For over a decade, the Cassatt String Quartet has collaborated with the composer Gerald Cohen. “Telling stories through music is central to all I do as a composer and performer – most explicitly in my operas and vocal works, but also in purely instrumental works such as those on this album,” said Gerald Cohen. “This album is the culmination of the voyage I have taken with the Cassatt String Quartet during the past decade. I will always be grateful for the collaboration with these wonderful colleagues.”

Breathing – Remembering – Dissolving is a collaborative record bringing together a collection of contemporary experimental musical perspectives that all share a common interest: challenging the idea of what the human is in a musical performance. Composers, Clara Allison, Seán Ó Dálaigh, Julie Herndon, Hassan Estakhrian, Manuel Pessôa de Lima, and Marcel Zaes, contribute unique responses to themes we typically associate with being human, the body, and the larger aspects of sociality in/with/around humans. The project collects six works by composers of various backgrounds, gender and racial identities, and diverse musical styles, coming from the San Francisco Bay Area, United States, Latin America, and Europe. Each original work was created specifically for the Kuku-ruz Quartet while in residence in the Bay Area.

Based in Switzerland, the Kukuruz Quartet— 4 pianists on 4 pianos — is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, all trained in disparate musical fields: Simone Keller is a versatile pianist in contemporary and classical music, Philip Bartels is an exper-imental theater stage director, Duri Collenberg studied composition in Amsterdam, and Lukas Rickli has broad experience in improvi-sation. They are equally at home on theater stages, concert halls, clubs, bars, office buildings, and studios.The ensemble was founded in 2014 in a corn field — Kukuruz means “corn” in several languages. These four pianists were first seen and heard making their contribution to a production by musician and theater director Ruedi Häusermann at the Zurich Schauspiel-haus. From the outset, the group has been engaged with classical music, jazz, and improvisation. This album is sponsored by Innova Recordings and American Composers Forum’s Bay Area Pilot program with support from Pro Hel-vetica and the Stanford Department of Music.

Pianist and composer Mike Garson is perhaps best known for his longstanding musical relationship with David Bowie, which began in 1972. He made his mark on numerous Bowie albums and traveled thousands of miles on tours spanning more than four decades, including Bowie’s first and last performances in the U.S. When classical pianist Danny Holt first heard Mike Garson’s music, it was as if it reached out of his stereo speakers and grabbed him. Holt and Garson first crossed paths in 2004 when Holt was a graduate student at CalArts. The two hit it off, and Garson even helped produce Danny’s Fast Jump album, also released through innova. Garson and Holt developed a musical kinship, and that relationship led them to this album, Piano Music of Mike Garson. Mike Garson and Danny Holt share a voracious appetite for new music and monster piano technique. Garson developed a compositional process that favored first-take improvisational works composed in real-time with the help of a Yamaha Disklavier. Holt’s playing and Garson’s music both have a sense of immediacy, aliveness, and being ‘on the edge.’ All of this comes together to form a perfect pairing in this first-ever album of Mike Garson’s solo piano works, a project that survived both Garson’s home burning to the ground in a 2018 wildfire, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Danny Holt has been called “the classical music equivalent of an extreme sports athlete” (The Record) and Gramophone called his Fast Jump album (innova Recordings, 2009) “a compelling showcase for Holt’s innate virtuosity and gregarious temperament.” Known as a champion of adventurous new music, Holt has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Blue Man Group, Bang on a Can All-Stars, California EAR Unit, and the Calder Quartet, among others.

REVIEW:

Mike Garson may be best known for his extensive collaborations with David Bowie on disc and in concert, yet his credentials as pianist, composer, and arranger embrace a wide stylistic scope. You can’t really pinpoint his virtuosity within any genre, because he interweaves classical, jazz, and pop traditions organically and fluidly. What is more, he evolved a technique blurring improvisation and composition, where he would improvise fully-formed works, recording directly onto a Yamaha Disklavier, bypassing the notation process. He’d usually record at slightly slower tempos, and then use the Disklavier’s technology to play the pieces back faster. Over a period of about 10 years, Garson amassed around 3200 piano pieces this way, of which roughly one out of ten was a “keeper”.

