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On Sale Pre-orderThe Elastic Heart of Youth
CD$16.99$14.44Sono Luminus
Jun 12, 2026DSL-92289 -
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On SaleMazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright / Herresthal, Gaffigan, Arctic & Bergen Philharmonic
SACD$21.99$15.99BIS
Mar 03, 2023BIS-2572 -
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On SaleAtmosphériques, Vol. 1 / Bjarnason, Iceland Symphony
$22.99$11.49Sono Luminus
Apr 28, 2023DSL-92267 -
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On SaleBetween Breaths / Third Coast Percussion
CD$19.99$9.99Cedille
Sep 08, 2023CDR 224 -
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On SaleFernando, Masaoka, Mazzoli, Negron & Shyu: Panorama / Olivia de Prato
CD$20.99$18.99New Focus Recordings
Apr 14, 2023FCR368 -
Resonating Earth
$17.99CDMetier
Sep 20, 2024MEX77128 -
American Century
$15.99CDCentaur Records
Apr 18, 2025CRC4120 -
The Stone People / Moore
$18.99CDCantaloupe Music
Feb 12, 2016CA21115 -
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On SaleStreya / De Prato
CD$20.99$18.99New Focus Recordings
Mar 02, 2018FCR193 -
Journaling 2
$16.99CDInnova Recordings
Mar 24, 2017INN960 -
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On SaleLimitless / Jennifer Koh
CD$19.99$9.99Cedille
Sep 27, 2019CDR 191 -
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On SaleBach & Beyond / Jennifer Koh
CD$29.99$14.99Cedille
Sep 10, 2021BOX 1004 -
Cocteau
$18.99CDDivine Art
Mar 20, 2026DDX21141 -
Meanwhile / Eighth Blackbird
$19.99CDCedille
Sep 25, 2012CDR 133 -
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On SalePalumbo: Woven Lights / D'Orazio, Reynolds, London Symphony Orchestra
CD$21.99$10.99BIS
Jan 06, 2023BIS-2625
The Elastic Heart of Youth
Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright / Herresthal, Gaffigan, Arctic & Bergen Philharmonic
Named ‘2022 Composer of the Year’ by Musical America, Missy Mazzoli inhabits an exquisite and mysterious sound-world in which indie-rock sensibilities meet American minimalism, European modernism and classical traditions. The first woman ever to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, she has also composed for prominent soloists, ensembles and orchestras around the world. Through her music, she reaches to the roots of tradition, inhabits and renovates older forms while using every resource at her command. Mazzoli, who says that she likes “to tell stories”, always imagines actors, singers and dancers grappling with a situation, even when she composes instrumental works. The album is bookended by two versions of the same work: loosely based on baroque idioms the violin concerto Dark with Excessive Bright is first heard with string orchestra accompaniment and then in a chamber version. The soloist is in both cases Peter Herresthal, who also performs Vespers for Violin, a piece for amplified violin and electronics using sampled organs, voices and strings, drenched in delay and distortion. Three orchestral works complete the programme: Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), These Worlds in Us and Orpheus Undone in performances by the Arctic Philharmonic under Tim Weiss.
REVIEWS:
When Missy Mazzoli was just 10 years old, growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she confidently declared she was a composer, although she hadn’t written a single note. Her family thought it was a phase she would get through. Now 42, Mazzoli is among today’s busiest and most respected composers. She’s best known for her operas, such as the career-boosting Breaking the Waves, but a new album, titled Dark with Excessive Bright, is the first to showcase the young composer’s purely symphonic music.
[The] titular Dark with Excessive Bright [is] a lyrical violin concerto inspired by a very old double bass which sat in an Italian monastery for centuries and whose cracks were patched with pages from the Good Friday liturgy.
The concerto riffs on baroque formulas while recycling motifs in fresh disguises. Like a photographer, Mazzoli captures moments rich in texture and charged with expression. They are hard to describe, but you can see them in your ear. For example, after the orchestra slides up to a cadence, low strings pluck the beat, high strings twinkle with glitter, and in the middle, a melody wanders a solitary path. (As a fascinating bonus, the album includes a reduced version of the piece for solo violin and string quintet.)
