The present release is the exciting Sono Luminus reissue of Anna’s Thorvaldsdottir’s now classic first album. Long out of print, Rhizoma will now be available once again, both physically and on all digital platforms. The original release has been completely remastered by Daniel Shores at Sono Luminus. This release includes the Sono Luminus recording of “Dreaming”, recorded in 2016 and featured on the album ‘Recurrence?’ Rhizoma was a press sensation when released back in 2011. "[The music on Rhizoma] is meticulously crafted and beautifully put together. The result is enchanting and poetic." (Jónas Sen, Icelandic Newspaper Fréttablaðið) “The album is full of soundscapes that fill the head of the listener. ... Their bare nature makes them incredibly intriguing, something that is difficult to achieve, as it is a thin rope to walk on.” (Elena Saavedra Buckley, Sequenza21) “Rhízoma is modern composition at its very best” (Richard Allen, A closer listen)

REVIEW:

Rhízōma was originally issued on another pioneering American label, Innova, back in 2012. That disc was the first to be exclusively dedicated to Thorvaldsdottir’s music. There is one important difference with the reboot though: the orchestral essay Dreaming has been re-recorded. This svelte new account benefits from the superb acoustics of Reykjavík’s splendid new Harpa Concert Hall.

This re-boot of Rhízōma is unmissable. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music might well oscillate between extremes of sensitivity and ferocity, but hers is an utterly independent and authentic voice. Hats off to Sono Luminus for continuing to recognise her stature and document her inexorable progress.

– MusicWeb International

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

The recording project Northscapes weaves works-from the first decades of the twenty-first century by composers from the Nordic and Baltic countries of Europe-into a tapestry of soundscapes, vibrating between landscape and the imagination, between the external and internal, between nature and psyche. What these works for piano solo share is a particular attunement to nature, reverberating out of the ever-present reservoir of pagan myths, legends, and folk music of the region. Their sensitivity to the sonic environment allows these composers to explore the liminal space dividing yet connecting landscape, soundscape, and mindscape.

More than mere musical "representations" of the striking natural landscapes of the North, each work, in it's own way, attempts to transform the natural world into a sonic landscape, a mindscape, into imaginary geographies. More than simply pastoral nostalgia, these sonic meditations on nature reach beyond the physical to the spiritual, probing the limit dividing the objective and subjective. Whether it is vast cosmic space or the intimate, interiority of the expressive voice, these works harness the power of music to probe the emotional contours of the tension between world and mind.

Haunted by landscapes colored by memory, fantasy, dreams, decay and infused with emotion, this music shifts consciousness through a transformational synthesis of landscape, soundscape, and mindscape - a shift from imaginary soundscapes to soundscapes of the imagination. In the hands of Lithuanian pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute, Northscapes is a sonic Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights of the ear and mind. -- Christopher Zimmerman

REVIEWS:

A superb recital disc from a quite exceptionally talented pianist…I was consistently won over by the fabulous talents of Jokubaviciute. The representative of her agency described her in an email introducing this recording as “one hell of a pianist”. For once, such a comment is an understatement!

-- MusicWeb International

This fascinating, unusual and at times enthralling selection is performed with a great balance of precision, understanding and respect. Importantly for a program in which textural considerations are central, Northscapes is beautifully recorded with warmth, plenty of space and no brassiness in the upper registers.

-- Limelight

It is a fascinating, well-balanced programme, played with engrossingly undemonstrative virtuosity…Jokubaviciute navigates the contrasting demands of each work with hugely impressive skill and Sono Luminus’s sound is superb. This is an enthralling programme from the northern world that no listener wary of contemporary music need be fearful of (Vasks’s nostalgically evocative score, for instance), though demands are sometimes made of their ears. Recommended.

-- Gramophone

“I am really excited about our upcoming release of Aerial on Sono Luminus this year! The album was originally released in 2014 on Deutsche Grammophon and now the journey of the album continues with Sono Luminus in a remastered version by their very own Daniel Shores. The orchestra piece Aeriality is at the center of the album which also features Into Second Self, Ró, Tactility, Trajectories and Shades of Silence. It was quite a personal journey to record these pieces in Iceland, working with long time collaborators such as the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Caput Ensemble and Nordic Affect. It is such a joy to continue the collaboration with Sono Luminus that we have grown for many years now with releases of, now, all my portrait albums to date! The new release of Aerial will also feature percussion quartet Aura performed by the LA Percussion Quartet.” (Anna Þorvaldsdóttir)

REVIEW:

The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has emerged as one of the most talented Nordic composers in recent years. Her voice is quite different from that of other contemporary composers, and thankfully her orchestral music has become widely performed and recorded by the leading orchestras world-wide and acclaimed by reviewers and the musical public alike.