Garson often takes his cue from preexisting pieces. The nearly eight-and-a-half-minute 3X18 uses Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit as a jumping off point, although some of the compound two-handed arpeggios border on Sorabji-like atonality. Homage to Chopin and Godowsky is a brilliant, freewheeling fantasia inspired by Godowsky’s transcription of Chopin’s C major Op. 10 No. 1 Etude, and may be more dazzlingly difficult to play.

Imagine a David Bowie ballad effortlessly merged with a Fauré Nocturne, and you’ve got Garson’s Nocturne in D-flat. Although the Hommage to Ligeti mirrors that composer’s restless rhythmic asymmetry and use of registers, the music’s rhapsodic lyrical qualities are pure Mike Garson. Actually, Garson’s Tribute to Keith Emerson sounds more authentically “Ligeti-like”, even though it’s superficially rooted in the opening of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus.

The point is that Garson’s magpie temperament and eclectic outreach never yields formulaic or clichéd results. There’s a consistent freshness to his inventiveness, and he rarely repeats himself. You can’t say that about many contemporary composers who write a lot for the piano.

Along with his brilliant technique, Danny Holt is able to imbue each composition with a distinct character. He gets exactly the right rhythmic feeling for jazz and pop oriented works, yet brings a wide dynamic range and sophisticated voicing to more complex selections. It would be interesting to hear Garson’s original Disklavier renditions of the 17 pieces selected for this release, yet one would miss the imprint of Holt’s own musicality and multi-leveled, even transcendent virtuosity. Holt provides detailed notes about the process of learning, assimilating, and recording this music under the composer’s supervision. A major and, needless to say, unique piano release, not to be missed.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)

Originally from London but based in Los Angeles and New York, Danielle Eva Schwob is a “notable cross-genre composer” (The New Yorker) who writes concert works, experimental electro-rock and film scores. Danielle’s debut album as a composer in the classical realm, Out of the Tunnel, is an artful collection mixed by Grammy nominee Ryan Streber and Grammy-winners Silas Brown and Marc Urselli. Out of the Tunnel presents the first recordings of nine compositions, each as contemporary as it is alluring. The chamber music Danielle has composed is often inspired by nature and other art, such as painting. On Out of the Tunnel, there is a striking triptych for solo violin, solo cello and solo piano (commissioned by the American Composers Forum): “Reflections on Francis Bacon,” “Reflections on Lucian Freud” and “Reflections on David Hockney,” the title subjects being British painters who often socialized together and motivated each other. Similarly, many of the album’s performers are close colleagues of the composer, the relationships cultivated over years working alongside each other on stage and in the studio. The album’s titular string quartet, the thrilling “Out of the Tunnel,” was commissioned from Danielle jointly by New Music USA and the Grammy-nominated performing ensemble on the album: PUBLIQuartet, whose members the composer knows well. Harpist Ashley Johnson, who performs several pieces on the album, has a long collaborative history with Danielle, and violinist Jennifer Choi has also played with Danielle in various contexts, including on DELANILA’S Overloaded album.

Electrocosmia is a daring exploration of electroacoustic music for solo piano that finds pianist Peng-Chian Chen diving head first into musical worlds that are at times explosive and at others mercurial and enigmatic. Much of this album finds Chen striking a balance between acoustic and electronic sound. Whether that be using an electronic keyboard and an acoustic piano simultaneously, interweaving fixed media and live performance, or using signal processing to experiment with sound being created in the moment. Featuring works by Cindy Cox, Pierre Chavet, Elanie Lillios, and Peter Van Zandt Lane, Electrocosmia brings new energy to keyboard music being written and performed today. Each piece contributes to a growing landscape of electroacoustic concert works that defy listeners expectations and expand what concert music can mean.

