The term étude first started to turn up in musical literature in the late 1700s, and came into common usage in the first half of the 19th century. The notion of a piece of music exactingly engineered to promote some specific aspect of technique was nothing new; in her public presentations of “The Étude Project,” pianist Jenny Lin traces the concept back to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Clavier-Übung, four volumes of keyboard exercises published between 1726 and 1741 — the final volume known more widely as the “Goldberg” Variations.

Countless composers have risen to the challenge of the étude. This album, the first documentation of a sweeping project conceived by Lin, includes some of the most famous examples – Debussy, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Messiaen, Ligeti, and Glass – alongside equally noteworthy contributions to the format by such mavericks as Ruth Crawford Seeger, Toshio Hosokawa, and Unsuk Chin. Lin further pairs each of her canonical selections with an entirely new work by a member of ICEBERG New Music, a determinedly heterodox collaborative of 10 gifted young composers who represent a broad range of stylistic inclinations, but who are united by their enduring faith in substance and craft.

Bucking a current fad, the new études were not proposed as sequels or responses to existing works. Lin simply asked the ICEBERG composers to challenge her, and then used her own keen ear and sure instincts to find sympathetic pairings. Driving rhythms and rich harmonies link pieces by Alex Burtzos and Chopin. Rangy scatterings of notes present a frolicsome affinity between Victor Baez and Unsuk Chin. Stephanie Ann Boyd and Debussy both deploy dreamy arpeggios in rippling waves; and so on. In each case, hearing the new piece enhances your understanding of the older one—and vice versa. Identifying affinities among old and new music, and among familiar and unknown pieces, is a knack Lin has demonstrated again and again throughout her career—and it’s part of what makes her not only a persuasive interpreter, but also an invaluable guide and companion. Stated simply: you are in extraordinarily sure hands, here.

REVIEW:

Aligning with composers of ICEBERG New Music, pianist Jenny Lin gave its ten members absolute freedom of style and pianistic approach when crafting new etudes for her. In addition to her Herculean playing, the fearless pianist brings curatorial prowess to bear in pairing each new etude with an existing work from the canon. Have a listen to this disc and then have another. The Etudes Project will repay you manifestly.

– The Whole Note (CA)

This brand new Christmas album from The King’s Singers features 25 tracks covering everything from contemporary choral gems and folk songs through to well-loved carols. Dotted throughout the album are several of the most famous English church carols, which take The King’s Singers right back to their earliest singing days, and which also reflect the group’s heritage at King’s College, Cambridge. In Christmas Carols with The King’s Singers, the group bottle that frosty, moonlit, fireside Christmas wonder and pour it into their sound.

The King’s Singers have represented the gold standard in a cappella singing on the world’s greatest stages for over fifty years. They are renowned for their unrivalled technique, versatility and skill in performance, and for their consummate musicianship, drawing both on the group’s rich heritage and its pioneering spirit to create an extraordinary wealth of original works and unique collaborations.

REVIEWS:

If you love a capella men’s ensembles in Christmas music the King’s Singers are for you. This new album has some of the most beautiful ensemble singing I’ve heard in a long time. The arrangements are all tasteful and the singing, both in solos and ensemble, exquisite. These are not the same singers that recorded some truly ugly arrangements in some truly ugly albums several decades ago. Back them there seemed to be an attempt by their producers to make the King Singers more “withit” by recording them in arrangements that someone deemed funny or original. Since then someone brought the group back to what they do best. There are a number of familiar carols here (`Ding! Dong! Merrily on High!’, `Tomorrow Shall be my Dancing Day’, etc.), but also some newer carols that are really lovely (`The quiet heart’, `The little road to Bethlehem’, `O, do not move’). What a suitable disc for a wintry evening by the fire! Notes, texts, and translations.

-- American Record Guide

This programme portrays the ‘birth’ of the flute in France in the late 17th century and the following 40 years of its life as a new and fashionable instrument. A famous patron of the arts, King Louis XIV gathered elite composers and musicians to create the refinement, elegance and good taste that was demanded at his Paris Court. From the early petites pièces to more virtuoso suites and sonatas with their ornamented lyricism and grand dance rhythms, the mellow, robust and almost husky sounds of flutes from this period blend and weave around each other like the voices of two singers.

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards!

Following the success of their last album, Timelapse, this new album from Orchestra of the Swan is a collection of extraordinary works connected by ideas of pilgrimage, contemplation, exploration and enlightenment through the works of composers such as Richter, Respighi, Britten, Piazzolla, Brian Eno, Nico Muhly, Joy Division and more. As with Timelapse, the joy is to be found in discovering the surprising and delightful connections between culturally disparate and musically contrasting time periods. Labyrinths have been an important part of humanity’s cultural landscape for thousands of years; from the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to the intriguing stories of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Our overwhelming desire to find patterns and ‘the hidden truth’ is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the subversive and complex vistas of music. Formed in 1995, Orchestra of the Swan is a British chamber orchestra which, under the artistic direction of David Le Page, is passionate about audience inclusivity and blurring the lines between genres, through its adventurous and accessible programming.