...while this album is purely symphonic, drama abounds in the music. Mazzoli dedicates the piece These Worlds in Us to her father, a Vietnam vet. Sometimes the music swirls downward on sliding string figures while other passages prove that Mazzoli knows how to make an orchestra roar like a jet engine.
Coming of age in a DIY environment, and encouraged by outfits like the Bang on a Can collective of composer-performers, Mazzoli is at home using rock instruments and electronics in her music. On Vespers for Violin, played with ardor and agility by Peter Herresthal, Mazzoli sampled old organs, strings and voices, and waterlogged them in distortion.
Mazzoli likes to think of herself as primarily an opera composer. But with instrumental music as expressive and rigorously built as this – not to mention the dynamic performances here by the Bergen and Arctic Philharmonic Orchestras – we kindly ask that she not forget the command she holds over a symphony orchestra.
-- NPR Music
Atmosphériques, Vol. 1 / Bjarnason, Iceland Symphony
Note: this double-disc release contains both a CD and a Blu-ray Audio disc. The former will play on any CD player, and the latter will only play on devices with Blu-ray read capability.
Daniel Bjarnason writes: "at the risk of getting canceled by my musician colleagues, I’m going to divulge a dark truth about classical music: it’s never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage. Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming. So not … immediate. Which is why I am approaching zealot status in my admiration for Sono Luminus and the way in which it submerges listeners within reach of the Atlantis that is the on-stage experience. Which is why, save for live performance, the often inimitable new-music originating in, or in proximity to, Iceland (homeland to an unreasonable percentage of the composers living rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found its most ardent advocate and most clarion amplifier in Winchester, Virginia. Certainly its exceptional national orchestra has. Despite a bewildering insistence by journalists to characterize music written by those with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this tracklist are as singular as hand blown glass.
"The inclusion of American sonic clairvoyant Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographic foil here, but there is one element fusing all of these inventions: Your person is about to feel minuscule or massive, by contrast to – or motivated by – these sounds. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraftian deities, but it simultaneously introduces an iridescent hope I have not encountered before in her music. Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsing solar system to the other while Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from earth to the moon and back, seeming somehow both terrestrial and paranormal within a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir's Clockworking bridges a similar expanse, coexisting within the measurable realm of time-keeping … and the immeasurable realm of what occurs as the seconds tick by. Is Bára Gísladóttir's ÓS gasping in air, or desperately exhaling? Whatever your observation, and as with every waypoint on this illusory itinerary, the answer is likely: both."
REVIEWS:
The range of sonorities they [the Iceland Symphony Orchestra] bring out in Gísladóttir’s ÓS is viscerally gripping – rushing strings, apocalyptically deep wind notes and percussion fusillades…Mazzoli’s engaging Sinfonia and Sigfúsdóttir’s Clockworking provide textural, stylistic and expressive contrast. Sono Luminus’s sound is top-notch. Enjoy!
-- Gramophone
I listened to these two discs one after another: the first is a normal CD, which I listened to to familiarize myself with this music. This is all definitely in my wheelhouse: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s CATAMORPHOSIS, from 2020; Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), from 2014; Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth, from 2019; Maria Sigfúsdóttir’s Clockworking for Orchestra, from 2020; and Bára Gísladóttir’s ÓS, written for the Iceland Centenary in 2018. It’s beautifully played by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, directed by Daniel Bjarnason.
Only a few months ago I reviewed Missy Mazzoli’s latest album, Dark With Excessive Bright, which also includes her Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), with Tim Weiss conducting the Arctic Philharmonic. It seems like high-latitude orchestras are best situated to play this piece about the Music of the Spheres, situated as they are far from the noise of the world’s cities, and closer to the light show of the Aurora Borealis. I prefer the performance of the Iceland players by the narrowest of margins in this important work, helped as it is by the sound engineering of Sono Luminus.
And it’s the audio that brings us to the second disc: a Pure Audio Blu-ray disc with the identical repertoire, totalling just under an hour, in remarkable Surround Sound. As I’ve mentioned a few times in my reviews, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the audiophile component of recording, but listening to this Blu-ray knocked me for a loop. This will surely become a demonstration disc for high-end Surround Sound systems.
Iceland is a small country, but its music, both classical and popular, has the huge scope and universal appeal of the Sagas. This is a distinguished addition to a long and distinguished artistic tradition.
