INFINITE BLUE

Contemporary art song is alive and well in the hands of soprano Polly Butler Cornelius and the team she has gathered for Wild Songs, a song recital as suitable for an environmental conscious-�ness-raising event as for the salon. Drawing on impassioned pleas and the enigmatic nature-centered poetry of Emily Dickinson these powerful, lyrical songs charm and chasten.

Violinist and composer Cornelius Dufallo began his "Journaling" concert series in 2009 as a way to document the work of living composers and contribute to a repertoire of 21st century violin music. In 2012, Innova Recordings released Journaling, the first album created out of these concerts and now comes teh follow-up, Journaling 2. Bringing together elements of electronics, extended techniques, chance techniques, and digital interactivity, the pieces here were composed by Kinan Azmeh, Guy Barash, Missy Mazzoli, Raven Chacon, Armando Bayolo, and Dufallo himself. Azme's "How Many Would It Take"draws inspiration from the composer's long visit to his home country of Syria; Bayolo's "Tisch" takes off from Bach's "Toccata in F Major"; and Dufallo's "Reverie" expresses the unpredictable and often contradictory thoughts encountered in dreams. For the past two decades, Cornelius Dufallo has performed and promoted new music, as a soloist and as a collaborator. Dufallo has been a member of several notable ensembles, including the Flux quartet, Ne(x)tworks, and ETHEL. He currently performs as a member of the Secret Quartet. In the performance of his own work, Dufallo was described as "an intensely introspective thinker who is committed to visual communication as he is to the purely musical" by the Washington Post. His work with the musical technology illustrates "how much amplification can expand the isntrument's palette. Far from robbing the violin of its beauty, electronics add textural elements and graduations of timbre that the acoustic instrument cannot approximate" (The New York Times).