The brilliant Cavatina Duo (Spanish flautist, Eugenia Moliner and Bosnian guitarist Denis Azabagic) offer a new release of baroque masterpieces: Telemann's 12 Fantasies, and French virtuoso Marin Marais' spectacular variations on "Folies d'Espagne". Described by Gramophone as "relentlessly mellifluous" and by Grammy-winning producer and leading guitarist David Starobin as "simply the finest flute-guitar duo on the planet", the Cavatina Duo offer a recording for our times: music at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Dedicated soloists and chamber musicians, the Cavatina Duo breaks convention with their combination of instruments. Add to that their daring choices of varied and versatile repertoire, and the result is new sounds, colors and musical phrasings, which in return awakens a high level of emotion and audience response. A Cavatina Duo concert is a musical experience you don’t want to miss.

Yellowbird features the sensational tuba virtuoso Aaron Tindall in an album that defies categorization. Tindall's latest recording includes jazz pianist (Grammy-nominated Shelly Berg) on the ballad, "The Peacocks"; Claude Bolling's "Suite for Cello & Jazz Trio" in Tindall's breathtaking transcription for tuba; and a swinging rock band accompaniment to Fred Tackett's "Yellowbird". Prepare to be entertained and astonished! With his solo playing described as being "remarkable for both it's solid power and it's delicacy" and his orchestral playing praised as "a rock-solid foundation," Aaron Tindall is the associate professor of tuba and euphonium at the Frost School of Music located at the University of Miami, and the principal tubist of the Sarasota Orchestra. In the summers he teaches at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, NC, where he also serves as Principal Tuba with the EMF Festival Orchestra under the direction of Gerard Schwarz.

Pianist Hsiang Tu presents a delightful collection of works from the animal kingdom. Bestiary on Ivory offers a wide-ranging collection from Bolcom and Bartok, through Schumann and Saint-Saens. Praised by The New York Times for his "eloquent sensitivity" and The Boston Intelligencer for his "impeccable technique," pianist Hsiang Tu has graced the audience with his creative programming and wide range of repertoire. Hsiang is currently working on the complete cycle of piano solo works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and thematic recitals featuring animal-themed music and opus-one compositions. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Mr. Tu has performed twice as concerto soloist at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center and appeared in venues all over the world, including the National Museum Cardiff, National Recital Hall in Taipei, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hsiang Tu was winner of the Juilliard Concerto Competition, and is currently Professor of Piano at Virginia Tech.

REVIEW:

Every one of the pieces Tu has chosen for his Bestiary album sounds positively beastly in terms of its technical difficulty. Yet Tu sounds like a happy warrior, joyful in engaging the beasts and having fun in slaying them. This is an album of mostly fun music, and Tu manages to tickle us as he is tickling the ivories. We need more recordings like this to lift our spirits in these difficult times. Strongly recommended.

-- Fanfare (Jerry Dubins)

Baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer join forces in a brilliant recital of English songs, written by French composers. Tyler Duncan brings consummate musicianship, vocal beauty and interpretive insight to recital, concert and operatic literature. He has appeared with the New York Philharmonic in Messiah under Andrew Manze, a Mendelssohn/Bach program under Masaaki Suzuki and as soloist in Poulenc’s Le bal masqué for chamber ensemble; made countless appearances with Les Violons du Roy/Bernard Labadie, the Toronto Symphony/Peter Oundjian, Montreal Symphony/Kent Nagano, Toronto's Tafelmusik, Ottawa's National Arts Centre Orchestra and at the Oregon Bach and Bard Music Festivals. Duncan and Switzer have been leading figures in the world of art song, and share a deep connection to songs of the Romantic period, as well as works of living composers. Mr. Duncan and Ms. Switzer were born in British Columbia, and are proud ambassadors of Canadian art song.

For pianist Victor Rosenbaum's fourth album on Bridge Records; the artist turns to the last three piano compositions of Johannes Brahms. Rosenbaum's Schubert release was described as a “powerful and poignant record of human experience”, and much the same can be said of these profound readings of Brahms's late masterpieces. Pianist Victor Rosenbaum, former chair of the New England Conservatory piano department for more than ten years, has performed widely as soloist and chamber music performer in the United States, Europe, Asia, Israel, and Russia, in such prestigious halls as Alice Tully Hall in New York and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has collaborated with such artists as Leonard Rose, Arnold Steinhardt, Robert Mann, and the Cleveland and Brentano String Quartets, among others. Festival appearances have included Tanglewood, Rockport, Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall, Kfar Blum (Israel) and Musicorda, where he is on the faculty. He has been soloist with the Indianapolis and Atlanta symphonies and the Boston Pops.

Composer Louis Karchin has created a substantial body of work to date, including his recent opera "Jane Eyre" (recorded for NAXOS) and more than half a dozen pieces for orchestra, and a plethora of chamber and vocal compositions. BRIDGE's second Karchin release presents five recent works composed during the past decade 2009-2019, featuring the composer's "Chamber Symphony" (2009). Over a career spanning more than four decades, composer LOUIS KARCHIN has amassed a portfolio of over 95 compositions, appeared as conductor with numerous performing ensembles, co-founded new music groups, including the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, the Orchestra of the League of Composers, the Washington Square Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New Music, and overseen the formation of a graduate program in music composition at New York University. His works have garnered distinguished honors, including three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and Koussevitzky, Barlow, and Fromm commissions. A citation from the American Academy praised his Songs of John Keats as “a striking conception, in which the sonic properties of the poetry interact with musical material in unprecedented fusion.”