Andrew Nethsingha and The Choir of St John’s, Cambridge present a tribute album to two former directors, Christopher Robinson and David Hill, who celebrate their 85th and 65th birthdays respectively. Taking the idea of new growth as a starting point, the album develops from the seed of a single treble line, gradually adding organ, then lower voices, a second choir (Yale Schola Cantorum), 150 additional singers, and eventually combining nearly 500 voices together (former members and friends of the college choir). The programme spans Hildegard of Bingen to a new commission by James Long (b.1987) and also includes works by three ex-St Johnians: Herbert Howells, Johnathan Harvey and Christopher Robinson. The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge is one of the finest collegiate choirs in the world, known and loved by millions from its broadcasts, concert tours and recordings. Founded in the 1670s, the Choir is known for its distinctive rich, warm sound, its expressive interpretations and its breadth of repertoire.

This is already our third encounter with the great Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin – an encounter, in fact, that is as unusual as his music, which has delighted people around the world for over one hundred and fifty years. In Fryderyk’s day, not everybody was able to listen to his works. To hear one of his concerts they would have had to travel to where he lived – in his early years that meant going to Warsaw, and later even further, i.e. to Paris. Today, all we have to do is listen to one of his albums and imagine that the genius composer is playing especially for us.

All of the works in this programme were prize winners in the hotly contested 2018 Huang Zi International Chinese Piano Composition Competition, an event marking the 80th anniversary of the death of this influential composer and educator. Themes explored include the charm and unpredictability of China’s landscape, alongside elements of Chinese musical and theatrical aesthetics. Joint First Prize winners were Emile Naoumoff, whose Celestial Parade describes the composer’s wonderful experiences while in Shanghai, and Zhiliang Zhang, whose Qiao Ling Liu Dan portrays six widely differing ‘Dan’ or female characters in Sichuanese opera. Huang Zi (1904–1938) was the most influential composer and music educator of his generation, mentoring many distinguished Chinese musicians. To mark the 80th anniversary of the death of Huang Zi, the People’s Government of Chuansha New Town, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, and the American Pacific Musicians Association jointly launched the HUANG ZI International Chinese Piano Composition Competition from August to November 2018. 52 piano works from all over the world were submitted to the competition, and the impressive collection of works in this recording comprise the joint winners of both Third, Second and First Prizes.

Old and New Worlds is the result of an international collaboration between Ars Veritas (Gothenburg, Sweden) and Schola Cantorum (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio). It features great choral works of the past and the present. Ensemble Ars Veritas started in 2010 at the University of Stage and Music in Gothenburg. Jakob Patriksson led the work on creating an ensemble focusing on early church music and the sacred music it later inspired. One of the hallmarks of Ars Veritas is the concerts that gradually illustrate the evolution of Western European church music: from the sacred unanimous Gregorian music to the first completely independent polyphonic works.

Singing together binds us together. From the Protestant Reformation in Europe during the 1500s to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, there have been countless moments in history when songs have united nations, cultures and causes. This is still the case in today’s world. Finding Harmony is evidence that music has always been our common language. A unique collection of pieces that span the globe – including music that’s too often forgotten – each song is the key to a powerful true story about who we are and how we’ve got here. Together, Finding Harmony proves how deeply we can be moved by all kinds of stories when songs connect us to them, and to each other.

REVIEW:

For the most part, this album is a virtuoso piece of work. The Singers' vocal inflections and scoops are adaptable to a wide variety of styles, and they push themselves in that respect here, connecting pop sounds to the classic folk of Malvina Reynolds and to Eastern European traditions. In the main, it all holds together, and it is very much of the moment.

– All Music Guide (James Manheim)

This is a program of 20th Century trumpet music by some of the greatest composers of the first half of the 20th Century. Roderick MacDonald, trumpet, and Mikyung Kim, piano, bring these great works fully to life in mesmerizing performances. Roderick MacDonald was born outside Providence, Rhode Island. Since 2014 he has served as Music Director of the New England Symphony Orchestra, and is an Associate Professor of Music at the State University of New York in Fredonia. Pianist Mikyung Kim has performed across the globe as a collaborative pianist and soloist. An advocate for music in higher education, she has also held faculty positions at New York University, Montclair State University, and Concordia University in Austin (also as adjunct violin professor).

Grammy Award-winning chamber choir The Crossing brings to life the striking works of six contemporary composers in this Navona Records release, with performances that are unique and awe-inspiring. The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its over seventy commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

This album pays homage to the guitar. While the casual listener may recognize many of these works as favorites from the guitar canon, the majority of the repertoire wasn’t originally written for the instrument.

Only the Sor and the Brouwer were originally guitar compositions. The other works started life in a different form, and stand testament to the strength and versatility of the guitar to not only play such a diverse range of repertoire, but to truly embrace it. With its polyphonic capabilities and roots in popular music around the world, the guitar is singularly capable of such a traverse of styles. This album is not, as the title may imply, a collection of the most beloved or greatest hits from the classical guitar repertoire, but instead a demonstration of the power and ability of the guitar to perform and assume ownership of such beloved repertoire.

