Stradivarius is pleased to present the new album by Aurora Avveduto, a young pianist who has enriched her training by participating, among other things, in various masterclasses and seminars with composers and performers of today's music. Entitled Stille, the CD invites you on a journey that intertwines music from different sources (Japan, China, the United States, Italy) brought together around the theme of the Far East and the images of permanence that derive from it, with pieces that investigate the theme of time and suggest moments of reflection in a delicate dimension of suspension. The CD, which opens with China Gates by John Adams, a composer of the second generation of minimal music, is configured as a concept album centered on a certain vision of music and the world that has roots in the Far East but which then also touches the cultures of other countries. After the songs by Toru Takemitsu Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II, from 1982 and 1992 respectively, and after Eight Memories in Watercolor (1978-1979) by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, born in 1957, the album closes with two compositions by two Italian authors, Pioggia d'autunno by Federico Maria Sardelli, a multifaceted musician, painter and writer, and Stille by Giorgio Colombo Taccani, a song from 2022 that gives the title to the entire CD, for a singular listening path that creates bridges and links between the cultures of different countries.

Anna Geniushene and Lukas Geniusas both have brilliant careers as soloists: Anna won the silver medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 and now records for Fuga Libera, while Lukas' two Rachmaninov recordings, a recital of solo works (ALPHA997) and songs with Asmik Grigorian (ALPHA796), have both won major awards. Partners in life and in art, they form a highly virtuosic and tightly knit duo. This highly varied programme pays tribute to American music with works by Gershwin, Stravinsky, Copland and McPhee, a succession of melting-pots that create fusions of classical music, jazz, Mexican music and Balinese rhythms. The spectacular and rebellious Fourth Ballad from Frederic Rzewski's North American Ballads (1978-79) is also included. This musical odyssey concludes with the vast fresco that is John Adam's magnificent Hallelujah Junction (1996).

This is an album of great American Piano works, spanning a century. Evan Mitchell plays these works with great aplomb.

John Luther Adams' ‘Become Desert’ is a remarkable expansion on the ideas he developed for his Pulitzer-winning (and Grammy-winning) work, ‘Become Ocean.’ While not necessarily a "sequel" in the literal sense, the recording certainly shares multiple elements with its predecessor — including, most significantly, the renewal of Adam's creative partnership with conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony. In his 2018 essay for the New York Times, Adams prepares us for listening to Become Desert with a map, of sorts, to help us find the state of "swimming in light" that the music is meant to convey. Along the way, "You begin to feel that this music you had thought was suspended in time is slowly leading you somewhere, pulling you somewhere. It continues upward, rising with inevitable force, like the wind or the light."

Also included in this release is a video which includes a 5.1 surround mix of the recording, as well as a slideshow of desert images (all still photography by John Luther Adams) that loops during playback.

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REVIEW:

His latest symphony shimmers in majestic stillness. Through intricate orchestration, Adams conjures glistening shafts of light, distant rolling thunder, and flickering colors, refracting in the haze of desert heat. The closer one listens, the more is revealed.

– NPR.org (Tom Huizenga)

Organist and pianist James McVinnie makes his PENTATONE debut with Dreamcatcher, an intimate sequence of contemporary classical music centred around the act of imagining. The recording features the organ of St Albans Cathedral—an epoch-making instrument closely associated with legendary organists Peter Hurford and Ralph Downes. The piano segments of the album were recorded on a Steinway D of exceptional beauty at Studio Richter Mahr, co-founded by composer Max Richter and visual artist Yulia Mahr. A mesmerising sonic trip, Dreamcatcher reflects the unique artistic persona of McVinnie, whose mastery of core organ repertoire extends to an extensive body of work written for him by leading contemporary classical composers, as well as collaborations in the world of electronic and experimental music. The album features works by Nico Muhly, Meredith Monk, Laurie Spiegel, John Adams, inti figgis-vizeuta, Gabriella Smith, Giles Swayne, Bryce Dessner & Marcos Balter. The album's title is taken from Marcos Balter’s work of the same name, written in response to the child separation crisis at the US-Mexico border in 2018—“dreamers” being the name given to children separated from their families by the Trump administration’s immigration policy. This record also presents the first ever recording of Giles Swayne's Riff-raff made on the St Albans organ for which the work was written in 1983—McVinnie’s rendition embodying a perfect synergy between the piece’s minimalist roots and the modernist tonal philosophy of this instrument. Through his boundless approach to music making, innovative programming and captivating musicianship, James McVinnie has carved out a unique career as an organist and keyboard player. “McVinnie's Dreamcatcher is a smartly curated album, where a thoughtful artist challenges us — with extraordinary results — to think of the pipe organ as an instrument of our time.” – Tom Huizenga, NPR All Things Considered