Trailblazing a path for the carillon in the 21st Century, Tiffany Ng commands towers of bells that ring across great distances. On Dark Matters, Ng masterfully helms the carillon works of composer Stephen Rush. These works and Ng’s playing possess a kind of magical cacophony that is in equal parts powerful, intimate, and entrancing. Since Stephen Rush’s debut carillon work Three Etudes reshaped the soundscape of carillon composition in 1987, he has steadily fashioned new campanological sounds in partnership with trailblazing carillonists like Margo Halsted and Neil Thornock. When Halsted premiered Six Treatments for Carillon in 2002, they launched a tradition of carillon with live electronics at the University of Michigan that flourishes to this day. In 2013, Dark Matters invited Rush to attend to time, space, and chance on a vast scale. Through the visceral experience of music, movement, and space, this piece leads into the unknown, questioning the origin of life, coincidence and inevitability, macro and micro, the stars and the elements, the instant and the eternal. As an oeuvre, Rush’s carillon music is singular in style, compelling in its driving rhythmic effects, and pushes the technical boundaries of the instrument while remaining idiomatically true to it. Ng recorded this album in collaboration with Rush, Jason Corey, Roger Arnett, Jessica Glynn, and Matias Vilaplana. A “virtuoso” (HKSNA) in command of a range of expression from “eerie sonance” (Diapason) to “jumpy athleticism” (Chicago Classical Review), Tiffany K. Ng, Ph.D., is assistant professor of music and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

From Gothic horror to ghostly whispers to Boschian excesses, Anne LeBaron’s music evokes fantastical worlds tempered by excavations of Bach-tinged ruins. Ramping things up, she embellishes Gertrude Stein’s ruminations on money with call bells and ratchets to materialize cash registers in sound, followed by a musical depiction of a fiery sandwich. Topping it all off, she lifts all the words on the spines of volumes forming the first Oxford English Dictionary, transforming them into a whirlwind of utterances punctuated by the letter A, Hobbit, Walrus, and Zythum. Unearthly Delights, a collection of chamber and solo works from the past decade, begins with the unearthly power of the crack in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. As depicted in the initial work, Fissure, the crack widens with renderings of a door harp recording in a haunted mansion blended with a hairbrush strumming piano strings. Meanwhile, the loosely sketched characters Roderick and Madeline play their piano and violin amid gathering doom. With its hellish hedonistic excesses, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, jump-started Julie’s Garden of Unearthly Delights. Square-waved multiphonic bassoon tremolos, frogs singing in Julie’s garden, and two live bassoons blast away in the night. Harp and violin solos calm things down. Gertrude Stein questions the role of money; one bassoon returns to conjure a Dammit to Hell sandwich, and the alchemical creation of birds by an Owl-Woman is invoked in a piano solo. A – Zythum tears through bizarre words and even non-words to offer a distinctive history of the OED. Poem for Doreen returns, the languid portrait of a friend performed by two different harpists.

The “King of Instruments,” the pipe organ, has a long and storied history. Its long association with the church has been a source of strength but also, in recent times, led to its seeming neglect by contemporary concert composers. Organon Novus is a monumental effort to bring together this hidden slice of American music. Clocking in at over three hours of music, and running the gamut from Adler to Zorn, it includes 25 works from the past 25 years by 25 celebrated composers – composers not often associated with their organ oeuvre. With 8,565 pipes in 132 ranks available to them, the 1928 E.M. Skinner symphonic organ in Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago is no modest resource for a composer’s imagination (not to mention a player’s active limbs). Randall Harlow, in this marathon tour de force, reaches them all. Compositional approaches range from the sonic tapestries of Thomas and Zorn, to the linear complexity of Adler and Mamlok; from the full-bodied symphonic approaches of Ran and Tower, to the eclectic and unique voices of Lang, Johnson, Lucier and Wolff. The album concludes with the premiere of Aaron Travers’ monumental Barlow Prize work, Exodus. Exploring the extremes of what is possible on the organ, the work offers a way forward for the instrument in contemporary art music, an exit from the common modern associations of the organ with churches and staid liturgical Gebrauchsmusik. Organon, “the device”: the original Greek word for the pipe organ from the third century BCE. Novus, “the new.” From its beginnings as a noise maker to its apotheosis as a contrapuntal keyboard-controlled orchestra, all coupled with the acoustic and architecture of its location, the organ can be many things. This musical snapshot is both a chronicle and a revelation.