The opening work on this disc - Into-Second Self - is for seven brass instruments and percussion. It opens with rumbling, whistling effects as if we are in a dark threatening tunnel, creating an atmospheric roar of sound with the percussion generating what is like an ancient Celtic chant on the horns and trombones. This is heard in an unearthly harmony by evoking sounds of aircraft and loud thuds on the drums, a shimmering of bells becoming increasingly loud then settles into silence.

Written for flute, bass clarinet, piano, percussion, two violins, viola and cello, Rö, opens with a jangle on percussion and piano chords aided by the bass clarinet and the strings harmony. We hear sudden noises against the wind of the flute and bass clarinet with a hint of an idea on the wind against the loud disharmony on the percussion - all broken by a bagpipe-like noise and a twanging idea, all of which creates a world of mystery, yet is brought to a terrible halt with thuds on the keyboard before a slow descent into quiet.

Under the baton of Ilan Volkov, Aeriality opens with a loud chord from the orchestra offering exciting harmony, and the entry of the piano is heard against strings and woodwind babbling in a dynamic pulse - as if we are hearing the movement of great bodies in space, or on the earth - is this the cosmos? There is a constant flow of sound and dissonance with occasional noises and murmuring on the strings, growing steadily louder with roars from the brass and a shrill woodwind theme emerge together in a great potent idea leading to a low-pitched drone of noise against a twitter of woodwind invoking birds calling out in the wind, yet the sudden crashes on the percussion are like chains breaking against rocks then disappear into silence.

Tactility opens with a mysterious hovering sound on harp and percussion and a dull throbbing sound, yet the harp hints at Japanese music, interrupted by thuds on the drums, and a rustling sound pattering away in the background, then we hear the effect of the wind blowing against the window ending with an inflection on the harp.

Composed for piano and electronics, Trajectories opens with a stirring rise in noise and an enormous build in tension with chimes of momentous chords on the piano, lending the impression of ‘something trying to escape’, all in dreadful harmonies, dissonance and a ripple of piano chords repeated amid the chime of a clock, rippling and tapping on the keyboard and an all-powerful throbbing noise before suddenly dying away.

The composer uses an ensemble of baroque instruments for her Shades of Silence, which opens with high shrill notes on strings, creating an amazing acoustic effect enhanced by the pizzicato strings in rising and falling dissonance, of sharply brutal music on the harpsichord that strangely creates an almost magical effect.

Aura, the final piece here, written for four percussionists, starts with an eerie atmosphere of a strange whispering ringing on the percussion with a chiming xylophone and ringing tubular bells, creating an amazingly catatonic effect, against a rustling, loud throbbing noise ‘like whales in the sea.’ For anyone unaware of this young Icelandic composer, this disc will prove an enlightening experience, and can only whet one’s appetite for her more recent compositions. Thorvaldsdottir herself was responsible for the engineering on four of the seven recordings, adding another credit to her talents; the sound quality is splendidly ambient throughout.

-- MusicWeb International (Gregor Tassie)

UBIQUE lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction - of various kinds and durations - as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure. The work is inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance - throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite. As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such - it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece. UBIQUE is 45 minutes in duration and is written in 11 parts, for flutes, grand piano, 2 cellos and pre-constructed electronics. - Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Icelandic cellist, singer, and composer Gyða Valtysdóttir, a founder of the band múm and 2019 winner of the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize, releases Epicycle II. Gyða Valtýsdóttir came to prominence with electronic experimentalists múm, the lauded Icelandic group leading the charge in the country’s fertile underground scene in the early 00s, rightfully gaining international recognition. She left the band to pursue her studies as a cellist; gaining a twofold Master’s degree from Musik Akademie, Basel, both as a classical player and a free-improvisational one. Since then she has journeyed with a colorful palette of collaborators, including The Kronos Quartet, Josephine Foster, Damien Rice, Colin Stetson, Jónsi (of Sigur Ros fame), Skúli Sverrisson, Ólöf Arnalds, Ben Frost, Aaron & Bryce Dessner (from The National) and visual-artist Ragnar Kjartansson. To name but a few.

