The star of tenor John Matthew Myers is rapidly in the ascendent. His debut album, Desiderium, coincides with his Metropolitan Opera debut in Brett Dean’s Hamlet. Desiderium – “an ardent desire or longing, a feeling of loss or grief for something lost” – beautifully showcases Myers’ mellifluous voice.

His thoughtful program of works by American and American émigré composers opens with Samuel Barber’s yearning Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – rarely heard sung by a tenor – and transitions to Charles Griffes’ similarly searching settings of 3 Poems of Fiona Macleod, and Andre Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano. What follows is A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, set to the words of a poignant letter by an American Civil War officer, by John Kander (of Kander and Ebb musical theatre fame). Rounding out the recital are 4 Walt Whitman Songs by German-born composer Kurt Weill, including the classic O Captain! My Captain! John Matthew Myers says, “Call me a big-hearted Romantic. Each song on this album conveys yearning, separation, loneliness or distance but also a sense of intimacy and longing for connection.” It certainly does. Desiderium is an auspicious debut album, and one especially attuned to our times.

REVIEW:

For his debut recital disc John Matthew Myers has chosen songs and groups of songs by five American composers, active during the 20th century. The common denominator is a feeling of loneliness, and it all stemmed from Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, which is the only really well-known work in this album.

It goes without saying that the overriding mood is that of melancholy and gloom, but the texts and the musical expressions differ greatly, which vouches for a varied program. Barber’s Knoxville was composed in 1947 for a high voice and orchestra, and has almost exclusively been soprano territory. Since James Agee’s dream-like prose poem from 1938 is written in the persona of a 5-year-old male child, it’s logical to have it performed by a tenor. John Matthew Myers sings the many lyrical sections with soft beautiful tone, but he is also apt at expressing the desperation and sorrow in the work's crucial lines. It is a deeply felt reading.

Composed in 1918 The three Griffes songs, to poems by Fiona Macleod (William Field), were orchestrated in 1919. Like Barber’s Knoxville the orchestration has an attractive colouring that the piano cannot measure up to, but still it has its own attraction, and since it is the original it’s valid and gives the music a more intimate image, more chamber music like. I am happy to have both versions in so convincing readings.

I must say that André Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano is a harder nut to crack. Composed in 2004 they are dressed in a rather knotty harmonic language. The mood is gloomy, also in the up-tempo last song, The Revelation. I believe that repeated listening might open them up, but at present I must content myself with admitting that the singing and playing are of the highest order. As far as I have been able to find out, this is a first recording, even though the liner notes don’t specifically say so.

The setting for John Kander’s A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, a major in the Civil War, is wonderful and gripping. John Kander is known, at least to Broadway musical enthusiasts, for his collaboration with Fred Ebb in Cabaret, Chicago, and other Broadway successes. Here, in a quite different vein, he catches all the shifts and nuances of the letter so sensitively. There are certainly echoes from his musical background, which in no way is a drawback. John Matthew Myers reading is appropriately sensitive.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 triggered Kurt Weill to set three of the Walt Whitman poems recorded here. He “structured the original three as a gradual decrescendo of militarism from the bullish opening to the wistful intensity of the final dirge”, as Julian Haylock says in his notes. Five years later he added Come Up from the Fields, Father, which here is placed third in the suite. Weill was a great admirer of Whitman, and said as early as 1926 that he was “the first truly original poetic talent to grow out of American soil.” The music is warlike and sturdy in the first song, reminding me of his style in the 1920s, the second song is a funeral march, and the whole suite – I wouldn’t call it a cycle – is deeply engaging.

John Matthew Myers can feel satisfied with his debut album, and he is excellently supported by Myra Huang’s accompaniment.

-- MusicWeb International (Göran Forsling)

Anne Akiko Meyers has amassed a multitude of fans and admirers for her exquisitely curated recordings, often exploring her passion for new music, and old music in new guises. Her quest for creative collaborations has inspired countless commissions and world-premieres, with the results infusing Shining Night, an album that embraces themes of love, poetry, and nature.

Anne’s fruitful association with composer Morten Lauridsen led to the arrangement of his popular choral work Sure on this Shining Night, for violin and piano, lending its name to the album’s title. From there springs forth an album imbued with music of light and hope, spanning the history of music through Baroque, Romantic, Popular, and current genres. J.S.Bach’s beautiful Air in G and Corelli’s colorful La Folia – arranged for violin and guitar – rub shoulders with Latin-tinged Estrellita (Little Star) by Manuel Ponce, the Aria from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, and Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango. Two of the 20th century’s most iconic songs appear in intimate and tender new arrangements: Duke Ellington’s (In My) Solitude, and Can’t Help Falling in Love, famously crooned by The King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Anne’s collaborators are eminent Italian pianist Fabio Bidini and Grammy Award-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux.