Girls of the Golden West is a California opera, telling the story of the Gold Rush not through familiar time-worn myth, but in the words and deeds of real people: in the words of Mark Twain, "the strangest population, the finest population... who ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. "Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars drew from original sources from the Gold Rush era-letters, journals, newspaper articles, and familiar song lyrics-to create the libretto. The composer leads the LA Phil in this recording made in Disney Hall. The aria "Wagon Ride," which features Dav�ne Tines and Julia Bullock (both also Nonesuch artists), is available today. The Los Angeles Times called the opera "glorious and compelling. " After it's San Francisco premiere in 2017 and a production at the Netherlands Opera, Adams revised the opera significantly. Writing about this new, dramatically more compact, version, Mark Swed wrote in the Times, "The Disney concert performance... went straight for the gut. "Girls of the Golden Westfeatures the Los Angeles Master Chorale, long familiar with Adams' choral music, prepared by it's Artistic Director Grant Gershon, and a cast that also includes Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny. Adams says, "Girls of the Golden Westmay be my most personal of all my stage creations. Like the characters in it's story, I too am a kind of California immigrant... For forty years I have hiked those same mountains... And I share the same sense of awe and appreciation that Dame Shirley so perfectly evokes in the opera's very last moment-for the fathomless splendor and 'never-enough-to-be-talked-about sky of California.

This 9-movement work by this Alaskan composer features Percussion Group Cincinnati, a quartet who commissioned and premiered the piece. The musicians are spatially separated so that waves of percussion crisscross around the room often to a hallucinatory effect.

The Living Earth Show's debut album, High Art begins with a blues lick gone awry - a hit cymbal and a pitch-bent guitar - and ends with electronics eating themselves. In between, the Living Earth Show crafts an album that stretches the definitions of 'art' and 'popular' music. High Art navigates the traditions of classical, rock and roll, blues and electronic music, stitching them into to a groundbreaking statement on the past, present and future of American music.

Conceived and realized in partnership with Q2 Music's Peabody award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, Splitting Adams is Alarm Will Sound's tribute to American composer John Adams, and in particular to his works Chamber Symphony (1992) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Presented with commentary tracks from MTC's host Nadia Sirota, Alarm Will Sound's artistic director Alan Pierson, and the composer himself, the podcast-plus-performance conveys a rare sense of interaction for the listener; not only does the music, performed in all its lush detail by the 17 musicians in AWS, capture and connect the long trajectory between the two works, but the commentary also shines a revealing light on the story behind the music.

Peter Oundjian and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tackle two seminal works by the American composer John Adams. Harmonielehre, a symphony in all but name, is an expansive, richly expressive, and often breathtaking work. It takes its title from a 1911 text by Arnold Schoenberg on harmonic theory and evokes the lush soundworld of that composer’s early tonal period. Also heard throughout the score are echoes of Mahler, Wagner, Strauss, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. The piece also takes inspiration from some of Adams’s own strange and surreal dreams. The Doctor Atomic Symphony, based on Adams’s controversial opera Doctor Atomic, focuses on the character of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as preparations are made for the first test of the atomic bomb. Although played without a break, the symphony falls into three distinct sections: ‘The Laboratory’, ‘Panic’, and ‘Trinity’. The symphony’s concluding section takes its title from the name given to the bomb test site by Oppenheimer himself, with reference to a deeply spiritual John Donne sonnet. This poem is set to music at the end of Act I of the opera and here in the symphony the aria’s intense vocal line is performed by solo trumpet. Also featured on the album is John Adams’s energetic fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

R E V I E W:

ADAMS “Doctor Atomic” Symphony. Harmonielehre. Short Ride in a Fast Machine • Peter Oundjian, cond; Royal Scottish Natl O • CHANDOS 5129 (70:15)

This spectacular new release is perhaps the perfect introduction to those who do not already know the music of John Adams, as it contains not only three of his most effective works, but also encompasses a representative overview of the evolution of his compositional style.