-- Music for Several Instruments
Boasting a formidable ensemble of ninety full-time musicians, Iceland's national orchestra is the perfect conduit for these composers's bold imaginings. Atmospheriques is an apt title given how much its oft-ethereal material imposes itself. Melody is downplayed in favour of mood, texture, and presence, the latter qualities architecturally established in the form of grandiose blocks of sound. The music at times plays like the slow, heaving movements of an enormous geological mass.
All five works are immersive and dynamic creations, yet there are critical differences between them, something Bjarnason emphasizes in asserting that each of the five is “as singular as hand-blown glass.”
That said, one description applied to Thorvaldsdottir's music, that it's “an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other,” is one that could as easily be applied to some of the other works. At twenty-one minutes, her CATAMORPHOSIS, first up on the hour-long release, is epic on purely temporal grounds, let alone structural. Such durational expanse grants her a huge canvas upon which to paint, which she does using flurries of glissando-swooping strings, rumbling sonorities, and orchestral micro-chatter. The music convulses and broods, but there are also lyrical episodes that allow for peaceful contemplation. As the piece advances towards its conclusion, it begins to suggest the disturbed sleep of some soon-to-be-awakened behemoth, with all the imminent activity that entails. CATAMORPHOSIS flows seamlessly into Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), whose shimmering strings and muted horns exude a starry-eyed quality that positions it far from the geological ruptures that ground Thorvaldsdottir's piece. Mystery permeates Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) too, but in this case it's the kind of mystery one associates with ineffable extraterrestrial expanses. The ethereal character of her piece carries over into Bjarnason's From Space I Saw Earth, whose sweeping tonal masses are so toweringly large it seems as if they're extending from one planetary realm to another.
Sigfúsdóttir's reputation precedes her on the recording. In addition to establishing herself as a composer, she's a violinist well-known for her membership in the band amiina and for touring with Sigur Rós from 2000 to 2008. Compared to the other works, Clockworking for Orchestra is dramatic but also a tad less tumultuous; its keening strings are also explicitly grounded by chiming mallet patterns whose interlock lends the piece a stability less defined elsewhere.
Like Sigfúsdóttir, the Copenhagen-based Bára Gísladóttir is a composer and musician, her instrument the double bass. Gísladóttir's contribution to the album, ÓS, picks up where her recent Sono Luminus album SILVA left off with a blistering textural exploration where strings swarm, horns groan in anguish, and percussive surfaces are violently battered. One of the more impressive things about Atmospheriques, music aside, involves sequencing. While there is a dramatic shift in tone and style from the penultimate piece to the closing one, the album generally advances smoothly from one setting to the next, which makes the recording register as a cohesive singular statement as opposed to a compilation of unrelated works.
-- Textura
Between Breaths / Third Coast Percussion
Grammy Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) presents Between Breaths, an album of world premieres of works by four contemporary composers, plus a work by the quartet itself.
Known for their captivating performances and innovative approach to modern classical music, TCP has been praised for “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) performances and the “rare power” (Washington Post) of their recordings. Between Breaths, a follow up to TCP’s widely praised album, Perspectives, “continues to push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners” (NPR).
The works on Between Breaths explore aspects of meditation in sound, incorporate unconventional timbres and tones, and invite listeners to lose themselves within a captivating sonic landscape. Missy Mazzoli’s five-movement Millennium Canticles transports listeners into a vivid realm where a group of people strive to recreate the rituals and stories of human life after an apocalypse. Mazzoli skillfully crafts an evocative soundscape using diverse elements such as wooden planks, resonant metal pipes, tone chimes, drums, discordant metallic tones, a resounding lion's roar, and an array of vocal expressions.
In Practice, a collaborative composition by TCP, began as a sound meditation drawing upon the personal rituals of the quartet’s members, from a warm-up routine to using sounds created with everyday objects. This source material laid the foundation for the work, which developed its own sense of direction and purpose, with an atmosphere of meditation and balance.
Tyondai Braxton's Sunny X juxtaposes otherworldly acoustic and electronic timbres against a steady rhythmic drive. Within this sonic tapestry, resonant wooden planks, metallic pipes and plates, and an array of gongs and woodblocks contribute to a distinctive and immersive experience.
