They are worth more than their reputation as academic exercises might suggest, however, and deserve to be better known, especially when performed by Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Pascal Rophé and a team of vocal soloists including Véronique Gens and Michael Spyres.

REVIEWS:

This two-disc set brings together all of these rare vocal pieces by the composer: five shorter settings for choir and orchestra, and three cantatas, each with three characters taking part in the plot, which followed a more or less fixed sequence of introduction, recitative and aria, a duet, a trio and a brief conclusion. First published more than half a century after Ravel's death in 1937, these test pieces for the Prix de Rome have never acquired the popularity of his later and more mature works, but they are no mean pieces and are worth more than their reputation as academic exercises might suggest. These are compositions that are deftly crafted, full of attractive melodies, harmonically refined, and very often deeply sensitive. Indeed, they encapsulate all of the future Ravel hallmarks that were to make him one of the twentieth century's leading French composers.

Pascal Rophé draws some convincing performances and, in his hands, the music has an immediacy that keeps it consistently fresh and vivid. More than a collector's item which should attract the interest of all music lovers - Ravel aficionados in particular. Sonics and booklet notes are first-rate.

-- Classical Music Daily



Towards the end of the 19th century, ´several composers were taking a new interest in folk music. Folk tunes, or imitations of them, had previously mainly been used in order to provide ‘local colour’ or as a way of catering to nationalist sentiments, but it was now seen as a means to revitalize art music itself, opening up for new possibilities in terms of rhythm and harmony as well as melody. At the forefront of this development was Béla Bartók, who also considered the use of folk elements as a tool to transcend boundaries – to achieve a ‘brotherhood of peoples’. For his new recital disc, Can Çakmur has devised a program which juxtaposes four composers’ different responses to folk music. Bartók’s Piano Sonata is followed by Passacaglia, Intermezzo e Fuga with which Dimitri Mitropoulos made a clean break with earlier works in a more nationalistic vein. Next comes Çakmur’s compatriot, the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, who in 1936 accompanied Bartók on a field trip in Turkey collecting music. His Piano Sonata was composed some fifty years later, however, and refers to folk music primarily on a theoretical level. Closing the disc is George Enescu’s Piano Sonata No.?3 in D major, which Çakmur in his own liner notes describes as ‘radiating a natural affinity for the village, without sacrificing the compositional value of the work.’

The love for the Latvian landscape is audible in the piano works of Latvia’s greatest living composer, Peteris Vasks (b. 1946), especially in his Seasons, the composer’s most frequently performed piano work. For this album pianist Reinis Zarinš has brought two other piano works alongside The Seasons as first recordings: Vasks’ early piano work Cycle (Zyklus) from the 1970s, and a new piano work, Cuckoo’s Voice. Spring Elegy (2021), written by the composer for Reinis Zarinš during the pandemic.

Ever since his concerto debut at the age of ten, Reinis Zariņš has performed as a concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout Europe and North America. He has participated in prestigious music festivals including the Lucerne Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, and the Scotia Festival of Music. His thoughtful virtuosity has delighted audiences at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. Reinis has collaborated with leading orchestras including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, and with conductors Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Pablo Heras-Casado, and Andris Poga, among others.

REVIEWS:

Alongside the world premiere recording of Vasks’ first-ever piano piece Cycle (1976) and the epic, complete The Seasons — four freestanding works composed between 1980 and 2008 — Cuckoo’s Voice—Spring Elegy (2021) serves to reinforce a sense of the importance to Vasks of his ongoing calling ‘that he must, until his last breath, glorify God’s world and people and his fatherland’, as Zariņš puts it. Yet, while Cycle especially is a welcome reminder of Vasks’ more astringent youthful style, and his writing is never less than intensely felt, there’s little trace here of the outright anguish that has often characterized his better-known string pieces. It’s as if Vasks is writing from inside nature as opposed to merely observing it: there’s an overarching stillness and acceptance within the sometimes dramatic push-pull of growth and decay explored throughout—and the contrasting moods he traverses ultimately nestle within that bigger process, albeit to varying degrees of comfort.

Zariņš’s impeccable pianism is hugely to thank for this, and his capacity to trace cohesive narratives through often lengthy, apparently free-wheeling but rigorously composed, works. Most satisfying is ‘Autumn Music’ (1981) which looks stylistically backwards and forwards even as it rounds The Seasons and the album itself.

-- BBC Music Magazine

This has the premiere recordings of Zyklus (Cycle) from 1976 and Cuckoo’s Voice. Spring Elegy from 2021. Cuckoo’s Voice is improvisatory and generally meditative, though it does have a few clamorous climaxes. Then Cycle bursts in with notes firing as if from a machine gun, taunting and acerbic. Its pauses are foreboding. Zarins brings out some impressive sounds from the insides of the piano: gradations of pizzicato and a pulsing, ringing “wub-wub-wub” from some low frequencies at the end of the ‘Prologue’. Most string-plucking from pianists sounds awkward, but Zarins gets loveliness out of it, even evoking a zither in the ‘Nocturne’. The repetitive rumblings and clattering chords of ‘Drama’ are too close to pompous avant-garde pounding for my taste, though I have to admit that Vasks manages to preserve his own Baltic voice through it all. The ‘Epilogue’ ties the preceding movements together and ends with what sounds like bricks dropping onto the strings.

The Seasons clocks in at 52 minutes. ‘White Scenery’ is a somewhat minimalist reverie, while ‘Spring Music’ goes for nearly 20 minutes, rippling and ringing and shaking the whole world by the collar with vernal urgency. This spring is the opposite of the English pastoral type and more like a tempered, transparent version of one of Messiaen’s bird-song pieces. The harmonies of ‘Green Scenery’ veer closer to England, but the repeated chords soon turn to tedium. Irritation turns to exasperation in ‘Autumn Music’ and its unending strings of repeated notes similar to tremolo on a guitar. It is more bearable when I concentrate on it (rather than, say, listening to it in the car), but rarely has a piece driven me up the wall so quickly.

Zarins’s playing is superb, and any Vasks fan will want this.

-- American Record Guide (Stephen Page)

Pianist Reinis Zarinš impresses with evocative music-making. In coaxing beautiful colors from the piano, he renders well the more subtle as well as the more immediate moods of the music.

-- Pizzicato