The cornerstone of the program is Adams’s monumental Harmonielehre. In Fanfare 35:6, I described it as follows: “John Adams’s 1985 Harmonielehre was and still is a landmark work, not only in the composer’s output, but also within the larger scope of late 20th Century orchestral music. With Harmonielehre, Adams definitively demonstrated that minimalist techniques, previously thought by many to be not only a passing fad, but an emotionally vacuous one at that, could be used to create music of great power and deeply felt human expression.” In this work, Adams integrates these minimalist techniques, some might say clichés, into a musical vocabulary based on the development of strongly expressive melodic material and compelling rhythmic patterns.


Harmonielehre not only created a huge initial sensation when it was premiered in San Francisco in 1985, but has established and maintained a strong foothold in the repertoire ever since. The work is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. With this splendid new release, Harmonielehre , essentially a three-movement symphony, has now been recorded six times and of the five that I have heard, there is not a dud in the lot. These include two offerings by the San Francisco Symphony, the orchestra that commissioned the work: the excellent premiere recording conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79115–2) and a breathtakingly powerful 2011 release conducted by current music director Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media 0053). Other recordings included the muscular and colorful Rattle/City of Birmingham (EMI 5-55051–2) and a solid, serviceable Saint Louis account conducted by David Robertson (available as a digital download from the orchestra’s web page and on iTunes and Amazon). There is also one by the Litauische Philharmonie conducted by Juozas Domarkas (available on two separate Denon releases) which I have not heard.


This new recording can stand toe-to-toe with the best. From the violently pounding hammer strokes of the first movement’s opening E-Minor chords we know this performance by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra presented in the insightful interpretation of its recently appointed music director Peter Oundjian is going to be something special. This impression is carried through the darkly hued and sinister second movement to the ear-tickling colors and dancing rhythmic fragments of the third. The brass is especially powerful, the woodwinds and percussion are vividly colorful, and the whole performance is enhanced by an extraordinarily detailed and impactful recorded soundstage. I have to admit, I was emotionally exhausted at the end of my first listening (but in a good way), so visceral was its overall effect on me.


The disc opens with “Doctor Atomic” Symphony, a work derived from Adams’s opera of the same title. It is not a symphony in the traditional sense; the composer is not concerned with the development of melodic, harmonic, and/or rhythmic ideas. However, this is not to imply that the work is without structure. Quite the contrary, here Adams has synthesized the dramatic and emotional arc of the opera into a concise, tightly organized three-movement work. This is no mere suite of “highlights.” With its pounding timpani, snarling brass, and shrieking strings, the brief first movement immediately calls to mind the music of Edgard Varèse and Carl Ruggles. The second movement is dark, gloomy, and mysterious with a sinister film noir feel. The closing aria, though performed very expressively by trumpeter Huw Morgan, does not quite elicit the same devastating emotional effect as it does in the opera. The vocabulary of the work might strike some as a bit severe, characterized as it is by sharply angular melodies and unapologetically dissonant harmonies, but the emotional impact of the Symphony is undeniable. Clocking in at only four minutes, the disc is filled out with the shortest and fastest Short Ride in a Fast Machine on record. It’s quite a roller-coaster ride.


It’s very early in 2014, but I cannot imagine this superb new release not making my Want List. Highest Recommendation.