Chicagoan Ayanna Woods’ Triple Point refers to the unique state where a substance simultaneously exists as a gas, liquid, and solid due to temperature and pressure conditions, which results in liquids bubbling into gas, rapidly freezing, exploding, and melting into liquid again. Woods’ composition mirrors this phenomenon, as it encapsulates moments of dynamic energy and musical elements that rise to the surface and dissolve again.
Gemma Peacocke’s Death Wish, composed in tribute to Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan, a Maori artist, poet, and activist, has become a staple of TCP’s repertoire. Performed by four players on two marimbas, the music creates a powerful landscape of melancholy, personal devastation, and hope.
REVIEW:
Third Coast Percussion’s Between Breaths is another fresh and thought-provoking album in what has been a steady stream of recordings from the Grammy-award winning quartet over the past seven years. Released Sept. 8 on Cedille Records, Between Breaths returns to many themes explored on the ensemble’s debut EP, Ritual Music (2006): relationships between individuals, communities, and ritualistic acts. The highly programmatic and hypnotic new album showcases the quartet’s vision for commissioning works by living composers and features world premiere recordings of works by Missy Mazzoli, Tyondai Braxton, Ayanna Woods, and Gemma Peacocke, and by Third Coast Percussion itself.
-- I Care If You Listen (Forrest Howell)
Fernando, Masaoka, Mazzoli, Negron & Shyu: Panorama / Olivia de Prato
Violinist Olivia de Prato releases her second solo album on New Focus, Panorama, exploring the multi-dimensionality of expression and identity. Composers Missy Mazzoli, Jen Shyu, Angelica Negron, Miya Masoaka, and Samantha Fernando contribute pieces for solo violin with and without electronics that probe questions of dislocation and return.
Resonating Earth
American Century
The Stone People / Moore
As Pulitzer-winning composer and Bang on a Can cofounder David Lang reveals in the album’s liner notes, the project takes its name from the opening piece by another Pultizer winner, John Luther Adams. “John’s music is ruggedly elemental,” Lang writes, “using very restrained materials as a way of probing some of our most fundamental human truths. Who we are. Where we are. How we relate to each other. How we relate to the natural world. His pieces are stark explorations of humankind in its most elemental state, and this CD brings together, for the first time, his complete acoustic music for solo piano.”
Among other firsts, the disc includes two works for piano by Julia Wolfe (2015’s Pulitzer winner), as well as newly recorded pieces by Martin Bresnick, Missy Mazzoli and Kate Moore. By turns meditative, mysterious, tumultuous and tender, The Stone People presents Lisa Moore at the height of her transformative powers.
Streya / De Prato
Journaling 2
Limitless / Jennifer Koh
A New York Times 25 Best Classical Track Selection for 2019
Violinist Jennifer Koh’s Limitless, based on her groundbreaking recital project of the same name, bridges the modern divide between composer and instrumentalist, celebrates artistic collaboration, and revives the grand tradition of composers performing their own music. The album features world-premiere recordings of Koh-commissioned duets by a diverse roster of highly accomplished contemporary composers, which she performs with the composers themselves. Premieres include Quasim Naqvi’s The Banquet for violin and modular synthesizer, exploring a convergence between acoustic string and electronic sound worlds; Lisa Bielawa’s Sanctuary Songs for violin and voice, three settings of texts by American women poets of the 1920s; Du Yun’s give me back my fingerprints for violin and voice, representative of what The New York Times calls her “adventurously eclectic” style; and Tyshawn Sorey’s In Memoriam Muhal Richard Abrams, dedicated to Sorey’s beloved mentor, the avant-garde pianist, composer, and founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Limitless also offers the first recording of Nina C. Young’s Sun Propeller for violin and electronics, inspired by traditional Tuvan throat-singing; Wang Lu’s Her Latitude for violin and electronics, with a quasi-improvised piano part and electronically processed sounds of Buddhist chants and old Korean pop songs; and jazz luminary Vijay Iyer’s The Diamond for violin and piano, inspired by an early Buddhist text. The album concludes with Missy Mazzoli’s A Thousand Tongues for violin, piano, and electronics, an intense response to a line in a Stephen Crane poem; and Vespers for violin and electronics, “deliciously disorienting” (National Public Radio) with a soaring solo violin.