Here I Stand is the confident debut album of iSing Silicon Valley, the international-award-winning girls’ choir based in Silicon Valley, California. Here I Stand celebrates iSing’s focus on the power of girls to change the world as they raise their 200+ voices in remembrance, in strength, and in the pure, shared delight of coming together to sing. The album opens with a transcendent performance of the treble-voice version of ?riks Ešenvalds’ soaring, dreamlike work for solo voice and chorus, Only in Sleep. The pro-gram includes some of the stunning works commissioned by iSing during its first six seasons, with themes ranging from social justice, to individual growth and collective power. Among these: Never Shall I Forget, Adam Schoenberg’s haunting setting for treble voices, string quartet and percussion of excerpts from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night; Daniel Elder’s arrangements for iSing of his powerful commentary on gun violence, 365, and of In Your Light, his musical setting one of Rumi’s most ecstatic poems. Given first life on the concert stage and on this recording by iSing’s bright young singers, these commissions and commissioned arrangements make exciting, relevant additions to the repertoire for treble voices, here given definitive, top-notch renditions. The album artwork also includes original illustrations by a young choir alumna; together the package puts girls’ inspiring talents center stage in heartwarming fashion. Listeners, prepare to be moved by the breadth of performance of iSing girls: The musical finesse and the stunning vocal blend of iSing’s elite choirs; the clarity of expression of the soloists; and — on the later tracks of the album — the lovely ensemble sound of younger iSing girls ranging in age from 7 to 12.

“by moonlight isn’t just a collection of works - it also provides a certain overview of my compositional life,” says Jeremy Beck. Bringing together music of his present and past, this selection of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music opens a window into Beck’s sound world. From the celebratory Concertino for two cellos and strings to the pensive Serenade for orchestra, Beck’s musical language is direct and distinctly American. His music embraces a continuum of tonal compositional thought that organically embodies previous developments while moving forward in his own individual style. Beck’s music has been called “... forceful and expressive. ... concise in structure and generous in tonal language, savoring both the dramatic and the poetic” (Gramophone, 2013), while the critic Joshua Kosman has noted that “...novelty isn’t the only thing music can provide, and the moody expressiveness of Beck’s writing is its own reward.” (SF Gate, 2013). Through his music – by turns confident and vulnerable, outgoing and intimate – composer Jeremy Beck reaches out to the world, sharing his artistic vision of the beauty, struggle, and thoughtful wonder that reflects part of our human experience.

In an interview with the Hong Kong website Interlude, Ilari Kaila said, “I hope to never write music that doesn’t feel personal.” The Finnish-born composer was talking, on that occasion, specifically about The Bells Bow Down (Kellojen kumarrus), a single-movement work for piano quintet composed in memory of his friend, pianist Hanna Sarvala. But as each of the works here shows, Kaila’s vision is intensely personal, as is his musical language and style. Much of his work is shaped by extra-musical stimulus: his grief for a lost friend; visual and aural images celebrating the natural world; a love of the (sometimes multilingual) punning title. He has a strong awareness of music from outside the Western classical canon; he creates striking harmonic effects from within the diatonic system, and he has a keen ear for subtle gradations of sound, especially those made possible by the string family.—Gordon Kerry, excerpted from the liner notes. Ilari Kaila (b. 1978) is a Finnish-American composer who has written chamber, orchestral, vocal, and stage music. His music has been described as “haunting”, “intriguing”, “engaging ... soulful” (The New York Times), “powerfully resonating” (Helsingin Sanomat), and “melodically euphoric” (Rondo Classic). Kaila received his PhD in Music Composition in 2011 from Stony Brook University, New York, having previously studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Between 2011 and 2014, he taught at Columbia University and as a teaching artist with the New York Philharmonic, before moving to Hong Kong where he currently works as Composer-in-Residence on the faculty of the School of Humanities at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