FANFARE: Merlin Patterson

Rather than an attempt to depict a reality-based musical view of China, pianist Jenny Lin's program seems designed to show how fantasy tends to mix with reality in many Western composers' attempts to evoke the flavor of a far-off, exotic land that held strong fascination. Of course, this fascination with the Orient in general began centuries ago with Europeans' first awareness of music, styles, food, and art, an awareness that grew to spawn periodic fads and influence fashions. Rulers stocked their palaces with treasures brought from the far east; Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated this attention and many other composers included or tried to include elements of what they thought was oriental "flavor" in some of their works. Most often, however, the result was as much like real Chinese as the Moo Goo Gai Pan from your local takeout.


Lin has chosen a varied and eminently colorful program that includes many unfamiliar works--but no one can complain that this isn't one of the more engaging, intriguing, original, and entertaining piano recordings to come along in the past year. And pianist Lin is a wonderful musician, in total technical command of this long (nearly 80 minutes) and formidable program. And (as long as we're on the subject) she imbues the music with an enticing mix of variously scented spices that truly bring out the unique, if rarely authentic flavors of each composer's creation. As you might expect the pentatonic scale and its permutations are a ubiquitous presence, a feature that may have seemed merely curious a century ago but now comes off as more than a little cartoonish and hackneyed. But it still can be made charming and even pretty, as in Martinu's The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, or sensuous, as in the surprising, Debussyian Lotus Land by Cyril Scott. Morton Gould's Pieces of China is a kind of Pictures at an Exhibition for the Kodak age. The idiom is a hybrid of borrowings from popular music styles (especially jazz) and the Western composer's "do-it-yourself Chinese music fake book"--but it's an absolutely charming condensation of cliché and postcard images, from "The Great Wall" to "Puppets" to "Slow Dance-Lotus".


Other highlights include Anton Arensky's Étude sur un theme chinois Op. 25 No. 3, a great encore piece that whirls and swirls its way through four exciting minutes; Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, loaded to overflowing with open fourths and pentatonic melodies; John Adams' predictably busy-but-going-nowhere evocation of China Gates; and Albert Ketèlby's In a Chinese Temple Garden, complete with gong. The prize for most authentic goes to Alexander Tcherepnin's Five ('Chinese') Concert Études Op. 52. The composer not only lived in the Far East for nearly three years in the 1930s, but he married a young Chinese concert pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming, for whom the etudes were written. Inventive and artful in their use of real Chinese melodies and impressions of Chinese instruments, these pieces have been virtually ignored by pianists but, especially as Lin presents them, they also deserve serious attention by others. Lin's fluid legatos, skillfully calibrated dynamics, and polished rapid fingering technique really shine here.


In the "works that have Chinese names but nothing to do with China" category are Abram Chasins' Rush Hour in Hong Kong, which from the sound of it just as well could be San Francisco or London or any other city; Ferruccio Busoni's Turandots Frauengemach, which is based on the folk tale Turandot, but whose theme is the very English tune "Greensleeves" which, according to the excellent liner notes, Busoni mistakenly thought was Chinese; and Rossini's Petite Polka chinoise, in which amusingly you can hear lots of Chopin but virtually no chinoiserie. Lin plays this with knowing humor and understated flair.


Lin's Steinway benefits from an acoustic that complements and naturally captures its full range and character, from robust lows to ringing highs. This is a release that every piano enthusiast should own. Those looking for a quirky but unfailingly delightful visit to China will enjoy it too. [7/1/2000]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

This special box contains all four of Ralph van Raat's Naxos recordings plus an exclusive interview CD which includes music selected by Ralph specifically for this boxed set. Also on this bonus CD, Ralph speaks about his musical choices for the set, as well as his own playing in an exclusive interview with Naxos Classical Music Spotlight's very own Raymond Bisha. Featured composers include: Tavener, Adams, Rzewski, Lindberg, Takemitsu, Ives, Bolcom, Messiaen, and more. 1. Adams, J.: Piano Music (Complete) 2. Rzewski, F.: People United will never be Defeated (The) (Van Raat) 3. Tavener: Piano Works 4. Lindberg, M.: Piano Music (Van Raat) - Klavierstuck / Play I / Jubilees / Twine / Etudes 5. Artist Profile Series - Van Raat, Ralph