REVIEWS:
Koh, needless to say, is sensational throughout: responsive to each composer’s demands, and fiercely committed to making each piece sing true in collaboration with its creator. The project is a paradigm shift in thinking about composers who perform, and about representation on the concert platform; the result is a beautiful, compelling collection of intimate conversations and collective statements.
– National Sawdust
Part of Ms. Koh’s double-disc project of collaborations with composers who also perform alongside her, Du Yun: ‘Give Me Back My Fingerprints’ rises from quietly uneasy to rabid and raw, then back again. Violin lines emerge, as if from far away, to mingle with Ms. Du’s earthy, murmuring, sometimes choking voice.
– New York Times (Zachary Woolfe)
Bach & Beyond / Jennifer Koh
Hailed as an “epic traversal of solo violin repertoire” and a “monumental achievement” (Chicago Tribune), American violinist Jennifer Koh’s complete Bach & Beyond recordings, pairing J.S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas with 20th- and 21st-century works inspired by Bach’s groundbreaking masterpieces, are now available in a convenient, economical boxed set offering all three albums for the price of two. Bach & Beyond Part 1 features Koh’s “alluring performances” (The New York Times) of Bach’s Partitas Nos. 2 and 3, Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 2, Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne, and the world-premiere recording of Missy Mazzoli’s Dissolve, O My Heart, commissioned for Koh by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Newark Star-Ledger cited the violinist’s “distinctive voice over a range of styles.” Toronto’s The Whole Note said of Bach & Beyond Part 2, “Koh, as always, is superb, her intelligence and interpretation always matching her outstanding technique” in Bach’s Sonata No. 1 and Partita No. 1, Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117, BB 124, and Saariaho’s Frises. Koh’s Bach & Beyond Part 3 earned BBC Music Magazine’s and ClassicsToday.com’s highest ratings for performance and recording quality. The Strad admired Koh’s “eloquent, artful, yet unadorned playing” in Bach’s Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3, Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII, and the world-premiere recording of John Harbison’s For Violin Alone, written for Koh. AllMusic said, “Koh’s series is highly recommended to those in search of an experience that will reward repeated hearings.” Audiophile Audition called it a “remarkable three-disc effort, recommended to all with a good degree of urgency.”
Excerpts of reviews from previously released volumes included in this set:
Bach & Beyond, Part 1
Koh makes short work of the Bach pieces—not in a bad sense: she just nails these works with a confident technique and a free-flowing, un-mannered style that remains true to Bach yet reminds us that a modern violinist is at the helm. Although ostensibly “modern”, the works by Saariaho and Mazzoli still incorporate time-honored traditions of solo-violin writing and don’t stray into what some might call “experimental” territory. These are both very ingratiating and accessible works to anyone who appreciates interesting, involving, intelligently written new violin music.
– ClassicsToday.com (10/10)
Bach & Beyond, Part 2
Koh’s Bach is amazing as usual–so fluid and delivered with such a sensitively nuanced, confident authority. A personality emerges: is it Koh? is it Bach? It’s either or both, but ultimately, who cares? This is exceptional Bach playing. Throughout, Koh is in command, from the dazzling explications of the Bartók Fuga and Presto movements, to the sometimes frighteningly audacious dynamic and timbral assertions of the Saariaho.
– ClassicsToday.com (10/10)
Cocteau
Meanwhile / Eighth Blackbird
MEANWHILE • eighth blackbird • CEDILLE 90000 (68:28)
MAZZOLI Still Life with Avalanche. HUREL _…à mesure. ETEZADY _from Damaged Goods. HARTKE Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays. GLASS Music in Similar Motion. ADÈS Catch
Eighth blackbird has always impressed me with their unstoppable combination of fresh taste and virtuosic playing. They’ve gone from strength to strength in their series of albums, and this might well be my favorite. Whether I like all the pieces or not doesn’t really matter: If I did, it probably would mean they weren’t reaching out broadly enough, and what really matters is that the group plays as though it likes them.
Stephen Hartke (b. 1952) contributes the “title track” for the disc, Meanwhile (2007). It’s a micro-suite, referencing a personal re-imagining of Javanese puppet theater, yet I also hear echoes of Stravinsky from L’Histoire du Soldat . Perhaps the most consistently striking thing about the piece, though, is its sound world. It has dazzlingly imaginative percussion writing (the first movement has an insistently groovy hammering of three flexatones, for example). It’s a feast of little sonic plates, served with dizzying speed.