For more than 16 years, Quey [“Kway”] Percussion Duo (QPD) has dazzled audiences worldwide with their unmistakable style that blends traditions of Western percussion, “world,” contemporary, classical, and popular music to create colorful sound worlds that often place focus on interlocking counterpoint and musical multi-tasking. In other words, breathtaking and virtuosic.This recording is a small selection of the many works written for the duo over the past 16 years, which have been created through three large com-mission contests and by working directly with composers. Two of the titles represented on the recording are winning compositions from the group’s composition contests in 2005 (In the History of Man) and 2012 (Rhapsody for Vibraphone and Marimba). In addition, many works composed by duo member Gene Koshinski were written specifically for QPD, two of which are represented here on this album. The most prominent composition is the double percussion concerto entitled, soniChroma, recorded here with full orchestra. As the title suggests, soniChroma (meaning “sound color”), is focused on creating unique sonic and instrumental combinations. This can be seen throughout the orches-tra, but prominently in the large percussion solo setup which contains over 80 instruments, including skins, metals, woods, strings (guitars), non-Western instruments, and found objects. The solo parts reflect the diverse performance demands of the 21st Century percussionist, ranging from classical percussionists, drum set players, keyboard soloists, contemporary multi-percussionists, and world music performers. Comprised of members Gene Koshinski and Tim Broscious, Duluth-based QPD has performed in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Jordan, the UK, and extensively throughout the US. They have worked with music festivals, art galleries, chamber music series’, conventions (including 4 PASIC appearances), professional orchestras, and have engaged in more than 50 university residencies worldwide. They also can be heard in the score of the award winning short film The Passage, which was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018.

Get ready for revelation! Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite is an epic jazz opera spanning four continents and five centuries. The opera is a tribute to the resistance of migrants to the destruction of ecologies, economies, and cultures unleashed by slavery, conquest, and colonization- in short, a history of capitalism from the point of view of women warriors from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. A trinity of revolutionary women converge to tell stories of migration, singing a Sermon on the Mount to bring down Babylon. The plot of Mirror Butterfly is inspired by The Story of the Sword, a Mayan parable shared with us by the Zapatista autonomous schools. The story symbolizes the centuries-long Mayan resistance to the conquest and Indigenous genocide through avatars of a tree, a stone, and water. In their story, a sword (representing the conquest) cuts down a tree (Mayan society). The tree transforms into a rock, which is underground and still; but the sword hacks at it and shatters it, though not without damage. Finally, the stone transforms into water, which the sword is unable to resist. The sword rusts and withers away in this eternal elemental. The water symbolizes the flourishing grassroots-organizing of indigenous communities and their allies in contemporary Mexico. The lesson of the tale is that we shall live to see an indigenous-centric Mexico and, indeed, an entire world.

Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles is based on Wole Soyinka’s Twelve Canticles for the Zealot (2002)- a strangely beautiful and terrifying look into the minds of fanatics. Seven of these poems form the bulk of the libretto, interwoven with excerpts from Soyinka’s plays, interviews, lectures and speeches; they reflect his upbringing in an environment of tolerance and condemn the current climate of intolerance, bigotry, and violence. The result is a concert-length choral ‘oratorio’ for clarinet, string quartet, and 24-voice choir, commissioned and performed by The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally and winner of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. Soyinka’s texts and McLoskey’s responses are universal pleas for peace and tolerance, yet they force us to look into the mirror and recognize the thin line between devotion and intolerance, zealotry and radicalism- themes that dominate our public discourse every day. Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African American recipient of the award. Throughout the set of canticles, Soyinka makes universal pleas for peace from multiple languages and religious cultures. Seven of these poems form the core of the libretto of Zealot Canticles. Interwoven with these poems are excerpts from Soyinka’s book The Man Died, his play Madmen and Specialists, and interviews, lectures, and speeches reflecting on his upbringing in an environment of tolerance, and condemning the current climate of intolerance, bigotry and violence.

