Innova Recordings
148 products
Odyssey
Apti
American Canvas / Shelton, Dolce Suono Trio
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.
Here I Stand / iSing Silicon Valley
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.
Glint
Saxophonist Timothy McAllister has put together this chamber collection in collaboration with fellow musicians.
The flickering and tapping mechnical action of McAllister's instrument is something you must acclimatise yourself to. It's part of the music. It in fact seems to have been notated into the start of the third movement of the Wanamaker scherzo in the Duo Sonata.
Caleb Burhans's solo alto sax Escape Wisconsin is Reich-like in its minimalist iterative cell repetition. It began life as a piece for two vibraphones.
Kristin Kuster's Jellyfish is for sax and Lucia Unrau's piano. In three quirkily titled sections (Medusa; Blob; Thimbles) but one track. This piece is dissonant, variously hectic and deeply and darkly dreamy.
Kati Agocs' As Biddeth Thy Tongue returns us to the solo sax. Agocs' rhapsodic dissonant, harsh and sometimes horrifying progress takes us flutteringly through fear.
Duo Sonata for sax and, its brother, the clarinet (Robert Spring) is by Gregory Wanamaker. The two instruments are Icarus twins. They fill in each others notes, fly in aerobatic formation, encourage contemplation and indulge in jazz-jamming and minimalist caprice in the Blues finale.
The symphonist Daniel Asia is for me the only big name in this group. His The Alex Set for solo sax is the second oldest piece here. Of the five movements three entitled Alex I etc are interspersed with two entitled Interlude I etc. The music is angular and rhapsodic with a dusting of minimalist manners among the Orientalisms.
GLINT by Roshanne Etezady is for clarinet and sax again. It's a vertiginous and possessed flight into an everglades of bumping and groaning noises. Then follows an ascent succeeded by helter-skelter diving and rocketing upwards.
Philippe Hurel's OPCIT (1984) is for solo sax. It is the most dissonant piece here: rippling, groaning and writhing across its four extended sections seemingly with every avant-garde effect deployed.
Lastly we have Peter Terry's RISE for sax and Lucia Unrau’s synthesised piano. The piece has a nervy and jazzy stride, a touch of pianola torque, the occasional infusion of 1920s expressionism and grand guignol.
Good liner notes. Sensible design. Will suit the broad-minded sax repertoire enthusiast.
-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International
Seven Kings
Turn the Page - New Directions in American Choral Music
Music for Harp
Maggi Payne: Arctic Winds
Extended Family
Maroney: Music for Words, Perhaps
Reynolds: The Difference Engine
Matteo Liberatore: Solos
Violette: Pistis Sophias - Flute Sonata - Trio for Horn, Ba
Uncovered / Maya Beiser
Dark Matters - Carillon Music of Stephen Rush / Tiffany Ng
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.
Schooldays Over
Mantra Revealed
Metamorphosis - Higdon, Clearfield, Primosch / Mendelssohn Club Of Philadelphia
Under the dynamic leadership of artistic director Alan Harler, Mendelssohn Club has demonstrated a major commitment to new music, commissioning nearly fifty choral works over the past two decades. METAMORPHOSIS is the first recording of all original commissions in the 138-year history of the chorus.
Looking Back
Organon Novus - Contemporary Organ Works By American Masters, 1990-2015 / Randall Harlow [3 CDs]
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.
TALKING DRUMS: Some Day Catch Some Day Down
THINGS YOU ALREADY KNOW (VINYL
Robert Moran: Trinity Requiem
SoniChroma / Quey Percussion Duo
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.