REVIEW:

Few violinists would have had the idea to ask the quintessential choral composer Morton Lauridsen, as Meyers did, to arrange two of his choral works for duo with violin. Fewer would have juxtaposed Lauridsen with Elvis Presley, and fewer still would have been able to make this marvelously varied program hang together. Meyers transforms the basic violin encore type of program into something new and fresh. She has made a specialty of bold, original, and immediate programming, but has outdone herself this time.

-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

The distinguished New York-based composer-pianist Bruce Wolosoff synthesizes traditional tonal idioms with lifelong enthusiasms for jazz, blues, and rock music, creating a distinct musical language that speaks to the heart, but is unmistakably contemporary. His soaring, soulful melodies are strikingly suited to the cello, “in some ways my favorite instrument,” admits Bruce, “after my own of course.” For Paradise Found, Bruce reunites with Grammy Award-winning cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio – the pair previously collaborated on Bruce’s Cello Concerto, a Top 10 Billboard Classical chart hit – for the first recordings of his two Cello Sonatas, and two miniatures Circe and The Woods. Paradise Found is indelibly inspired by the splendors of the natural world.

The title track – Bruce’s first cello sonata – was composed under the shadow of 2020’s first COVID lockdown and serves as an affirmation of lasting beauty when the world was plunged into a very dark place. “In composing this piece,” Wolosoff reveals, “I wanted to remind myself, and future listeners, that the world is still beautiful.” Bruce’s second cello sonata, “Requiem for the Planet,” is a musical response to climate change. With movements titled ‘Song of the Earth,’ ‘Requiem Aeternum,’ ‘The Great Waters’ and ‘Epilogue: I have loved this world so dearly,’ the work is a sort of musical requiem in sonata form. But it is not without hope. Bruce acknowledges, “It is my most fervent wish that this beautiful, ephemeral world will endure throughout my children’s lifetimes.” The album concludes with two “encores” – Circe inspired by the sorceress in Homer’s The Odyssey, and The Woods, after a drawing by Bruce’s friend April Gornik, whose beautiful paintings adorn the album’s booklet.

A 2023 GRAMMY nominee of historic stature, profiled in the New York Times!

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, the remarkably resourceful personnel and musicians of the New York Youth Symphony (NYYS), with Music Director Michael Repper, found a way to come together during a time of separation to make their debut recording. Featuring four works by three African American women composers – Florence Price, Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery – the orchestra’s first studio recording includes several premieres. The release coincides with the 115th anniversary of Price’s birth. Two recordings of works by Florence Price are firsts. Ethiopia's Shadow in America is the first recording of the work by an American orchestra. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement, with soloist Michelle Cann, is the premiere recording of the composer’s newly-discovered original orchestration.

Price’s compositional voice blends the African American folk songs and dances of her heritage with the central European Romantic tradition in which she was trained. Her tone poem Ethiopia’s Shadow in America evokes the injustices experienced by people of African descent. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement features the exuberant soloist Michelle Cann, a champion of the composer’s music, who gave the New York and Philadelphia premieres of the work.

Umoja – meaning “unity” in Swahili – by Grammy-nominated flutist, entrepreneur, and composer Valerie Coleman originated as a simple song for women’s choir. Its transformation as a work for orchestra – given its first recording here – maintains its feel of a drum circle and sharing of history through a traditional “call and response” form. In her rich and colorful single-movement symphonic work Soul Force, NYYS alum Jessie Montgomery drew on Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which he states, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

REVIEWS:

This has to be one of the most assured and exciting recording-debuts from a youth orchestra since the West-Eastern Divan and the Simon Bolivars hit the ground running: there's a wonderful sheen and polish to the sound, ensemble is nigh-on immaculate, and the young New Yorkers revel in Price's juba rhythms and inventive scoring in both the Piano Concerto (given for the first time in her original orchestration here) and Ethiopia's Shadow in America.