When violinist Mary Rowell asked Rick Baitz to write a piece for her quartet, what emerged was Chthonic Dances, a mashup of rhythms, patterns and harmonies gleaned from his early years living in Brazil and South Africa. Rick says: “The healing energy of dance is a constant wherever I’ve lived. From South African township music to Brazilian samba, the juxtaposition of dance and story-telling creates catharsis- and if you’re down, the act of dancing your pain is a force in transcending it. So the dance of chthonic spirits brings out their complement, the spirits of light.” The New York Times described it as “a bright-hued, vigorously melodic score,” and it opens his new innova album, Into Light. ‘Hall of Mirrors’ is also permeated with the spirits of light and groove, merging the tribal with the computerized, employing mbiras, windwands, table, and electronics, which refract the instruments into processed and transformed versions of themselves. Kind of like when you go into a funhouse and see a bizarro reflection of yourself. Commissioned by the Juilliard School, ‘Hall of Mirrors’ is both earthbound and celestial, dance-like and trance-like, with an underlying sense of rhythmic slight-of-hand and a prevalent- but at times ambiguous- drone. The final piece on the album, ‘Into Light,’ dates back to 1984, but philosophically it’s in the same ballpark as the others. Rick thinks of it as both a dance and a meditation; a voyage through light and darkness with a lot of harmonic and rhythmic trickery along the way.

David Kechley’s latest album of orchestra music is a lot easier to listen to than pronounce. It draws from far flung parts of the world, and historical origins, and brings them into a grand compelling vision. The album features two large scale orchestra works recorded with dazzling clarity by the Sudeten Filharmonie in a small Polish town, Walbrzych (most recently in the news for supposedly being the subterranean hiding place of the infamous Nazi gold train.) The first work, ‘Karasuma: A Fast Funk for Orchestra,’ started life as a classroom exercise at the Donisha Women’s College in Kyoto, Japan, here Kechley demonstrated how acoustic musical fragments could be combined in various ways by computer. The work was so successful it was expanded and premiered by the Boston Pops in 1993. The other major work on the album is a symphony exploring various aspects of dreams, ‘Wakeful Visions/ Moonless Dreams.’ Each of the four movements is associated with literary references; from the Old Testament, a haiku by Buson, the Witches’ scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and musings on remembrance by Marcel Proust. David Kechley recently retired from teaching at Williams College, Massachussetts. Taken as a whole this is a record of an expansive imagination and an intercontinental achievement.

American Canvas is a tour de force of flute cello and piano trio repertoire featuring the premiere recordings of four powerful works by some of today’s most celebrated American composers. Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Higdon and Shulamit Ran, Andrea Clearfield, and Zhou Tian embrace a variety of sources from visual art, literature, and nature, telling musical stories in a pyrotechnic display of color and brushwork, an eerie nocturne on a lake, a vivid intoxication by the moon, a thrill ride in medieval Spain. The acclaimed Dolce Suono Trio conveys the diverse sonic landscapes, nuanced timbres, and emotional experiences with inimitable virtuosity and passion. Dolce Suono Trio, “one of the most dynamic groups in the US” (The Huffington Post), includes flutist Mimi Stillman, cellist Nathan Vickery, and pianost Charles Ambramovic. Soprano Lucy Shelton and cellists Gabriel Cabezas and Alexis Pia Gerlach complete the album. The trio has enthralled audiences with its programs spanning Haydn trios to its own commissions at prestigious venues including the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York’s Symphony Space, Brooklyn’s Roulette, and Cornell University.

