LAWRENCE, D.H.: Sons and Lovers (Unabridged)

Paul Lewis explores the world of late Brahms, wherein the old master, far from growing more sedate, deploys a palette of infinite colors and sensibilities in his last four collections for solo piano. By turns tender and dazzling, intimate and tempestuous, these pieces appear to us as their composer's final confidences, entrusted to a crepuscular diary.

Also available on DVD

A Blu-ray video of a stunning 2014 performance choreographed by Belgian modern great Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, performed by members of the Paris Opera Ballet and set to Music for Eighteen Musicians, Steve Reich's major score composed in 1976. In tandem with the score rendered here by Ensemble Ictus and the Synergy Vocals ensemble, ‘Rain’ draws its spatial polyphony which manifests on the stage in a glorious pastiche of dancers and rhythm. Created by De Keersmaeker’s company, Rosas in 2001, “Rain” entered the Paris Opera Ballet's repertoire ten years later and reinforces her key role not just in the world of modern dance but in the worlds of contemporary art.

Paul Dessau - Let's Hope For The Best, directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz Paul Dessau (1894-1979) has been a violin prodigy, became Otto Klemperer's assistant and finally an accomplished conductor. He wrote operetta and film music - from mountain films with Leni Riefenstahl by director Arnold Fanck to Walt Disney's animated films. As a convinced communist, Paul Dessau settled over to the GDR in 1948. He worked with Bertolt Brecht as well as his fourth wife, the stage directing idol Ruth Berghaus, and had a significant influence on the socialist music scene and stage art. He became a GDR state composer who was mainly celebrated on the outside, but sharply criticized on the inside."Paul Dessau: Let's hope for the best" by Anne-Kathrin Peitz sketches an artist's life between conformity and repulsion, political idealism and musical individuality, in which the changeable German-German history of the 20th century is strikingly condensed as if under a burning glass. The film portrait consciously traces the contradictions in Dessau's character, life and work and embeds the man and his music in the historical context. The cinematic approach to the protagonist and his sound cosmos becomes a jigsaw puzzle, both literally and figuratively, whose individual - often disparate - pieces slowly come together to form an overall picture. Interview partners - from politician Gregor Gysi to former concert hall director Frank Schneider or the American jazz composer Jack Cooper as well as composer and pianist Steffen Schleiermacher - try to create a portrait of Paul Dessau not only with words, but actually by doing a puzzle.

At once poet and virtuoso, Paul Lewis has rapidly established himself as one of the leading Schubertians of his generation. This boxed set assembling the Viennese composer's major mature works for solo piano - Piano Sonatas, Wanderer Fantasie, Moments Musicaux, Impromptus and Drei Klavierst�cke - is sure to become one of the milestones of the modern discography.

A fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.

It’s very unusual to find all Honegger’s Violin Sonatas — which includes the solo sonata of 1940 — grouped together in one disc. In fact I’m not aware of another such coupling in the current catalogue, which gives this budget price entrant cachet. Even better, the performances are persuasive and finely played and recorded.
 
This would amount to a recommendation even were the music not so attractive, which is not to say it’s transparent, as there are moments of occlusion and introspection along the way. The First Sonata is actually the unnumbered D minor of 1912. I agree wholly with Anyssa Neumann’s booklet notes that the opening embeds genuine ‘pathos’—it’s the pathos of popular song, in my view, to which Laurence Kayaleh responds with pervasive and elegant portamenti and effusive lyric intensity. There’s a degree of agitato in this work and Brahmsian striving, and it’s understandable that it was not published during Honegger’s lifetime in a sense, given the influences. But it’s still a big, confident utterance from the young composer. The slow movement is engagingly done, with its odd Delian moments, and the March section is well characterised. The confident and puckish finale is interrupted by a moment of baroque reportage, before a nobly conceived maestoso sweeps us to the finish. As she does throughout, Kayaleh plays with a refined tonal palette. She doesn’t make a big sound, but it is finely coloured.
 