-- Presto Music

This particular album is yet another example of a project in a sense fortified by the Covid pandemic, and the fact that it features a youth orchestra – New York Youth Symphony – is a heartening indication of innocent ears opening to both the undiscovered and the entirely new. They give it their all. Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (recorded for the first time by an American ensemble) is a fitting foundation for the programme, its focus not so much on the indefensible reality and inhumanity of slavery as the enduring spirit to rise above it. For sure, its first pages are marked with a cry of anguish across the entire orchestra – but a nobility of utterance shines through them and it isn’t long before the emergence of a simple Spiritual (in the second section of the piece) finds solace in a solo cello and aspiration in its journey from solo oboe to balmy (and majestic) horns. And don’t for a moment think that a cakewalk is a somehow inappropriate conclusion to what has gone before, because this is the music that Price knew and found joy in. It was something to be celebrated.

-- Gramophone

Composer Elena Ruehr adds to her extensive discography with Icarus, an album of chamber music infused with hints of history, legendary literature and close collaborations with a multitude of musical colleagues. The repertoire revolves around the string quartet, a genre that generated great acclaim for Elena’s Six String Quartets (AV2379). Elena’s String Quartet No. 7, “A Thousand Cranes”, evokes experiences and resilience of children in wartime, including the internment of Japanese in American camps, and her own father’s escape from Nazi Germany. Her playful String Quartet No. 8, “Insect Dances” – “written for listeners of all ages” – finds a diverse family of bugs engaged in an impish dinner party. Inspired by T. S. Eliot, The Worlds Revolve, for piano and string quartet, conjures elements both ancient and prescient. The title track, for clarinet and string quartet, centres on the Greek mythological character’s excitement as he builds his wings of wax and dares to fly, rather than his dark demise as he flies too close to the sun.

The ever-inquisitive pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar presents The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music. The Long 17th Century refers to the period from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, an era noted for forward-thinking individuality and invention in all areas of life. This two-and-a-half hour recital surveys a pan-European variety of styles, genres and techniques, and comprises 36 works, each by a different composer, many not recorded before on a modern piano. Daniel-Ben Pienaar has been critically acclaimed for his previous albums on Avie: “a gloriously multi-faceted opus maximus ... Amazing and very much worth hearing” –Der Spiegel(on Beethoven’s Complete Piano Sonatas, AV2320) “dizzying virtuosity ... fresh, spontaneous, original readings that shed new light on the keyboard player’s Bible” –BBC Music Magazine (on J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, AV2299)



REVIEWS:

Have you noticed the growing trend of pianists taking up 17th-century keyboard works on the modern concert grand? Perhaps it has to do with the desire to be rebellious, or to attain a certain level of intellectual caché. Yet pianists also have valid artistic reasons to explore this repertoire. First and foremost are the sheer musical rewards. Secondly, the freedom one has in regard to phrasing, tempo, and embellishment can be liberating and creatively stimulating. For this remarkable two-disc collection, Daniel-Ben Pienaar has chosen 36 17th-century keyboard works, each by a different composer. He brilliantly reveals how a piano’s dynamic scope, timbral diversity, and sustaining capabilities can vividly and meaningfully serve this repertoire.

One noticeable example is in Tarquino Merula’s Capriccio cromatico, where the ascending legato chromatic lines and detaché counterline with repeated notes take on distinctive characters. The Weckmann D minor Canzon’s virtuosic repeated notes gain color and drama through pianistic inflection, and via Pienaar’s dapper fingerwork, of course. Terraced dynamics and half-tints of pedal evoke trumpets and winds in Gabrieli’s joyous Canzon quarta.

What bracing trills and hair-trigger scale passages Pienaar delivers throughout Muffat’s Partita IV, while serving up a more unified and colorfully contrasted reading of Buxtehude’s large-scale “La Capricciosa” Variations than most period performers manage to do. And while Pienaar allows for pockets of space or “air” between the notes in Keril’s Passacaglia, he manages to shape the sounds and silences into long-lined entities. I encourage listeners to discover their own favorite works and magic moments across this intelligently programmed, splendidly engineered, and boundlessly satisfying release.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)

 

What makes it work is not just the dazzling precision and clarity of Pienaar’s finger technique (though that is certainly a vital factor), but the intelligence that has gone into his interpretations. He also communicates an individual and convincing vision for each piece, enough for every one of them to give delight.

 

–Gramophone (Editor's Choice; June 2020)

Rachel Barton Pine’s ‘Testament’ is one of the best of this set of peerless works to have been released since Isabelle Faust’s definitive volumes of 2010 and 2012.