Missy Mazzoli (b.1980) opens the program with her Still Life With Avalanche (2008). She’s perhaps the most visibly successful composer of her generation, and fronts her own indie (all-female) rock band Victoire. The music is fluent and propulsive, but it moves me the least of the works here. The form for the majority of pieces I’ve heard by the composer is a chaconne (with repeating bass line), and even though she livens it here with polytonality, it still feels a little predictable to me. Others, I know, will disagree.
Philippe Hurel (b. 1955) is the most explicitly modernist composer on the program. His … à mesure (1996) feels like a very “post-Boulez” piece, in its evident rigor; its relentless motoric textures; and its sense of a complex undergirding system. But while formalistic, it’s not apparently serial. One hears constant repetition and sequencing of motives; indeed one could even reference minimalism in its obsessive cycling…except for the fact that there also seem to be processes at work that “eat away” at the material to distort it and trip it up (an approach owing something to Ligeti). His involvement with computer music is evident not only in the work’s structural logic but also in the slow drifting harmonies of its conclusion, which have a very “electronic” sound, even though they are all acoustic, emanating from the sextet.
Catch by Thomas Adès (b. 1971) is mercuriality incarnate. In just over nine minutes, the piece runs through a dazzling sequence of states and moods, at times somber, at others frenzied. Things can sound very raw, contrasts can be unnerving, and yet one never doubts the commitment of the composer to the resultant sounds and harmonies. It’s an almost sinister display of precociousness. Along with the Hurel, this is the most crazily virtuosic music on the program.
Philip Glass needs no introduction or explanation by this point. He’s not my favorite minimalist, but his presence on the program as a sort of elder statesman is strangely welcome, and I also salute the blackbirds for their selection of one of the composer’s early (1969), radical, and pathbreaking pieces, from the time when his “absolute” music was perhaps at its height of originality. And Roshanne Etezady (b.1973) is represented by two movements of her Damaged Goods. I’ve enjoyed almost every piece of the composer I’ve encountered, and these are a nice pairing; “About Time” is dark and mournful, while “Eleventh Hour” is a real rhythmic rush and the perfect closer to the program.
Eighth blackbird’s taste is stylistically omnivorous. They tend to avoid any school of composition in favor of real personality and high imagination. The result is a rare mix of substance and entertainment. I did mention that they’re able to negotiate all the subtleties of these different languages with equal virtuosity, didn’t I? Also, I salute them for sticking with the plucky Cedille label, which has been one of Chicago’s greatest cultural ambassadors for a couple of decades now. A wonderful disc.
FANFARE: Robert Carl
Palumbo: Woven Lights / D'Orazio, Reynolds, London Symphony Orchestra
The critically acclaimed Italian composer Vito Palumbo has had works performed all over the world by leading orchestras. He began his career with postmodern experimentation, going on to different forms of music theatre. In recent years Palumbo has focused on works for full orchestra, exploring the possibilities of colors and textures – sometimes with the help of electronics – and putting the concept of ‘historical memory’ at the centre of his own composing.
With echoes seemingly coming from Alban Berg’s violin concerto, Palumbo’s own Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2015) displays bittersweet lyricism. Characterized by a dramatic language and driven by a strong and varied rhythmic impulse, the single-movement work also offers transitional moments of static beauty typical of the composer’s usual finesse in the scoring. With its title echoing the past, Chaconne for 5-string electric violin and electronics (2019-20) highlights the different ways in which the electronics intertwine with the live electric violin, within a conception animated by a strong theatrical sense, like a script for a play that does not reject emotional gestures. About this work, the composer has remarked ‘I want the meaning of my music to be apparent from listening, without the need for verbal justification.’ Both works are championed by the violinist Francesco D’Orazio, a close collaborator of the composer and the dedicatee of the Chaconne.
REVIEWS:
Cast in a single movement of around 30 minutes, the Violin Concerto (2015) starts out with sepulchral stirrings that gradually open out texturally and dynamically on to an evocative backdrop for the soloist to pursue a mainly lyrical and often imaginative discourse. While the violin is very much first among equals across what unfolds, its contribution stands out owing to the fastidiousness of Palumbo’s orchestration; notably during those later stages (of a piece in several arclike sections) when other instruments come briefly if tellingly to the fore to extend the music’s expressive remit. A final and evidently defining climax precedes its dying down towards the musing and even mystical serenity with which this work closes.
