Webster's Dictionary defines "Americana" as "things typical of America." The "typical American" optimistic spirit is captured in the sweeping melodies and triumphant sonorities of composer James Beckel's "American Dream." Directed by Commander Lewis J. Buckley, the United States Coast Guard Band strives to express its great patriotism on this album, Americana. (Altissimo)

Franois Couperin’s Concerts Royaux (1722) and Les Nations (1726) use open scoring, indicating that they could be performed by whatever instruments were at hand. + He later confessed that he himself preferred to perform them on two harpsichords. + This suggestion had to wait for these two CDs to be taken up in a recording (the second CD is being readied for future release). + Also presented are a number of his Pices de clavecin, also in rarely heard realizations for two harpsichords.

Anna Clynne’s enormous palette of colors and special effects coalesce into an aural three-dimensional experience of striking originality. Equally there’s a comforting familiarity to her music, as she draws inspiration from historic styles that she transforms into a new musical dialect. Anna’s background in electro-acoustic music and her fascination for a variety of multi-media – including poetry, visual art and videography – combine to create rich and exhilarating textures of popular appeal.

The five works on Anna Clyne: Mythologies were written over a 10-year period between 2005 and 2015. The performances on the album feature the BBC Symphony Orchestra and four internationally-acclaimed conductors. Masquerade, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to open the Last Night of the Proms 2013 and conducted by Marin Alsop, captures the spirit of that quintessentially English tradition. The title evokes an 18th-century outdoor festivity featuring fireworks, acrobats and street entertainers. This Midnight Hour, conducted by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo, encapsulates the modernity and decadence of two European poets, Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez and Frenchman Charles Baudelaire. Oramo also conducts The Seamstress, a single-movement violin concerto in all but name, featuring soloist Jennifer Koh as well as the whispered voice of Irene Buckley reciting the work’s inspiration, a poem by William Butler Yeats.

More poetry by a Nobel laureate, the Irishman Seamus Heaney, inspired Night Ferry; conducted by Andrew Litton, the work conjures crashing waves and weathered seafaring. The album concludes with rewind, conducted by André de Ridder. It’s a wild romp imagining the backwards scroll of a video tape complete with glitches, skips and freezes.

Mythologies became an instant media and popular success when it was released in October 2020 – “hands-down one of the half-dozen best classical albums of 2020”, according to New York Music Daily. The album is now presented in both a CD version and as a magnificent 2-LP set. The splendor of the glossy gatefold and 180-gram vinyl in particular is an appropriate match for Anna’s enormous palette of colors and special effects.

REVIEWS:

I found her music colourful, full of energy and overflowing with ideas which grip you from first to last. The present release of her compositions spanning the decade from 2005 up to 2015 thus offers a fine survey of her recent orchestral music and there is no better place to begin with than the first work recorded here, the short Masquerade, a brilliant concert-opener if ever there was one. The music skips along with high spirits until it concludes with a quotation from John Playford's The English Dancing Master which comes as a surprise - although I for one would not be surprised to learn that that very tune had already been there since the very beginning but cleverly and subtly disguised. Anyway, this short and brilliant work presents Anna Clyne's music-making in a nutshell, as it were.

These superb works receive committed readings from all concerned and, besides singling out the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing at its customary best, I would like to draw attention to Jennifer Koh's impressive take on the violin part in The Seamstress, one of the gems in this collection. I hope that many will derive as much musical pleasure from this very fine release as I have, and that it will not take too long before more of Clyne's orchestral music is committed to disc.

-- MusicWeb International

Mythologies is an apt title choice for this striking collection by London-born composer Anna Clyne (b. 1980). However ancient mythological tales might appear at the surface level, their archetypal themes resonate across the ages, as relevant today as when they were born, and they're fantastical in nature too, populated as they are with gods and mythical beasts. In similar manner, Clyne's music exudes an era-transcending quality in these phantasmagoric pieces, some of which stretch out for twenty minutes at a time. The Grammy-nominated composer is a tale-spinner whose creations transport the listener to dazzling realms.

Certainly a key part of the recording's appeal has to do with unpredictability: in not conforming to long-established scripts, the pieces are able to unfold in any number of stylistic directions, even if ultimately each develops in accordance with her sensibility.

-- Textura