The first numbered sonata was written during the last two years of the First World War. It’s a more focused work, less effusive, and sites the fast movement centrally between two essentially slow ones. The central panel of the Presto is played with the mute, and the whole thing is freely ruminative, though I detect Franck still in his musical handwriting. Stark intoning begins the finale, and here Kayaleh powerfully intensifies her vibrato width. It’s hard not to read into this movement something of the same spirit, but not the same means, that informs John Ireland’s contemporaneous Second Violin Sonata.
 
By contrast the 1919 Second Sonata has rather dreamlike qualities. It takes in a fugal moment, whilst remaining strongly chromatic, indeed compact in its reach — it’s 12 minutes in length in this performance. The finale’s ebullience removes the rather heavy atmosphere brilliantly, fully conveyed by Kayaleh and Paul Stewart. The solo sonata is becoming ever more popular and this performance will not harm that status in any way. What I like especially is the generosity of her grazioso phrasing in the Allegretto; delightfully done.
 
So if you lack these sonatas, or are curious about Honegger’s approach to them, this disc will stand as a fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International  

For the second volume in this series devoted to each new stage in Bach's life, Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants show us how the composer appropriated the usages of the church cantata to his own ends. Borrowing from the French style and reinterpreting the Italian concerto, he left a lasting mark on the genre and blazed a new trail for it.

CADMAN: Piano Trio in D Major / Violin Sonata / Piano Quinte

The first installment of what is widely acknowledged to be Shakespeare’s greatest historical saga, Henry IV Part 1 is an epic tale of power, treachery and war, exploring the complexity of father-son relationships. Featuring an Olivier award-winning performance from Roger Allam as Falstaff, the comical mentor to Jamie Parker’s Prince Hal, this is a celebrated presentation of the English classic, expertly directed by Dominic Dromgoole.

REVIEWS:

"Henry IV is the Shakespeare play that's perfectly suited to the Globe. In Dominic Dromgoole's intelligent, faithful and entertaining new production, Sir John Falstaff, that 'sweet creature of bombast', might have stopped for a pint of sack in Southwark en route for a rendezvous with Doll Tearsheet at the Boar's Head." (The Guardian)

"It is the first time these wonderful plays have been staged at the reconstructed globe and it may be one of this theatres finest achievements." (The Daily Telegraph)

JAZZ MONEY, the 2024 debut album from multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Zacchae'Us Paul is an irreverent, fresh take on "America's classical music" that speaks to the 24 year old artist's deep-beyond-his-years understanding of Black music and the African diaspora. Paul stretches and bends jazz sounds around the Atlanta hip-hop he grew up with, the gospel sounds and philosophies that have long shaped his music making, and the Caribbean rhythms he learned studying in Puerto Rico. He has created a wholly personal sound that is youthful, and thoughtful all at once. "When you listen to this album, listen to it again," Paul says. "A lot of the songs have multiple meanings, and I'd love for people to have different perspectives on them." Made with a cast of improvising upstarts and veterans that includes the album's executive producer, Terri Lyne Carrington, fellow Atlanta native and Candid recording artist Morgan Guerin and Paul's fianc�e and star vocalist Melanie Charles, Jazz Money is jazz music for this, and future, generations.

JAZZ MONEY, the debut album from multiinstrumentalist, composer, and producer Zacchae'Us Paul is an irreverent, fresh take on "America's classical music" that speaks to the 24 year old artist's deep-beyond-his-years understanding of Black music and the African diaspora. Paul stretches and bends jazz sounds around the Atlanta hip-hop he grew up with, the gospel sounds and philosophies that have long shaped his music making, and the Caribbean rhythms he learned studying in Puerto Rico. He has created a wholly personal sound that is youthful, and thoughtful all at once. "When you listen to this album, listen to it again," Paul says. "A lot of the songs have multiple meanings, and I'd love for people to have different perspectives on them." Made with a cast of improvising upstarts and veterans that includes the album's executive producer, Terri Lyne Carrington, fellow Atlanta native and Candid recording artist Morgan Guerin and Paul's fianc�e and star vocalist Melanie Charles, Jazz Money is jazz music for this, and future, generations.