Francesco D’Orazio is the assured soloist both here and in Chaconne (2019-20), its scoring with electronics testament to the scrupulousness by which Palumbo approaches the medium. In the initial ‘Woven Lights’, a five-string electric violin is heard in the context of sampled sounds whose gestural immediacy decreases as these are drawn into a sonic continuum as unpredictable as it is imaginative. A long and often plangent cadenza makes way for ‘The Glows in the Dark’, the violin now surrounded by 30 pre-recorded variants of itself as this music assumes a rarefied while also capricious quality typified by tangible weightlessness.
Francesco Abbrescia has realised the electronics with audible sensitivity, and the London Symphony Orchestra respond with equal finesse to the astute conducting of Lee Reynolds. Warmly recommended[.]
-- Gramophone
Palumbo himself has mentioned Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto as an inspiration for his own concerto of 2015, and connections are clear in the more recent piece’s sumptuous harmonies and deep lyricism (a wonder-filled section near the end even sounds uncannily like a John Williams movie score). There’s a sense of ever-expanding melody that soloist Francesco D’Orazio captures excellently in his warm, generous playing, with an expressive, finely controlled vibrato and abundant character across the rhapsodic writing; the London Symphony Orchestra provides spirited support under Lee Reynolds.
D’Orazio swaps his Guarneri for a five-string electric fiddle in Palumbo’s two-movement Chaconne, which first pits the soloist against a shimmering electronic backdrop, and later against 30 mirror images of himself. It’s a volatile, sometimes elusive piece that blends fantasy and sonic adventurousness, and D’Orazio responds with far harder-edged, sometimes astringent playing that stands out beautifully against the composer’s washes of sound. The massed, high-pitched violins set microtonally apart in the Chaconne’s second movement make for a rather headache-inducing, if impressive, sonic texture, but it’s the piece’s uneasy relationship with more traditional tonality and playing, and its joyful celebration of the wild unpredictability of sound that make it particularly striking. Recorded sound is close, warm and clear throughout.
-- The Strad
Of the two scores the first is a Concerto for violin and orchestra. This is in a single-tracked 30-minute movement. A solution of tense foreboding and beetling catastrophe are the order of the day. The violin evokes thoughts of Ifrits rising like evocations of flame and driven upwards by superheated thermals. Palumbo embraces some ferociously stropped violent dissonance but weaves in a romantic style: Walton/Berg. It is as if a sky-soaring Ariel is gripped by a mystical pilgrimage. There are moments of appeasing calm (8.40), hesitant wispy writing deep in the undergrowth (18.11). Pizzicati and precipitous slides recall Hovhaness with the solo instrument slipping frictionless and free. (28.00). All ends in silence. This work will appeal to those who warm to the Violin Concerto by Missy Mazzoli – also on BIS.
A change of instrumental cams and gears comes with the other work: a Chaconne for five-stringed electric violin and electronics (2019–20). There’s no orchestra this time. The music is in two substantial movements: Woven Lights and The Glows in the Dark. The first of these has the soloist juxtaposed with sampled sounds and electronics. The second has D’Orazio’s solo plus 30 pre-recorded electric violin parts. Like the more conventionally scored Concerto this work is intricate and delicate: a jangling and twangling Prospero’s Island. It’s another impressively virtuoso piece – a thing of wonder.
As is BIS’s practice these days, the CD comes with a supportive essay and other written material. It’s all in a cleverly contrived card sleeve.
-- MusicWeb International
The year 2023 has served contemporary music rather well on record. Among its many highlights, Vito Palumbo’s new album Woven Lights burns bright indeed. Coming five years after the composer’s first BIS Records release, the second volume brings together two notable scores focusing on the violin – in its acoustic and electric raiments – featuring Francesco D’Orazio as soloist.
The album opens with Palumbo’s thirty-one-minute Violin Concerto (2015) in one movement, followed by the twenty-seven minute Chaconne (2019–20) for electric violin (five strings) and electronics. Cast in two movements – which can also be performed separately – the latter features sampled sounds, electronic soundscapes devised by Francesco Abbrescia and up to thirty pre-recorded electric violin parts.