REVIEWS:

Some of the musicians, like her fellow art-pop renegades Ólöf Arnalds and Jónsi, emphasize her crystalline, eldritch voice. Others, including Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daníel Bjarnason, deploy her cello in yearning lines and voluptuous waves. Altogether, the album offers otherworldly transport.

-- The New Yorker

Epicycle II is a wonderful experience and a tantalizing look into the future of experimental music collaboration.

-- San Francisco Classical Voice

Epicycle II is her crowning achievement to date.

-- A Closer Listen

From atmospheric micro-polyphony to heart-rending moments of electronic intimacy, the music is interesting and powerfully drawn.

-- Music City Review

A deeply cinematic score at times, this album is often transporting with great lift, giving the listener long opportunities to soar, bird-like, over the Icelandic landscape and beyond, for the most part leaving us safely and gently deposited on the earthly shore.

-- The Whole Note

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 play on devices with Blu-ray read capability.

Anna Þorvaldsdóttir writes: "The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centres around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.

"AIŌN is inspired by the abstract metaphor of being able to move freely in time, of being able to explore time as a space that you inhabit rather than experiencing it as a one-directional journey through a single dimension. Disorienting at first, you realize that time extends simultaneously in all directions and whenever you feel like it, you can access any moment. As you learn to control the journey, you find that the experience becomes different by taking different perspectives - you can see every moment at once, focus on just some of them, or go there to experience them. You are constantly zooming in and out, both in dimension and perspective. Some moments you want to visit more than others, noticing as you revisit the same moment, how your perception of it changes.

"As with my music generally, the inspiration behind ARCHORA and AIŌN is not something I am trying to describe through the music or what the music is “about”, as such. Inspiration is a way to intuitively tap into parts of the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the music I am writing each time. It is a fuel for the musical ideas to come into existence, a tool to approach and work with the fundamental materials, the ideas and sensations, that provide and generate the initial spark to the music - the various sources of inspiration are ultimately effective because I perceive qualities in them that I find musically captivating. I do often spend quite a bit of time finding ways to articulate some of the important elements of the musical ideas or thoughts that play certain key roles in the origin of each piece but the music itself does not emerge from a verbal place, it emerges as a stream of consciousness that flows, is felt, sensed, shaped and then crafted. So inspiration is a part of the origin story of a piece, but in the end the music stands on its own."

REVIEWS:

Thorvaldsdottir is ultimately more concerned with inner than outer forms, and – as conductor Eva Ollikainen and the ISO reveal in this thrilling release – finding an organic unity which stems from the perpetual transformation and refinement of material at often microscopic levels.

Archora (2022) and Aiōn (2018) are fundamentally abstract, unleashing primordial energies in shifting layers of sound to different yet related ends. The former explicitly aims to explore these energies alongside ‘the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm…both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere.’ Quasi-Stravinskian conflicts abound in one, tautly written movement; through subterranean drones and pulses overlaid with chord clusters and brittle, percussive slaps. Aiōn (2018) appears to pre-echo this material in longer and more overtly symphonic guise[.]

In effect, both works demonstrate the inseparability of time and space – and their key lies finally in Thorvaldsdottir’s extraordinarily subtle, constantly shifting details of foreground and background.

-- BBC Music Magazine (★★★★★)

Both pieces confirm the impression that Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Eva Ollikainen, its chief conductor, offer glowing performances that have been beautifully captured by Sono Luminus.

-- New York Times

This music is quite compelling when played as cleanly as it is here by what might be called the home team, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra…This is a good introduction to the work of this increasingly popular orchestral composer.

-- AllMusic.com

The Iceland Symphony Orchestra, led by Eva Ollikainen in Archora/Aion and Daníel Bjarnason in Atmospheriques heroically delivers performances of a group of totally exposed works in which each section of the orchestra is asked to play immensely complex music. The engineering of both albums is impeccable, the liner notes clear and concise. The results are nothing short of impressive.

-- All About the Arts

Eva Ollikainen [conducts on this] Thorvaldsdottir album, which pairs ARCHORA (2022) with the three-part AION (2018). Both composer and conductor have significant ties to the ISO: whereas she holds the title of Composer-in-Residence, he's the orchestra's Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, positions he assumed in 2020. According to the composer, the inspiration behind ARCHORA, which the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Ollikainen premiered in August 2022 at the BBC Proms, comes from the idea of primordial energy as well as “the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm—a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time.”

