2019 release. On Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw's album Orange, Attacca Quartet performs six of her pieces for string quartet. The string quartet form "has existed for hundreds of years, but there's something, for me, beautiful and ritualistic about coming back to that form," says Shaw. "It's something familiar, and yet you can keep on opening these doors and diving down these little rabbit holes... This album is a celebration of the simple, immediate, unadorned beauty of a natural, every day, familiar thing."

Track Listing
1. Any Old Time
2. Rosalie
3. Star Dust
4. Lover Come Back to Me
5. Everything Is Jumpin'
6. I Surrender, Dear
7. At Sundown
8. Chantez-les Bas
9. St. Louis Blues
10. Diga Diga Doo
11. El Rancho Grande, (Alla en)
12. My Blue Heaven
13. Concerto For Clarinet
14. I Cover the Waterfront
15. Nocturne
16. To a Broadway Rose
17. Suite No. 8
18. Maid With the Flaccid Air, The

Personnel includes: Artie Shaw (clarinet), Billie Holiday, Tony Pastor (vocals).

All tracks were personally selected by Artie Shaw and represent the best of his Bluebird/Victor recordings from 1938-1945. Included are many long- unavailable tracks and rare broadcast performances.

This is a rather odd but intriguing collection of Artie Shaw recordings. Shaw himself picked out these performances as his personal favorites and they include both familiar studio recordings and lesser-known broadcasts. Most Shaw collectors will already have "Any Old Time," the magnificent "Concerto for Clarinet" and "Lover, Come Back to Me" but may not possess copies of the seven broadcast performances.

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.

Francis Shaw has become one of the most versatile British composers of this day, having written a wide range of music, most notably for film and television. As with many composers whose work has taken them into diverse musical fields, the range of his accomplishments has tended to draw attention away from what lies at the heart of his output - his serious music, less extensive than that of his more commercial work, but which - is of a quality and achievement manifestly deserving of far greater recognition than it has received hitherto.

Lifejacket

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms.

Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigor.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet, and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel, a dialogue between the voices of the cello and the piano.

REVIEW:

The Pulitzer prize-winning Caroline Shaw (b.1982) has a gift for sensuous, delicate music in which a sturdy sense of form, often based on nature or architecture, is ever evident. She blends rough with smooth in a manner that manages to be challenging but enticing.

A solo piano piece, Gustave le Gray, takes Chopin’s A minor Mazurka, Op 17, as a starting point, intriguingly expanded with fresh material. Boris Kerner, for cello and eerie-sounding flower pots, pays homage to the German physicist who invented three-phase traffic theory. That description hardly does justice to the haunting music created here. The title work, The Wheel, for piano and cello, was commissioned by I Giardini. Guided by musical contours of the baroque, it turns beguilingly towards contemplation and demands attentive listening.

-- The Guardian (UK)