Documented on microphones at Abbey Road Studio 1, London on 17 September 2016, with D’Orazio joined by the London Symphony Orchestra under Lee Reynolds, the Violin Concerto is given an immersive workout on the new album. Although conceived as extended monolith, one hears traces of more traditional concerto scheme embedded within its awe-inspiring arch. Scored for solo violin and [orchestra], the violin concerto is awash with formidable instrumental writing, giving rise to an enthralling sequence of soundscapes.
Emerging from nowhere, the music begins to take shape in various orchestral noises; tam-tam pulses, low drones, Tibetan bowls and ascending vibraphone patterns. Out of the string fabric, violent orchestral pulses are drawn as the introduction draws to its close, paving the way for the solo violin to enter the soundstage. Accompanied by glockenspiel and strings, soon joined by woodwinds, the soloist begins to unfold an endless melody – to put it in Birtwistlesque terms – colorized by muted brass. This leads to rousingly kinetic section with virtuoso violin figurations and percussive orchestral interjections, contrasted some pages later by cloud-like arpeggios.
Cooling down, the concerto flows into its meditative central section of dazzling color, where the soloist’s candle-lit musings are echoed by translucent orchestral chiaroscuro. Here, Palumbo draws some astounding textures from the solo instrument and the symphonic ensemble alike. However, the music does not linger. Jagged soundscapes re-emerge some four minutes later in a passage of splendid unrest. This, in turn, leads to astounding near-stasis of utmost sonorous focus. Almost imperceptibly, the textures grow increasingly volatile, channeling all their repressed energy into an inevitable burst of instrumental electricity. Out of the rumors, a shadowy section remains, marked by loose melodic threads hanging mid-air between the orchestral instruments and the solo violin – a high-point in the concerto’s musical subtlety.
Rippling figurations mark the transition into a toccata-like tour-de-force passage, featuring hyper-kinetic instrumental singing from the soloist, answered by fluid orchestral propulsion. Cooling down to a riveting hall of mirrors, characterized by slowly-rotating melodic arches and dream-like woodwind pulses, the music crossed the threshold back to the surreal realm from whence it first emerged. Transformed by its journey, the concerto fades into tangible silence.
Given in dream-of-a-performance by D’Orazio and the LSO with Reynolds, the Violin Concerto is served with full spectrum of timbral nuance. Unraveled in ever beautifully aligned layers, the interplay between the soloist and the orchestra comes off admirably throughout the entire musical quest. Embraced with absolute control over the musical narrative, D’Orazio’s take on the solo part is nothing short of remarkable. Peerless in their studio work, the members of the LSO deliver a wonderful take on the orchestral score. Guided by Reynold’s attentive podium sensibilities, the musical discussion between the LSO and their soloist are always spot-on, their sonorous clarity being enhanced by sensitive engineering and post-production.
A concerto for the focused listener, Palumbo’s score keeps unlocking its sonorous secrets in the course of repeated iterations, lending itself marvelously even to the most zealous close examination.
The title track of the album, the eighteen-minute Woven Lights first movement of the Chaconne seems to stem from some realm interrelated – somewhat – to the pensive central sections of the Violin Concerto. An ever-permuting interplay between the fully written-out electric violin part and its real-time computer-processed echoes, interwoven with sampled sounds of glass and metal, the movement is perhaps best described as the musical equivalent of northern lights – if one is to resort into simple analogies. Sonorous aurora of gorgeous blues and greens, the tapestries of Woven Lights call forth a plethora of associations related to time and space, yielding to transformative listening experience.
Bridged with a cadential passage, the music is carried over into The Glows in the Dark second movement. An intricate web of live and pre-recorded parts, the eight-minute soundscape gazes into the open space and nebulae beyond, zooming in and out of musical cloud-formations resulting from multiples of the solo instrument. A quest into the unknown, aural apparitions travel across the resulting contrapuntal network, to a dazzling effect. Disappearing beyond our scopes, the music dissolves into interstellar space, calling forth the listener’s mental theater to complete its narrative.
A superlative rendition from D’Orazio and Abbrescia, the fused creativity of solo instrumental performance and its electronic reimaginations yields to veritable sonic discovery, exploring strange new worlds through shared musical ritual. Fabulously realized on the new album, the Chaconne is a milestone score.
-- Adventures in Music