There is in her interpretation a surprisingly striking contrast between its crystalline voicing, clear articulation, and warm tone that makes the listener feel that it is concerned with the plain and simple beauty of the music as much as with the genius of its counterpoint and relationships between movements. All this is further supported by the sensible combination of Baroque bow and metal strings on a period instrument in modern set-up – the tuning is unfailingly accurate and the strength of the bowing means there is never any interference with the musical line by a squeak or break.

These are thoughtful and generous performances amplified by great maturity and depth.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice; June 2016)

Cast out of Jerusalem, cast out of Spain. The Spanish Jews in their travels absorbed the colorful musical accents of Italy, Turkey and North Africa, including exotic percussion. Apollo’s Fire’s musical journey interweaves Sephardic folk song with the Monteverdi-like Hebrew choral work of Salamone Rossi – the Songs of Solomon. The daily rhythms of life – love, rejection, feasting and celebration – culminate in the mystical prayers of Shabbat.

Pianist Charles Owen and his regular duo partner Katya Apekisheva turn to Rachmaninov’s diverse Suites for two pianos, and the composer’s atmospheric Six Morceaux, for their first joint recording for AVIE. The cofounders of the London Piano Festival delve into the quintessentially Russian Suite No. 1, also known as “Fantasise-Tableaux,” with its poetic inspirations, and the more traditional Suite No. 2 which marked Rachmaninov’s compositional comeback after a four-year hiatus. Rounding out the album, Charles and Katya share the piano bench for the atmospheric piano four hands Six Morceaux. “…Together Owen and Apekisheva are not just one-plus-one, but virtually a third entity…in Rachmaninov’s heavenly Suite No. 2, its dizzying waltz delivered with extraordinary precision, yet full of subtle, pearly coloring… played with tremendous panache.” (The Arts Desk)

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REVIEW:

This new Avie release combines the two Suites for two pianos with the attractive collection of six Morceaux, Opus 11, the latter for four hands on one instrument. The Suite No. 1 begins with a beguiling Barcarolle which gradually builds in complexity as it proceeds, and the clarity of the textures as presented here are the result of much careful rehearsal combined with the splendidly balanced recorded sound. These strengths, moreover, set a standard that can be experienced throughout the recital. However, it is the final movement – Pâques – which makes the strongest impression of all, with Rachmaninov’s favourite bell-sounds ringing forth in joyful sonority: a wonderful sound, vividly realised.

The Second Suite is more ambitious still, and magnificently realised by Owen and Apekisheva from the opening bars. The exuberant enthusiasm of the performance reflects the very nature of the music, until in the final Tarantella the balancing of virtuoso rhythmic precision at a fast tempo with clarity of phrasing represents a veritable triumph.

The six Morceaux of 1894, written when the composer was aged twenty-one, were composed in tribute to two recently deceased supporters: Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Zverev. Be that as it may, Rachmaninov was trying to develop his career as a professional composer, so these duets were intended for early publication and sale in order to ‘balance the books’. Therefore the music is slighter than that of the two Suites, but always beautifully judged, and sometimes captivating, as when another opening Barcarolle, as in the Suite composed during the preceding year, sets the tone for the whole sequence.

– MusicWeb International

Swiss violinist Sebastian Bohren, who’s star is rapidly in the ascendant, makes his AVIE label debut with two concertos from Mozart’s “year of the violin” – Nos. 3 and 5 – paired with the composer’s youthful Symphony No. 29. Sebastian’s interpretations bring out the sparkling energy of the concertos, written when Mozart was just 19 years old, yet at the same time a brandish a smoothly burnished sense of style. His partners on the album, famed Hungarian violinist-turned conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy and Sebastian’s compatriots the CHAARTS Chamber Artists – comprised of leading European soloists and chamber musicians – perfectly embody these contrasting characteristics, both in their accompaniments and their reading of the Symphony which was written within a year of the concerti. Sebastian is equally at home as a soloist and chamber musician. He has performed with the Lucerne Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Basel Symphony Orchestras, among others, under such conductors as James Gaffigan, Andrew Litton and Ivor Bolton. His chamber music collaborators have included Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Thomas Demenga and Konstantin Lifschitz. He plays the “Ex-Wanamaker-Hart” violin made by Guadagnini in Parma in 1761.

REVIEW:

The concerto performances reveal classically balanced interpretations, with Sebastian Bohren's slender, delicate violin playing sounding entirely committed to heavenly, springy elegant tone.