REVIEW:

This is a superbly recorded and expertly performed recording made with outstanding musicians, many of whom are dedicatees of the pieces they are playing. Louis Karchin’s music is rewarding if not ‘easy’, the rewards coming from an appreciation gained over more than a few hearings of these works. The Chamber Symphony is certainly a masterpiece, and the subsequent chamber works are by no means mere fillers.

-- MusicWeb International

This new studio recording contains three works for piano and orchestra that virtuoso pianist Orion Weiss and conductor Leon Botstein first performed in concert at the Bard Music Festival. Together, the three works span almost a century of musical Romanticism and are as different from one another as the generations they represent. In each piece, the virtuoso genre becomes a means by which the composer responds to a specific source of inspiration—in the first case (Korngold), a performer and family friend who had suffered a horrendous tragedy, in the second (Rimsky Korsakov), a venerated old master, and in the third (Chopin) a melody from a beloved opera.

REVIEWS:

All the performances on this album, featuring the brilliant pianist Orion Weiss, are excellent.

– New York Times

Thoroughly entertaining.

– BBC Music Magazine

Paul Lansky's latest album brings together four virtuosic pieces, composed for widely varying ensembles. Four's Company for four guitars combines lyricism, rich harmony, and transparent textures. Angles for piano, violin and cello alternately dances and sings, and ends with a beautifully simple, sad song. Springs for four percussionists tears the roof off, and Color Codas for two pianos winds up the program with rollicking dance rhythms. From his pioneering work in computer music through his fresh and engaging instrumental music of the past decade, Paul Lansky has become a leading voice in contemporary American music. His music is well-represented on recording including a dozen albums on the Bridge label.

William Bland’s cycle of 24 piano sonatas, one in each of the major and minor keys, was composed between the years 1998 and 2014. The cycle is the West Virginia-born composer’s magnum opus, and is a summation of an extraordinarily wide range of cultural influences. The musical content of the sonatas merges strains of the simple and complex, popular and classical, romantic and modernist. American pianist Kevin Gorman, in his debut recording writes: “the essence of these sonatas is passion, which beckons me as a pianist to reciprocate the intensity with which these originally had been composed.”

Alan Shulman was a composer, cellist and arranger. Born in Baltimore on June 4, 1915, his early studies were with Bart Wirtz (cello) and Louis Cheslock (harmony) at the Peabody Conservatory. Shulman was the cellist of the Kreiner String Quartet (1935-38). Later, he and his brother, violinist/conductor Sylvan Shulman, co-founded the Stuyvesant String Quartet. During the 1940s and 1950s this group was noted for its performances and recordings of contemporary quartets of Bloch, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Malipiero, Hindemith and Kreisler, among others. Shulman's first successful composition was Theme and Variations for Viola and Orchestra, which received its première over NBC in 1941 with Emanuel Vardi as soloist. Alan Shulman's most extended orchestral writing appears in his film scores, made for RKO in the 40s and 50s. These soundtrack recordings have been restored and are being issued for the first time.

"We love Paul Salerni. Ever since our first collaboration in 2016, when we first played "Bad Pets", we knew we had found something special. This was confirmed soon after when he wrote us four cycles in about two months. All this repertoire inspired us to formally establish ourselves as The Bowers Fader Duo. Paul has written more music for us than any other composer and we love it's humanity, humor, and range of expression. It is truly a joy to per-form these songs and we are honored to present this album." (Jessica Bowers and Oren Fader) Created in 2009, the Bowers Fader Duo performs both classical and con-temporary repertoire. Their ongoing mission is to promote new American art songs for mezzo and guitar, through commissions, performances, and recordings. To date, they have presented over 40 world premieres of works written for them. Since 2016, the Duo has presented their series, New American Art Songs for Mezzo and Guitar, three times each season in venues around New York City.

Fortepianist Keiko Shichijo presents a radically fresh view of Mozart's keyboard music. Neal Peres Da Costa, Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music writes: "Keiko Shichijo has been inspired to reimagine a Mozart that is highly expressive, rhetorical, and even occasionally volatile." Shichijo's brilliant Mozart was recorded on an original Frère et Soeur Stein d’Augsbourg à Vienne dated 1802. Mr. Da Costa calls the instrument "absolutely ravishing in sound, with a clarity, crispness, and resonance that is ideally suited to Mozart’s piano writing." Keiko Shichijo is a special voice in both the Classical and new music worlds. Her traditional Japanese sensibilities combined with her knowledge of European historical performance practices shape her unique vision, and this is reflected in her feeling for the music, the instruments and the story behind them.

The brilliant saxophone quartet Project Fusion make their debut recording featuring two major works- Glazunov's richly contrapuntal Quartet, op. 109, with its tips of the hat to Chopin and Schumann, and the late David Maslanka's Recitation Book (2006), a work based on music by J.S. Bach. Extraordinary chamber playing! Formed in 2010 by graduates of the Eastman School of Music, Project Fusion captured the Gold Medal at the 40th Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and First Prize at the Music Teachers Nation-al Association Chamber Music Competition, and was the first saxophone quartet to win the Grand Prize, as well as the Audience Choice Award, at the 6th Plowman International Chamber Music Competition. Comprised of passionate teachers, Project Fusion is dedicated to public arts outreach, and has presented convocations, clinics, and workshops in numerous schools, as well as recitals, residencies, and masterclasses at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The ensemble has recently appeared at the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Yellow Springs, and the Bridge-hampton Chamber Music Festival.