Certainly that primordial character is felt during the ISO's twenty-one-minute rendering, which blossoms from its opening moments into a dense, enigmatic mass whose orchestral tendrils intricately entwine. Again, melody is more hinted at than explicitly stated, with fragments from different instruments coalescing into a whole ever threatening to combust. Glissandos sometimes punctuate the opaque clusters of strings, woodwinds, and horns that make up the ever-morphing mass. Despite the music's heaviness, mobility is very much present as the material moves fluidly through contrasting episodes of volume and mood, its unfolding rather akin to the unregulated flow of impressions coursing through consciousness.

As powerful as ARCHORA is, it's dwarfed, at least in terms of duration, by AION, whose three movements total forty-one minutes. Here, time—so critical a dimension of Thorvaldsdottir's music—expands and contracts as the music splinters, its movements less predicated on the conventional idea of one-directional development and more on the abstract concept of a centre that's collapsed and catapulting its parts into space. Epic rumblings and agitated, even violent activity surface during “Morphosis”; with ascending and descending flute patterns accenting string drones, the opening of “Transcension” suggests it'll be peaceful, but disturbance eventually emerges in the form of aggressive string plucks and thunderous drums. Harrowing at times too is “Entropia,” which works its way through disorienting passages of cyclonic swirl, percussive clatter, and blustery horns before exiting in a controlled blaze. Words like oceanic and engulfing help characterize the work's portentous soundworld, as well as Thorvaldsdottir's work in general.

-- Textura

If you would, coax your mind back to a time when you believed ducking your head beneath the covers was ample defense against the bogeyman. Do you remember, in the haze of half-sleep, seeing something or someone in your room that didn’t belong? As you breathlessly flicked on the light, you were relieved to find it was only a chair lopsided with laundry, or a vacuum propped against the doorframe. That faint halo of light, surrounding this once sinister and now innocuous object, that is the penumbra – that permeable border between light and dark. This is the space where Enigma lives.

We’ve all been living in an in-between of sorts for the last year, haven’t we? Nothing quite as poetic as the blend of blinding light and unfathomable dark one encounters with an eclipse, an early touchstone for this composition it is worth noting. But we’ve done quite a bit of living in the grey area, which is maybe broader than we thought. The thing is, traveling to Virginia to record this album was in some ways the first glint of hope on the horizon...well...that there was still a horizon.

This album is the result of a multi-year alchemy between the singular writing of composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir and the playing of three-time GRAMMY nominees Spektral Quartet. The first string quartet composed by Thorvaldsdottir, Enigma is simultaneously colossal and introspective, moving between heart-wrenching chord progressions and the scrapes and clicks of extended string techniques. A piece of profound emotional magnitude, Enigma provokes considerations of our relationship to the vast cosmos that surrounds us – and the infinite universe within.

REVIEWS:

“[Enigma] sounds like no string quartet you’ve ever heard... It’s wonderful work.”

-- Washington Post (Anne Midgette)

Head Space: Candlelight is the first EP in The King's Singers' Head Space series, aiming to connect choral music with calmness and reflection. Inspired by compline, the Catholic night service, it features plainchant, including "In manus tuas Domine" and "Salva nos Domine vigilantes," emphasizing breath-led pacing. The album also includes wordless Orlando Gibbons "Songs," contemporary pieces by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Judith Bingham, and Arvo Part, and the experimental "4'33" by John Cage, concluding with Robert Parsons' "Ave Maria" and Edvard Grieg's "Ave Maris Stella," all designed to create a contemplative atmosphere.

Aequora? aequor aequoris neuter noun? [AEQUUS] a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain; inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of night? the surface of the sea especially as considered as calm and flat, a part of the sea; per aperta volans aequora soaring over open sea; the waters of a river, lake, sea; tibi rident aequari ponti the waters of the sea laugh up at you. Gajic and Carrettin have performed under the moniker "Mystery Sonata" when performing new work and non-classical music styles. AEQUORA is the first album recorded under the name Mystery Sonata and reflects the duo's commitment to performing contemporary music alongside their work with ancient music, historical instruments, improvisation, and electric instrument collaborations with contemporary and aerial dance.

Katia Labèque/Marielle Labèque/David Chalmin/Bryce Dessner -"Sonic Wires"

Founded in 2018, the Dream House Quartet is bringing classical and contemporary music into completely new forms as a matter of course. The members draw on decades of expertise: the two piano sisters, Katia and Marielle Labèque, are joined by Bryce Dessner (Grammy-winning guitarist, composer and founding member of The National), and composer, musician and producer David Chalmin. Together they perform radical commissions from visionary composers and key contemporary works from the past half century.