New York-based Australian classical guitarist Rupert Boyd has been described by The Washington Post as “truly evocative”, by Gramophone as a “fine guitarist”, and by Classical Guitar Magazine as “a player who deserves to be heard”. He has performed across four continents, from New York’s Carnegie Hall, to festivals in Europe, China, India, Nepal, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia. Active as both a soloist and chamber musician, Rupert Boyd regularly performs throughout the world in Boyd Meets Girl, with cellist Laura Metcalf, and as part of the Australian Guitar Duo with guitarist Jacob Cordover.

REVIEWS:

The sheer versatility of this instrument comes to the fore in a really eclectic selection, which traverses centuries of music from Bach to The Beatles in a sunny 60 minutes.

– BBC Music Magazine

Boyd is a very fine musician. His sense of line is beautifully showcased in Bach’s Suite, while his rhythmic acuity enlivens from the onset of Jobim’s Felicidade, performed here in Roland Dyens’s masterly arrangement. The final item, Boyd’s own technically assured arrangement of John Lennon’s ‘Julia’, makes for a quiet, slightly downbeat encore.

– Gramophone

The technical challenging of balancing a choir singing at full volume and a guitar, renowned for its gentle sound, has tended to discourage composers from pairing these resources. Handled sensitively, however, the combination yields a seductive sound-world, full of mystery and imagination, tending in this trio of works to evoke a reassuring feeling of familiarity: there is balance, a sense of form, awareness, and respect for a past that is renewed while it nourishes the present. At the peak of his maturity in 1959 and in a burst of creativity, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco set to music seven poems by Federico García Lorca as a cycle, Romancero Gitano Op.152. The vocal writing is limpid, capturing the colours and contrasts of Lorca’s text, whether it is representing the placid flow of three rivers (Baladilla de los Tres Rios) with an incessant stream of semiquavers, or depicting Carmen’s dance through the streets of Seville with an elegant and slightly grotesque “Tempo di Seguidilla” (Baile). Everywhere, what shines through, to quote the composer, is a sense ‘of the Spanish lands: the parched Castile, the pale olive groves, the scent of the orange orchards in Andalusia and, along the coast, the sea which breaks at the shore with vibrations, almost, of a guitar.’ Receiving their first recordings here are Nulla Sors Longa Est by Nicola Jappelli (b.1975) and Materna by Nicola Campogrande (b.1969). Jappelli’s chosen text was written by the Roman philosopher Seneca, and addresses the concept of happiness, ending with a bitter reflection on human frailty. Campogrande’s piece has a more positive outlook, celebrating motherhood in a commission from the guitarist on this recording, Nicolò Spera, to mark the birth of his daughter. Campogrande has set four texts – also in Latin – by the contemporary poet Marco Vacchetti, who was in turn inspired by Renaissance-era nativities painted by Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Luini and Solari.

REVIEW:

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s soulful settings of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca are the most affecting songs of the lot. Nicola Spera, Professor of classical guitar at the University of Colorado, is a fabulous guitarist, so with his flamenco-inspired playing, the orange trees and olive groves of Andalucia sound fragrant indeed.

– American Record Guide

Rossini Hayward, one of the most creative guitarists of his generation, has written a sequence of Christmas carol arrangements that range across the centuries and over continents. These beautiful pieces respect the original carols while bringing to them ingenious new features. Seven of the arrangements involve overdubbing by Hayward himself with voice, percussive effects or guitar, adding new colors, but showing that he always ‘understands the charm and power of simplicity’ (Classical Guitar).

Includes works by:

• Ebel, Eduard (1839-1905)
• Gauntlett, Henry J (1805-76)
•Gruber, Franz Xaver (1787-1863)
• Hopkins, John Henry (1820-91)
• Nielsen, Carl August (1865-1931)
• Nordqvist, Gustav (1886-1946)
• Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter (1747-1800)

REVIEW:

The results are delightful.

-- The Arts Desk

In November 1949, at the age of eight, Idil Biret entered the studios of ORTF (Radiodiffusion Television Francaise) in Paris and made her first recordings; these were works by Couperin, Bach, Beethoven and Debussy. In the following decades she made nearly 100 LPs and CDs, released on ten record labels (Pretoria, Vega, Decca, Atlantic/Finnadar, Pantheon, EMI, Naxos, Marco Polo, Alpha, BMP) and many recordings for radio and television stations around the world. These included the complete piano works of Brahms, Chopin and Rachmaninov as well as the Sonatas of Boulez and the Etudes of Ligeti. The Idil Biret Archive (IBA) is now bringing together her past and present recording; as the copyrights are obtained, old recordings no longer available commercially are being released together with her new recordings. The transcriptions by Liszt of Beethoven's Symphonies, originally recorded for EMI, and the newly recorded 32 Sonatas and all the Piano Concertos of Beethoven were released by IBA and also made available in a box set. All the Piano Concertos of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Grieg and the nine LPs recorded for Atlantic/Finnadar in New York which include works by Boulez, Webern, Berg, Ravel and Stravinsky were also released. The present album is a showcase of Turkish Piano Music and is made up of recordings made between 1958 and 2021. IBA is distributed worldwide by Naxos.