When asked about three of his signature orchestral works — the Grammy-winning Become Ocean, its sequel Become Desert, and the original source Become River (previously unreleased as an official recording until now) — composer John Luther Adams refers to them collectively as “a trilogy that I never set out to write.” Become River, composed for chamber orchestra, was the first of the three, although it began while Adams was working on Become Ocean for the Seattle Symphony. “Steven Schick and I were having dinner together,” Adams recalls, “and I went on at length about the music I’d begun to imagine. ‘So you’re already composing a symphonic ocean,’ Steve said. ‘Maybe for a smaller orchestra you could go ahead and compose that river in delta.’ He had me, and I knew it. Within a week I’d begun work on Become River.” Collected here for the first time, with newly remastered versions of Become Ocean and Become Desert by acclaimed engineer Nathaniel Reichman, The Become Trilogy pays tribute to a magical partnership between Adams, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the renowned Seattle Symphony. As a whole, the music speaks both to the meditative solace of solitude, and the universally shared experience of living, giving and interacting as a citizen of the world.

Oxalys and the New World': in it's latest CD recording, Oxalys delves into American masterpieces for chamber music ensemble. From Pulitzer Prize laureate Aaron Copland with his nature fresco Appalachian spring to Minimal Music icon John Adams' mythical Shaker Loops and jazz icon Wynton Marsalis' funky and groovin' Meeelaan. Three unknown facets of a flourishing and inspiring musical culture, as always virtuosically captured by Oxalys, the jewel of our Belgian chamber music ensembles.

John Adams’ City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with the composer himself calling it ‘an imaginary film score’, while Fearful Symmetries exemplifies his steamroller motor rhythms. The album ends with a capricious ‘Spider Dance’ of memorable rhythmic drive – a work dedicated to Marin Alsop who leads the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in these performances.

REVIEWS:

Marin Alsop has been quietly championing John Adams abroad—and now at the Met Opera conducting his El Nino— for decades. A new Naxos recording with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra demonstrates her flair and feeling for his distinctive idiom. City Noir, premiered by the LA Phil in 2009, is a vivid, multi-textured score inspired by mid-20th century urban California. With its jazz inflections and brooding canvases, the debt to the City of Angels and film noir are equally clear. This is the work’s third recording but well worth acquiring for Alsop’s theatrical bite and detailed interpretation. Punchier than Robertson and livelier than Dudamel (though Robertson’s ravishing sonics make for essential listening), she holds the attention with a sure eye for the work’s architectural twists and turns. The companion piece is Fearful Symmetries from 1988, one of Adams’s most infectious scores and yet only receiving its second outing on disc. Alsop takes the chugging basic pulse a tad faster than the composer’s own recording without sacrificing any of the infinite variety to be found in Adams’s orchestral details. It’s a joyous, carefree work and beautifully recorded. The same goes for the recorded premiere of Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance. Happily rehabilitated after getting the chop from Girls of the Golden West, this six-minute essay in wriggling cross rhythms is laced with sardonic wit.

-- Musical America (Clive Paget)

John Adams’s City Noir has been pretty well represented on disc in the fifteen years since its 2009 premiere: Marin Alsop’s new recording of the score with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony is the work’s fourth. In general, this celebration of the city of Los Angeles benefits from her approach. It’s swift and characterful...its structure emerges nicely intact in Alsop’s hands. The central “The Song is for You” boasts a series of idiomatic solos (especially from alto saxophone and trombone), at times seeming to channel Gershwin. [The] ORF’s woodwinds, trumpets, and jazz drummer really shine here. By about any measure, this is some brash and chill Adams.

Even more welcome is the pairing’s account of Fearful Symmetries, a half-hour-long study in rhythm and texture that’s only been recorded once before. Granted, that earlier release was led by the composer and it’s aged well. But Alsop’s new take is downright invigorating. The conductor brings a strong sense of drive to the music, drawing out a beautiful blend of colors – from invitingly swooning saxophone quartet playing to unexpected synthesizer colors – from her forces. What’s more, hers is a reading that manages to vigorously illuminate the sophistication of Adams’s compositional language, circa 1988. It’s a keeper.

-- The Arts Fuse