"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 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.

Spanning landscapes from Mexico to Canada, the Pacific Crest Trail covers thousands of miles of natural beauty, creating a transformative journey captured in FROM WILDERNESS from Navona Records. Choral Arts Initiative, conducted by Brandon Elliott and joined by cellist Kevin Mills, paints these landscapes from composer Jeffery Derus with vibrant color, with vocal soloists giving identities to the spirit animals one may encounter on the trail. A concert-length work and meditation, the listener will hear a wash of sounds that allow for introspective reflection on the sacredness of nature, the profound text, and themselves.

REVIEWS:

A Textura Top 20 Album of 2022!

Jeffrey Derus is both a founding board member of Choral Arts Initiative and one of the esteemed ensemble's tenors. He's also, however, the composer of From Wilderness, a glorious choral work brought to magnificent realization by twenty-five CAI singers, eight crystal bowl players, and cellist Kevin Mills. The company earlier distinguished itself with the release How to Go On: The Choral Works of Dale Trumbore and now equals that achievement with a stellar realization of Derus's work. From Wilderness is a multi-hued meditation that lives up to its transformative billing: it's almost impossible to imagine someone hearing it and not being profoundly moved.

-- Textura

Indiana-based composer Eugene O'Brien and the 21st Century Consort (contemporary ensemble led by Christopher Kendall in residence at the Smithsonian Museum) release Algebra of Night, featuring two ensemble works that highlight O'Brien's rich harmonic palette and carefully articulated structural approach.

Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881–1950) was given the sobriquet of ‘the conscience of Russian music’ thanks to his dignified bearing and quiet wisdom – qualities reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation this series hopes to remedy. This second album presents his entire output of songs for baritone and piano, most of them early works responding to Russian lyric poetry with the calm dignity typical of his compositions – though there is the occasional flash of passion.

Napoléon Coste was the most eminent French guitarist of the 19th century and a creative innovator. Fantaisie symphonique shows the range of his ambition with its quasi-orchestral textures, swift mood changes and virtuoso flourishes. Le Départ is one his most popular extended pieces, full of liquid transitions. Volumes 1–5 can be heard on 8.554192, 8.554194 and 8.554353-55.

APNM (Association for the Promotion of New Music) releases Vol. 3 of their ongoing series documenting recordings of music by their member composers. Featuring works by Erik Lundborg, Ionel Petroi, Hiroya Miura, Louis Goldford, Michael Gogins, Peter Child, Aine Nakamura, and Krists Auznieks, APNM Vol. 3 is an important chronicle of a core organization in the New York new music community.

Philadelphia based contemporary music choir The Crossing releases "Carols after a Plague" in album format, a collection of works by twelve composers that responds to our collective experience of the last few years navigating the pandemic, as well as grappling with the fraught issues of our time. In characteristic fashion, The Crossing, led by artistic director Donald Nally, finds ways to create projects that connect music to our shared experience, with the beauty of human voices providing the glue for this timeless communal experience.

Only one year and a half after their first meeting in Budapest in early 1905, Bartók and Kodály were eager to jointly publish their first settings of Hungarian folk songs. In their foreword to the volume Magyar népdalok (Hungarian Folk Songs), they declare their goal thus: “ … to get the general public to know and appreciate folk songs.” The Ten Hungarian Folk Songs from 1906 (BB 43), Bartók’s earliest and still quite rudimentary but imaginative and very sensitive folk-song arrangements, were collected by the 25-year-old himself mostly in three regions of the Hungarian countryside: near Budapest, Békéscsaba, and the lake Balaton. This set, from which we can listen to four arrangements on this CD, had never been offered by Bartók to be published. Having collected peasant music from regions of the Hungarian Kingdom where significant Romanian and Slovak minorities lived, Bartók immediately became intrigued by the peculiarities – and from his point of view, musical freshness – of both nations’ songs and instrumental dances.

His reverence for the folklore of the Slovaks can be felt in the five arrangements of the Falún (Village Scenes) series (BB 87a), composed in 1924 and based on folk songs from the Zólyom (in Slovakian: Zvolenská) region of what was then Upper Hungary (now Slovakia) he collected in 1917 from village women. These arrangements of bursting energy, enchantingly deep emotionality and transcendence also bear testimony to Bartók’s discovery of Stravinsky’s music which he was galvanized by in the early 1920s. The texts are sung by Katalin Károlyi in Hungarian here, not in their original Slovak-language version.

Before leaving Hungary for Austria and West Germany after the fall of the 1956 revolution, György Ligeti (1923–2006) not only collected folk music in his native Transylvania but also worked for the Institute for Folklore in Bucharest and Kolozsvár in the late 1940s. Thus, in his twenties and thirties, he followed the footsteps of his idols, Bartók and Kodály. In the last months of 1952, Ligeti set to music five poems by János Arany, a leading figure of 19th-century Hungarian poetry. Both text and music are deeply rooted in Hungarian folk songs; indeed, most of Ligeti’s melodies, or parts thereof, could be actual folk songs, just like Arany’s texts from almost a century earlier could be folk-song texts. The last piece is an exception, being a daring musical setting of Arany’s 1868 Hungarian translation of Robert Burns’ humorous song The Deil’s Awa Wi’ Th’ Exciseman (1792).

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.

In this third volume of Liszt's Schubert song transcriptions, which includes some rare versions, the composer’s prodigious capacity for colouration, shifting textures and use of myriad pianistic devices brings refinement and beauty to each song. Follows Volume 1 (8.553062, Volume 5 in the Complete Liszt edition) and Volume 2 (8.554729, Volume 17 in the Complete Liszt edition) of the Schubert Song Transcriptions series. Goran Filipec also contributed to Volumes 42 (8.573458), 49 (8.573705) and 55 (8.573794) of the Liszt Complete Piano Music series.