This sequel to the Gramophone Award-nominated Americascapes album (ODE 1396-2) by the Basque National Orchestra and Robert Trevino is a thrilling and a deeply personal journey into the music of three American composers. All three composers had very unique aesthetic worlds and with two of the composers conductor Robert Trevino also had direct artistic collaboration. Where my first 'Americascapes' album looked at lesser-known major American works that had influenced European composers (rather than the other way around), for this follow-up, I went back to a more basic thought - "What is America?". Since America is many things to millions of people, I realise that my question had to mean, "What is America to me? (...) Selecting the composers for this American Opus took well over a year. Yet I eventually refined the list to these three composers, with all of whom I feel a close kinship and all of whom are deeply meaningful to me. Two of them I even had a direct artistic relationship with. As a group, they also embody some of the diversity and the radically different aesthetics that thrive in the Americas." (Robert Trevino)

REVIEW:

The hunt for buried treasure is quite an industry these days, but coming up with gold is far from guaranteed. No problem, it appears, for Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra. American Opus is the sequel to 2021’s excellent Americascapes (Ondine ODE 1396-2) and once again the Mexican-American conductor demonstrates a gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff. With the Revueltas set beside the Crumb and the Walker, Americascapes Volume 2 is a complex, thoroughly satisfying national portrait.

— Limelight

"Echos de la Terre," the first album with Cypres by the highly promising Trio O3, is intended as an aural journey into the immensity and immeasurability of the world around us. Each composition resonates with one of the fundamental elements present in nature. However, the element earth, mentioned in the title of the CD, is not directly linked to any of the four pieces. Rather, it is light (Fiorini) that appears as a crucial element alongside air (Kõrvits), fire (Saariaho), and water (Crumb).

Interpreting these complex works as if they were their mother tongue, Lydie Thonnard, Eugénie Defraigne, and Lena Kollmeier, thanks to their mastery of unconventional playing techniques, bring them to life and fuse their distinct instrumental voices into a harmonious whole, lavishing the listener with unexpected pleasures and profound emotions.

Bridge Records announces the release of Volume 21 the Complete Crumb Edition, a monumental recording project begun in 1982, and completed 42 years later with this final installment. The Grammy award-winning Crumb series documents the late American composer's complete catalog of works, spanning Crumb's seventy-five year compositional career. Project producer David Starobin writes that “the series benefited tremendously from George's participation in the recording and post-production of these documents.” This last volume includes compositions from the beginning, middle, and end of Crumb’s career and features the world premiere recording of the composer's penultimate composition, the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (2020), performed by Ensemble 20/21 of the Curtis Institute of Music. The record also includes Crumb's second acknowledged composition, the Sonata for Solo Violoncello (1955), performed by cellist Timothy Eddy, as well as two performances of Crumb's piano solo, Processional (1983), played by pianists Gilbert Kalish (keyboard version) and Marcantonio Barone (alternate version with extended piano effects).

From the ensemble: The sad news of George Crumb’s death was announced on 6 February 2022, shortly after these recordings from a concert in Holland in 1978 were discovered in the KRO-NCRV archives in Hilversum. They included the first European performance of Dream Sequence (1976), one of his most beautiful and original compositions. George was always a pleasure to work with, highly professional, considerate, open to suggestions and relaxed. On one fraught occasion, when Rohan’s cello mysteriously disappeared for several hours, making rehearsal impossible, we would have expected many composers to throw a tantrum (!) but not George. He remained completely calm and slightly amused by the ensuing Tati-esque comédie. He was also a master calligrapher. His scores, all hand-drawn, are works of art, the notation often original, and models of musical practicality. We offer these three recordings from long ago in tribute and gratitude to a remarkable musician, composer and friend.

Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition reaches Volume 20 with the first complete recording of the great American composer's recently completed Metamorphoses cycle. The "20 Fantasy Pieces After Celebrated Paintings" are Crumb's "Pictures at an Exhibition"- aural interpretations of famous paintings from our recent past including works by Picasso, van Gogh, Chagall, and Dali. Critic David Hurwitz writes: "Bridge's decision to embark on a complete edition of George Crumb's music remains one of the most significant recording projects currently in progress, as well as one of the most artistically successful."

Josefa Schmidt presents the very interesting piano programme Dream Images, a musical combination with the composers Debussy, Scriabin, Crumb, Ravel and Schmidt. Josefa Schmidt (*1998 in Stuttgart, Germany) is prize winner of several competitions such as the International Euregio Piano Award, the Lions Club Competition, the international SIMW Award, the International Chamber Music Campus Weikersheim, the Carl Bechstein Competition Berlin and was a finalist of the International Piano Competition Concours Merci, Maestro in Brussels. In 2019 Josefa received the TONALi Prize of Creativity at TONALi Piano Competition. She is a scholarship holder of the foundations Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, Yamaha Foundation, Foundation Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Hannover, Harald Genzmer Foundation and the Jeunesses Musicales. She performed at reknowed festivals such as the Rheingau Musikfestival, the Klangbruckenfestival and the Festival Momentum Stolberg as well as in France (Paris), Austria, Italy and numerous cities in Germany. Concerts were broadcast on the radio.

“A Riveting Piano Recital” (The New York Times, 2017) David Greilsammer’s new album venture, Labyrinth, is a project that he has been developing since 2017 in a number of concerts given in New York, at the Ravinia Festival, Illinois, in Lancaster and Sheffield, and at the Flagey in Brussels. The fascinated listener can follow this trail here, while keeping hold of the thread and following the light, encountering composers both well and less well known, from every period and style, with whole works and ephemeral fragments cunningly interwoven. While reconnoitering music by Beethoven, Janácek, Satie and Bach, we also have the surprise of a first world performance of Repetition Blindness by Ofer Pelz – specially commissioned for the program – and of a piano arrangement by Jonathan Keren of Chaos by Jean-Féry Rebel (also a first performance) as well as George Crumb’s mesmeric Magic Circle of Infinity.

Volume 18 of Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition features premiere recordings of two recent works ("The Yellow Moon of Andalusia" and "Yesteryear") as well the premiere recording of the recently revised version of a Crumb classic, "Celestial Mechanics". Crumb returns to his favorite poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, for "The Yellow Moon of Andalusia", six settings of English translations of Lorca's work. The performance features the work's dedicatees, the brilliant American soprano Tony Arnold, and the superb pianist, Marcantonio Barone. Mr. Barone follows with Crumb's 'Thelonious Monk variations' for solo piano, "Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik". Crumb was never satisfied with the ending of "Celestial Mechanics" and re-wrote it in 2012, recorded here for the first time. "Yesteryear" is a vocalise for soprano and three players, dedicated to Ms. Arnold. Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer George Crumb, now in his 88th year, continues to compose highly expressive, colorful and dramatic music. This new recording is a must-hear for all fans of a unique voice in contemporary music.

Voices From The Morning Of The Earth: A Cycle of American Songs from North and South, East and West (2008) is the sixth of seven American Songbooks that occupied George Crumb for most of the millennium’s opening decade. This recording (Volume 17 of Bridge's Crumb Edition) completes Bridge's cycle of Crumb's American Songbooks. The seven songbooks are approximately five hours in length, and constitute George Crumb's magnum opus. Also on this CD is Crumb's Idyll for the Misbegotten. The composer writes that “flute and drum are to me those instruments which most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. I have suggested that ideally (even if impractically) my Idyll should be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” The Sleeper with words by Edgar Allan Poe, transforms Poe's lugubrious meditation on a dead beloved (“Soft may the worms about her creep!”) into a haunting ode to a woman slumbering beneath the “mystic moon.”