DUAL UNITY

28 track collection of the legendary guitarist recorded with his trio of rhythm guitarist - Cal Goodin, bassist Clinton Nordquist, and pianist Milt Raskin or Buddy Cole. Tracks include: Feed Back, All of Me, Song of the Islands, Viper's Dream, Dark Eyes, at Sundown, Good for Nothing, Undecided, It Had to Be You, It Must Be True, Left And Right, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Dream Dust.

Paul Giallorenzo's new jazz trio album has been released October 14th, 2023 on Chicago's Delmark Records label, featuring Joshua Abrams on double bass and Mikel Patrick Avery on drums.

2022 release. Two time Grammy winner, Paul Brown, both as an artist and producer, is responsible for more than 60 #1 jazz radio hits! Paul has produced and shared the stage with a who's-who of jazz greats such as George Benson, Patti Austin, Boney James, Norman Brown, and Peter White, just to name a few. With Promised Land, Paul Brown reaches the peak of his prodigious creativity. The album kicks off with the spirited "Secret Sauce," a surefire contemporary jazz radio #1, and delivers with "Don't Stop," Paul's sexy collaboration with Marion Meadows, and the Bluesy, in-the-pocket, "7and7," featuring Euge Groove!!

All in their twenties, these four young men are currently at the top tip of the Swiss jazz scene. District Five has taken time off after their debut album, the antithesis of short-term project culture. Now, with Decoy, they do justice to the album's title, throwing us a seductive bait. The aim behind the album is to transcend conventional jazz and offer a statement; it was to sound different from the experience of District Five live, using the possibilities of studio recording to mine the wealth of electronic-based sounds the quartet hears around them. Whether flowing calmly along or sweeping weightlessly through the expanses of ambient soundscapes, whether the concentrated energy of free improvisation shatters the song structure or eruptive clusters of sound and hard-edged grooves emphasise the physical aspects of the music, in the club-friendly anthem 'Maths', the multi-layered sound art of District Five is compellingly direct and builds up a hypnotic momentum.

ODYSSEY

Paul Lingle began playing ragtime and jazz in his teens and was to continue until his death, Oct. 30, 1962. His piano training made him capable of playing classical music, but he preferred the music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton and others of the ragtime-jazz persuasion. Lingle was an original member of the Yerba Buena Jazz Band and by the end of the '30s had become something of a legend on the West Coast. In 1953, Lingle recorded for Good Time Jazz who issued eight sides. Euphonic Records later issued three LPs of Lingle made up mostly from live recordings at the Jug Club in Oakland. Those rare LPs are long out of print, but here is the first CD featuring Paul Lingle, Live at the Jug Club.

HERE TODAY GONE TOMORROW

Pianist-composer Paul Giallorenzo (GitGO, Hearts & Minds) assembles a new trio for his second Delmark release. Covering wide terrain, from energetic swing to bluesy soulfulness to sonic exploration, these original compositions further Giallorenzo's exploration of improvising within and without melodic, rhythmic, and formal structures. The music is deeply embedded in the tradition with a sound and feeling that is personal and contemporary. In a review of Giallorenzo's first Delmark release, Force Majeure (DMK 5015), the Chicago Reader praised it for it's "melodic and harmonic depth", "rich polyphonic arrangements" and "dam-bursting energy and woolly extended techniques."

CLOSER

BARRAGE

VINDONISSA

REBOUNDS FOR PERCUSSION

Paray's whimsically relaxed and sparkling account of Espa�a gives great pleasure and his rubato in the F�te is equally winning... wholly delightful... warm and polished... beautifully balanced [Lalo Namouna Suite] "What delightful music this is, particularly in such expert hands" (both: Penguin Guide 3*)