Classical Music

Don't Look Back, composer Jenny Olivia Johnson's solo debut album, explores early childhood and adolescent trauma. The album's five musical works-scored for voice, small chamber ensemble, and electronic sounds-profile characters undergoing the emotional aftermath of extreme experiences. While these subject matters might seem dark, Don't Look Back acknowledges what it means to overcome darkness, and how difficult experiences can indelibly reshape one's perceptual abilities in eerily beautiful ways. Ms. Johnson is a composer and sound artist currently teaching at Wellesley College.

On her debut solo release Tapping the Furnace, Dorothy Hindman's fascinating and ear-grabbing works are interpreted by some of today's top new music performers, including Craig Hultgren, Laura Gordy, Paul Bowman and Stuart Gerber. The result is a wide-ranging collection that touches on the visceral contained within Hindman's highly structured compositions.

Classical Music

Fueled by a unique blend of punk, postmodern, and spectral techniques, Dorothy Hindman’s music sings and screams, breathes and howls, leaving a lasting impression like none other. Her second solo release, Tightly Wound, a double album showcasing her music for strings, stakes a solid claim for her position as one of the most fearless voices in chamber music today. Hindman’s works have a raw power- such as Heroic Measures, Taut and Needlepoint, three perspectives on the ravages of cancer, or Setting Century, an elegy on how losing a parent clarifies our own mortality. Other pieces are lighter in substance but no less personal: Time Management on the impossibility of balancing marriage, children and career, Monumenti and centro on the challenges of life, language, and customs in a different country, and Sound/Water on climate change and sea level rise in her native Miami. Over a two-decade span of works, Hindman’s driving rhythms, meticulous development, and sparkling timbral imagination show her commitment to connecting music and life to a thrilling degree. Enter with caution.

Classical Music

As befits both the Meridian Arts Ensemble and com¬poser Andrew Rindfleisch, their collaboration on In The Zone doesn’t so much blend the tradition of the brass quintet with modern tonal and harmonic ideas as send them crashing headlong into each other, making for a glorious collision that both re-imagines and renews our conception of brass chamber music.

Classical Music

On his first solo album, Neomonology, double bass hero Jeffrey Weisner leaves well-traveled musical paths behind, fearlessly tackling three profound and substantial new pieces for him and his notoriously bulky instrument. The result is an evocative journey beyond the event horizon of the double bass, at once strange and resonant.

Pianist Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi’s playing has been called “brilliant” (New Music Connoisseur), “persuasive” (Sequenza21), and “beautiful” (American Record Guide). Her repertoire, ranging from the Renaissance era through the present, clearly affirms her keen interest in new music, which has led her to commission and premiere many new works.

Classical Music

On his fourth album as a leader, New York bassist/ composer Dave Phillips takes his quartet Freedance to new places. The sole vehicle for Phillips' writing since he moved to New York City in 1985, the core group consists of guitarist Rez Abbasi, alto saxophonist John O'Gallagher and drummer Tony Moreno. Confluence is true to it's name: A collection of eight works that blend folklike melodies, mixed meters and dynamic instrumental interplay to create a modern chamber jazz sound.

With a tally of more than ninety commissioned works for band, Matthew George and the Minnesota-based University of St. Thomas Symphonic Wind Ensemble are blazing the trail in spurring new works for the medium. The Other Side is the seventh installment on their ongoing UST Symphonic Wind Ensemble Commissioning Series. This golden volume has something for everyone: symphonic Romanticism, allusions to Surrealism and Abstract Art, and virtuosic solos performance, not to mention the unlikely pairing of a rock group with wind band. The music of Spanish composer Luis Serrano Alarcon bookends the album, starting with his B-Side Concerto. A rock/jazz fusion band and the symphonic wind ensemble tackle and support each other over the course of three sections in a concerto that Vivaldi could never have imagined. Nigel Clarke's Mysteries of the Horizon was inspired by the artwork of Rene Magritte, and the four movements are named after some of his most popular paintings. The performance features the virtuosic cornet soloist, also from Belgium, Harmen Vanhoorne, whom the composer had in mind while writing this dazzling work. Another British composer and another work inspired by art follow; this time Kit Turnbull and Wassily Kandinsky respectively. The title, Everything starts from a dot, is a direct quote from Kandinsky when answering a question about how he goes about starting a painting. Staying with Russia for the final work on the album, Serrano Alarcon's Second Symphony for Wind Orchestra pays tribute to the era of Russian Romantic symphonic composers. The emotional content of the music matches the powerful forces of the symphonic wind ensemble.

The compelling story of cyber-dissident groups Anonymous and LulzSec, Peter Van Zandt Lane’s electro-acoustic ballet, HackPolitik, is a wild collision of music, technology, and politics. Its ten scenes weave chamber music with electronic sounds in an array of divergent and subversive ways, creating a blend of classical and vernacular musical traditions—electronica and modernism, heavy metal and spectralism, free jazz and post-minimalism. The CD features links to a plethora of online content.

Visits blurs lines between improvisation and composition, jazz and classical, spontaneity and planning. To hear what Triade do is to lose yourself in endless possibilities. Cellist Michelle Kinney drew Carei Thomas and Gary Schulte down a new path, away more traditional jazz improvising. New possibilities opened up, and new compositions were spontaneously generated on fragments of Thomas' work. Recorded in the mid-1990s, it receives via innova it's first digital pressing.