Classical Music

Classical Music

Grammy-nominated The Dufay Collective has been performing and recording its unique brand of early music for nearly three decades, winning awards and wide-spread critical acclaim along the way. I Have Set My Hert So Hy marks the group’s return to the recording studio with a collection of 15th century songs and instrumental numbers, much of which has been expertly reconstructed by the ensemble’s director William Lyons. On this recording, The Dufays collaborate with vocal trio Voice, recreating the essence of music written for and heard in the royal courts and religious houses of Medieval England.

Epic poetry set to powerful music, brought to life by a cast of legendary performers: Ask Your Mama is an original musical setting by four-time Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman of the 1961 masterpiece by Langston Hughes, delivered with majesty and magnetism by sopranos Janai Brugger and Angela Brown, hip-hop innovators The Roots and Medusa, jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon and others, conducted by Grammy-nominated George Manahan.

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz is the most modernist, defiant work by Langston Hughes, an icon of the Harlem Renaissance known as the pre-eminent voice of the African-American experience. It gives voice to the outrages and the joys of African-American life through the eyes of a child and the man he becomes, alternating between the fury of indignation and wild comedy, taking us on an odyssey from Africa to the Americas, high art to low art, from south to north, from cities to suburbs, from opera to jazz – and in Hughes’ own words, “from shadows to fire.” Hughes conceived his epic 12-part poem as an interdisciplinary creation, including in the margins suggestions for types of music including hot jazz, German lieder, cha-cha, patriotic songs, post-bop, Arabic and more.

Laura Karpman’s composition is the first musical setting of Hughes’ complete masterpiece. Her score takes its cue from Hughes’ boundary-exploding text and musical notations. Integrating 21st century technology, Hughes’ words are brought to life with orchestral music, live singers, rap artists, and recorded voices of African-American icons from Louis Armstrong to Leontyne Price to Pigmeat Markham. The result: an exhilarating tapestry of jazz, carnivale, tent revival, film, opera and poetry slam.

Ask Your Mama premiered to a sold-out Carnegie Hall in 2009 and has since played from Harlem’s Apollo Theater to the Hollywood Bowl, and has reached millions more through media coverage by National Public Radio, PBS, NBC TV, The New Yorker and the Huffington Post. The release appropriately comes in the wake of Independence Day: as Hughes says in his poem, “your country is your mama.”

Tracklist:

Ask Your Mama
Music by Laura Karpman
Poetry by Langston Hughes

CD 1
DEDICATION (4:20)
CULTURAL EXCHANGE (12:53)
RIDE, RED, RIDE (4:16)
SHADES OF PIGMEAT (7:42)
ODE TO DINAH (10:37)
BLUES IN STEREO (5:12)
HORN OF PLENTY (7:39)
GOSPEL CHA-CHA (11:00)
Total time CD 1: 62:15

CD 2
IS IT TRUE? (2:52)
ASK YOUR MAMA (6:51)
BIRD IN ORBIT (12:12)
JAZZTET MUTED – SHOW FARE, PLEASE (17:04)

Total time CD 2: 38:19

Vocal Soloists:
Janai Brugger
Blackthought, The Roots
Nnenna Freelon
Angela Brown
Medusa
Taura Stinson
Monet Owens
Tesia Kwarteng
Erin McGlover
Langston Hughes

Instrumental Soloists:
Questlove, The Roots drums
Ben Wendel tenor saxophone
David Loeb piano
M.B. Gordy world percussion
Bart Samolis bass
Firaz Hussein Arabic percussion

Featuringa:
Jelly Roll Morton
Cab Calloway
Lucky Millinder
Mahalia Jackson
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Ella Fitzgerald
Bo Didley
Shirley Temple
Bill Bojangles
Jessye Norman
Marian Anderson
Leontyne Price
Charlie Parker
Louis Armstrong
Pete Seeger
Pigmeat Markham

Augustin Hadelich’s first major concerto recording paired the Violin Concertos of Sibelius and Thomas Adès (AV 2276). Universally acclaimed, it was nominated for a Gramophone Award, was one of The New York Times’ Top Classical Albums of the Year, and was chosen by National Public Radio as one of the broadcaster’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2014, a list that included all genres of music. Augustin follows up with another provocative pairing, the ever-popular and melodious Mendelssohn with Bartók’s iconic Second Violin Concerto. Augustin revels in the concertos’ contrasts, as well as the similarities that emerge when the works are played together. Augustin’s penchant for programming has quickly caught on; as BBC Radio 3’s CD Review noted of the Adès-Sibelius coupling, “It all makes perfect sense in this performance of [Adès’] ‘Concentric Paths’ which in turn makes more sense of the performance of the Sibelius Concerto. It really does work as a double header.” Augustin’s latest, in which he’s superbly supported by his frequent collaborator Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, is sure to strike a significant chord as well.

An award-winning program created by Apollo’s Fire’s director Jeannette Sorrell, Sugarloaf Mountain follows the joys and sorrows of Celtic immigrants who settled in Appalachia. Sparkling fiddle tunes and haunting ballads of the British Isles crossed the Atlantic during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries and took root in the hills of Virginia. They mingled with American shape-note hymns and African spirituals, creating the soulful music known as Appalachian. Passing through love and loss, dancing and prayer, the music overflows in celebration as the people of the mountains raise their communal voices.