A new recording of world premieres addressing a topic of our national discourse: diaspora. If There Were Water, from Philadelphia’s 2017 Grammy-nominated choir, The Crossing, is a testament to the expressive range of the human voice. These two strikingly diverse, yet equally compelling unaccompanied compositions were commissioned for The Crossing’s Month of Moderns festival and premiered in June 2017. Drawing from literary and historic sources, the works are highly personal reflections that speak with clarity to contemporary concerns of displacement, while weaving together past and present. In Crossings Cycle, Greek composer Stratis Minakakis creates a visceral musical response to the experience of observing Syrian refugees on the Isle of Lesbos. ‘un/bodying/s’ by composer Gregory W. Brown explores the history of the displaced populations of Quabbin, the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts, including the Native Americans moved by incoming Europeans, and then those Europeans relocated by the State when creating the massive reservoir that supplies Boston with water. Gregory and librettist Todd Hearon tell these stories from a variety of perspectives. The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. Consistently recognized in critical reviews, the ensemble regularly collaborates with some of the nation’s most accomplished ensembles and imaginative composers. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir, most often addressing social issues. The group is the American Composers’ Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music.

At the Center of All Things brings together the expressive, early-music influenced string quartets of Stanley Grill with the intense, visceral sound of the Diderot Quartet’s gut-stringed instruments. A composer for whom the string quartet is the perfect medium to express, in a modern idiom, his passion for the contemplative aspects of Renaissance vocal music, the album includes three of Stanley Grill’s many string quartets: American landscapes, Lonely Voices and the title track, At the Center of All Things. Raised in New York City, Stanley Grill has spent a lifetime composing music as an act of translation, trying to understand the world and convey that understanding in musical terms. Two main themes carry through in his work- music composed as a reflection of the physical world and music composed to inspire and promote world peace. These themes are at the heart of all three works included on At the Center of All Things. The unique sound that emerges from the Diderot Quartet’s period instruments is ideal for these three introspective and intensely personal works. On this album, the Diderot gives a brilliant, evocative performance that perfectly captures the nature of the composer’s work- music that is completely contemporary while simultaneously looking back in time to the beauty and harmony of early vocal music.

Time, silence, light, reflection and transcendence are all explored in Jane Antonia Cornish's new album, Into Silence. A breathless fragility on the precipice of liminal space imbues the album's six over-arching linear meditations; each work an inquiry into the transitory beauty of the unknown, through self-reflection and the conscious reorientation of perspective. These hallmarks of Cornish's aesthetic experience, along with the exquisitely balanced unfolding of her material, all contribute to a highly expressive and brave musical narrative that is unafraid, and, once heard, cannot be unheard. The six works featured here are not only unified conceptually, but also through their instrumentation; each features a subset of an aggregate ensemble of violin, piano, four cellos, and electronics. Throughout, Cornish brilliantly uses a carefully planned unveiling of instrumental sonorities to actuate and propel the over-arching design of the album's broader narrative. Memory of Time explores a distant nocturnal pathos as the solo violin's expressive presence floats, suspended, over the cello ensemble's irrevocable sighs. The titular Into Silence I incorporates piano and electronics into the sonic tableaux of the proceeding work, reorienting the seemingly unappesed yearning of the introductory material with a tender earthbound comfort. Scattered Light, scored for cello alone, expounds an unbridled moment of cadenza-like virtuosity. As the harmonic rhythm increases and intensifies the work concludes in an evaporated calmness. Elegia returns to the sound-world and material of the album's opening work, now examiend through the aperture of elegiac reflexivity. A meditation on solitude, Into Silence II, for piano solo, probes some of the album's most inner-directed moments of isolation. Luminescence is a culmination of the entire album's exploration of liminality. The electronic component returns with an exquisite and arresting subtly of hushed empyrean filigree. A solo cello momentarily transforms the sighing motif of the opening into a hopeful upward reach towards transcendence. The work ends in deliquesce silence, and the album concludes with a return of the opening motif, exemplifying the elegant notion that silence is the path to transformation.