– Online Merker (Ingobert Waltenberger)

With his critically acclaimed AVIE Records recordings of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Faure´ and Sergei Rachmaninov to his credit, the celebrated British pianist Charles Owen scales the heights of Franz Liszt’s anthology Annees de pelerinage, Premiere annee: Suisse (“Years of Travel, First Year: Switzerland”), which evokes the great 19th-century pianist-composer’s Swiss sojourns with aural impressions of the Alpine landscape, its peaks and valleys, mountains and streams, and the country’s distinctive folk music. Literary references abound as they do in the album’s concluding piece, the emotional Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude (“The Blessing of God in Solitude”) which was inspired by a poem penned by Liszt’s friend Alphonse de Lamartine. Emotions ran equally high for Charles Owen who turned to Liszt during lockdown. The uncertainty of being homebound throughout the pandemic was eased by the extra meaning and solace of the composer’s evocations of journeying, experiencing the natural world and its sense of beauty and liberation.

Greetings from Italy where music is everywhere! Celebrating 20 years of an illustrious international career with their 14th recording and first on AVIE, the multiple award-winning Quartetto di Cremona sends Italian Postcards, assembling evocations of the Mediterranean country by four non-natives. Mozart penned his first string quartet during his first Italian journey to the town of Lodi. Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade takes its inspiration from poetry and ancient Italian melodies. Extending the quartet repertoire, the Cremona commissioned British-French-Israeli composer Nimrod Borenstein, whose Cieli d’Italia was inspired by the colors of the Italian skies. The album’s idyllic conclusion is Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence,” in which the Cremona is joined by violist Ori Kam (Jerusalem Quartet) and cellist Eckart Runge (Artemis Quartet).



REVIEW:

The Quartetto di Cremona have an uncanny knack for sounding like more than just four players, their sound rich, vibrant, and resplendent. These are as sunny, Italianate performances as one could want.

– Classicsl Candor (John J Puccio)

Winner of the Berliner International Music Competition, the Prix Jeune Soliste des Medias Francophones Publics, and the International Manhattan Music Competition, young cellist Christoph Croise debuts on AVIE performing the two Cello Concertos by Franz Joseph Haydn. His fresh and fervent approach is matched by his collaborators, the Eurasian Soloists Chamber Orchestra, as they recreate the original set up of the works’ first performances in the Esterhazy Castle when the composer directed from the harpsichord alongside the first violinist and the soloist. Christoph concludes the album with Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto for Violin and Cello, RV 547, joined by the orchestra’s founder and director, Kazakh violinist Sherniyaz Mussakhan. “a magical performance… delicate yet virtuosic” (BBC Music Magazine) “Croise plays with considerable ardency and style” (MusicWeb International)

REVIEW:

This conductor-less release manages to capture something too often lost in recordings of the early cello concerto repertoire: fun. With the brilliance of steel strings – no sheep were harmed in its making – the Eurasian Soloists Chamber Orchestra encapsulate the phrase, ‘a band that plays together, plays together’. This delightful sense of the social and chamber music-making infuses producer Joël Cormier’s mix.

-- Gramophone

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The award-winning Canadian composer elaborates, “One can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance.” The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording.

“My heart skipped a beat when [The Italian Job] from La Serenissima and Adrian Chandler landed on my desk, such was my enjoyment of their Gramophone Awards-shortlisted Vivaldi Four Seasons recording. So to discover that with this all-Italian assortment of sinfonias and concertos they’ve actually topped their 2016 triumph- and apparently effortlessly- gives me no small amount of pleasure.” So said the reviewer of the Gramophone Award-winning release, and the Vivaldi specialists are set to triumph once again with Vivaldi x2, an astonishing medley of double concertos for hunting horns, oboes, bassoon, violin and cello. Emanating from Vivaldi’s pen the double concerto- a genre of which he all but cornered the market- resulted in some of the composer’s most colorful and exuberant works. In the hands of two-time Gramophone Award-winning La Serenissima, these concertos come to virtuosic and effervescent life. “Were I asked to condense this review down to two simple words, they would be: buy it.” (Gramophone) “the freshness incinerates the cobwebs of familiarity in the heat of La Serenissima’s proselytizing zeal.” (BBC Music Magazine Concerto Choice)

REVIEWS:

The Vivaldi recordings by Adrian Chandler and his British period instrument ensemble La Serenissima, named after the nickname of the Venetian Republic and specializing in its music, are breaking new ground. Give this one a try if you haven’t heard the group before: it’s wonderful.

– All Music Guide (James Manheim)

These musicians represent one heck of a crack team when it comes to the music of Vivaldi. Bravissima, La Serenissima.

– Gramophone