Cello virtuosity reigns on Capriccioso, the new album by Grammy�-nominated Antonio Meneses, one of today's most esteemed cellists. He harks back to his predecessors, a quartet of European cellists who composed dazzling works for their own instrument. At the heart of the album are 12 Caprices by 19th-century Italian cellist Carlo Alfredo Piatti, as well as his Caprice on a Theme from Pacini's "Niobe. " Antonio adds David Popper's Etude No. 29, and bookends the album with etudes by the French brothers Jean-Louis and Jean-Pierre Duport.

The Brook Street Band has easily earned its reputation as “the smartest new baroque band around” (The Times, London). Among today’s most notable Handel specialists, the group’s founder, cellist Tatty Theo, and harpsichordist, Carolyn Gibley, turn their attention for only the second time to the music of J.S. Bach as well as his son Carl Philip Emmanuel. Like father, like son, each wrote three Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. These works have long been a valued part of the cello repertoire, but this recording is the first to make use of a regular four-string baroque cello.

New York’s leading early music ensemble Tenet presents The Secret Lover, a program that celebrates music by, for, and about women and pays tribute to the 17th century Concerto delle donne, a trio of extraordinarily gifted professional female singers who were renowned for their performances in the courts of the late Italian Renaissance. Three of Tenet’s own leading ladies – sopranos Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn, and mezzo-soprano Virginia Warnken – honor the spirit of these pioneering women with a recording featuring solos and trios that weave a story thread to create a musical portrayal of three women and their complex emotional lives. As a 21st century tribute, Tenet has commissioned a new work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, which they perform alongside music by Caccini, Rossi, Strozzi and others.

Pianist Alexandra Silocea joins with fellow Romanian cellist Laura Buruiana in two Russian staples of the repertory - the Sonatas of Prokofiev and Shostakovich - along with a much rarer offering by compatriot George Enescu: The single-movement Sonata in F minor, an early work that only recently came to light. Silocea has distinguished herself on previous AVIE releases in repertoire ranging from Debussy and Ravel to Liszt and, notably, Prokofiev. Among Buruiana's distinctions is first prize in the New York-based Young Concert Artists competition in 2003, and a PhD summa cum laude from the National University of Music in Bucharest, where she devoted her thesis to the Enescu F minor Sonata.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Best-selling American violinist Rachel Barton Pine, whose previous release went straight to #1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart, debuts on AVIE with a survey of Mozart’s complete Violin Concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante, in which she introduces the extraordinarily talented young violist Matthew Lipman. Her orchestra is none other than the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by their legendary founder, Sir Neville Marriner.

Award-winning composer Elena Ruehr’s Avie Records debut, Averno, introduced three of her big and bold works for choir and orchestra. For her follow up, Ruehr scales down to intimate solo and chamber works for strings and piano, all with references to older music in some way. Baroque elements infuse Klein Suite for solo violin, Prelude Variations for viola and piano, and The Scarlatti Effect for piano trio. The three movements of the jazz-tinged Second Violin Sonata, are dedicated to people who have influenced Ruehr’s work: her composition teacher William Bolcom, jazz teacher Eddie Russ, and Oscar Peterson whom Ruehr met on New Year’s Eve 1980. Adrienne and Amy was written in honour of the pioneering American composer Amy Beach and her biographer Adrienne Fried Block. The virtuosic and lyrical title track for solo cello was inspired by Nobel Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani school pupil and education activist. Boston-based Ruehr, whose wide-ranging works are performed from coast to coast, teaches at MIT. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

REVIEWS:

A gorgeous-sounding collection of Elena Ruehr’s lyrical and modern chamber music.

This collection of recent (1997 to 2012) chamber music by Elena Ruehr is a glorious-sounding and exquisitely performed disc. The reproduction is a perfect combination of detail and reverberation that is mesmerizing. As I mentioned in a previous review of an orchestral disc of music by this Guggenheim fellow, the music here is full of resplendent melodies that she describes as “the most complex and human of musical experiences.” Her background as a dancer provides her music with a rhythmic pulse, yet there’s depth here. “The idea is that the surface be simple, the structure complex,” she explains.

A common element in these works is the composer’s reference to older music and musicians who have taught and inspired these chamber works. The album title, Lift (2013)was inspired by Nobel Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai, the student activist who was shot by a Taliban gunman for promoting education and equal rights for women. She survived and has become an international spokeswoman for her cause. Its dedicatee, cellist Jennifer Kloetzel (of the Cypress String Quartet), is the soulful performer of this work that combines lyricism with sincerity that reflects Malala’s cause. The Second Violin Sonata’s (2012) three movements are tributes to the composer’s musical mentors: her teacher William Balcom; jazz pianist and composer Eddie Russ who taught her as a teenager and Oscar Peterson, who Ruehr met in 1980. It’s a jazz-inflected work that expresses a variety of emotions: contemplation; plaintive musings and funky utterances.

This is a collection of chamber music that reflects the current age of tonality with enough modern techniques to make it interesting.

-- Audiophile Edition