The JACK Quartet performs two works by Turkish born experimental composer Cenk Ergün on this EP release. Ergun's immersion in the worlds of electronic music and improvisation shape material that is intense in character, whether it is exploring vigorous or static textures. Hailed by The New York Times as the “nation’s most important quartet”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. Over the past season, they have been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Piano four hands ensemble DUO Stephanie and Saar (Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia) continue their series of recordings that challenge listeners to hear iconic works in new guises. Catalyzed by Beethoven's own arrangement of the famous Grosse Fuge op. 133, the duo presents Hugo Ulrich and Robert Wittman's stately transcription of the op. 130 string quartet to which the iconic fugue originally belonged, alongside Schubert's brooding F minor Fantasie, D. 940. Pianists Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia collaborate as DUO Stephanie & Saar in dazzling performances filled with visceral excitement, elegance and artistic vision. The duo are founders and artistic directors of Makrokosmos Project, a critically acclaimed Oregon-based new music festival featuring dynamic American composers of our time. In its sixth year, the festival is entirely driven by community support. Some of the featured composers include Kenji Bunch, Gabriela Lena Frank, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, John Luther Adams, Karen Tanaka, Michael Johanson and Alexander Schwarzkopf, among many others.

Cellist Dan Barrett releases a collection of premiere recordings of solo and duo works by French composer Dominique Lemaître. Lemaître's music is characterized by sensuality, melodic contour, and mosaic textures, and reflects the influence of the French lineage of modern composition, from Debussy and Ravel up through Murail and Grisey. Dan Barrett, "a brilliant and driven cellist, composer, and conductor" (Huffington Post), is the creator, and current Director of the International Street Cannibals, whom the NY Times calls "a brash new-music ensemble", who Alan Lockwood of the Free Press has termed "kaleidoscopically eclectic", and of whose concerts Peter Christian Hall of the Huffington Post refers to as "performances that are creatively designed and rigorously executed". Dan has played extensively for PBS, particularly as cellist for many of their featured documentaries, such as "The Great Depression," and Ric Burns' "The Way West", "Andy Warhol", "The History of New York" and Death and The Civil War." At present, Dan can be heard on the top-rated BBC America series, "Copper", on which his solos are featured extensively.

Chicago based Ensemble Dal Niente releases "confined. speak.", a collection of works the group programmed in streaming performances during this past year. Despite the formidable hurdles associated with ensemble playing during the lockdown, Dal Niente presented concerts and took advantage of the ability to collaborate across vast distances. This album chronicles highlights from those events, featuring music by Melissa Vargas, George Lewis, Tomás Gueglio, Hilda Paredes, Igor Santos, and Andile Khumalo that reflects broad geographic influences from South America, North America, and Africa.

Critically acclaimed pianist Eric Huebner releases his performance of György Ligeti's famous etudes alongside his iconic Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano with colleagues Yuki Numata Resnick and Adam Unsworth. Ligeti's attraction to stylistic influences from across the spectrum, including non-Western music cultures, while preserving a Hungarian core to his aesthetic, is apparent in Huebner's dynamic performances of these remarkable works. Pianist Eric Huebner has drawn worldwide acclaim for his performances of new and traditional music since making his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 17. In January 2012, he was appointed pianist of the New York Philharmonic and currently holds the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Piano Chair. He has been featured in orchestral works by Lindberg, Stravinsky, Ives, Milhaud, Carter and R. Strauss among others and regularly appears in chamber music performances with musicians from the Philharmonic at New York City's Merkin Hall and elsewhere.

Curtis K. Hughes' "Tulpa" is a collection of his rhythmically incisive music heard in solo, duo, and ensemble settings, and culminating in the title work for ten players and guest soprano. The Boston based Hughes writes from a deep collaborative connection with his performers, crafting pieces that balance harmonic adventure with stylistic diversity, and political subtext with sardonic humor. The music of Curtis K. Hughes (b. 1974) is characterized by its rhythmic restlessness, its harmonic adventurousness and its often volatile mix of diverse stylistic elements and political subtexts. It has been described as "fiery" in the New York Times, "well crafted" in the Phoenix, and "colorfully scored" in the Boston Globe. A professor of composition at the Boston Conservatory since 2008, Curtis was a student of composers Lee Hyla and Evan Ziporyn, and is a graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory, and of the New England Conservatory (NEC), which honored him in 2010 with its Outstanding Alumni Award.

Composer Peter Gilbert releases his second full length album on New Focus, "Burned Into the Orange", a follow up to his 2008 release "The Bold Arch of Undreamt Bridges". Featuring performances by the Arditti Quartet, Camille Hoitenga, Magdalena Meitzner, Jeremias Schwarzer, Richard White, Michael Veit, Emanuele Arciuli, and the Iridium Quartet, Gilbert's music explores rich, sensual ensemble textures that highlight the uniqueness of individual timbres and the ephemerality of the crystalline moments that contain them. Gilbert writes: “If experiencing musical form is like experiencing an architectural space, if the unfolding of harmonic relationships is akin to the unfolding of narrative, then perhaps hearing timbre is like staring into a Heraclitian fire—we never live the same sound twice. Music is the transubstantiated energy of mechanical motion becoming a constantly evolving vibration whose internal life all too quickly exhausts itself, dissolving into its entropy. But during that brief flickering life, a thousand faces appear in the sound’s flames, one passing into another passing into another. It is upon this phenomenon that I want to focus my listening so as to hear the melody of waves as they wash against one another, to witness the resonance of a chord transforming into new life, to feel the pull of the vibrations that bind us to each other and unveil our secrets and our vulnerability, to dream into reality the sound of sound becoming sound.”

New York based ensemble Hypercube (Erin Rogers, saxophones; Jay Sorce, guitars; Andrea Lodge, piano & accordion; Chris Graham, percussion) releases "Brain on Fire," including works written for them by Sam Pluta, Philip Schuessler, Erin Rogers, Dennis Sullivan, and Nicholas Deyoe. Building on a growing repertoire anchored by Louis Andriessen's iconic Hout, Hypercube emphasizes the experimental, avant-garde potential of this quartet instrumentation with impressive performances and a cultivated ensemble sound. HYPERCUBE has built a reputation on high-energy performances with impressive execution. The NYC-based quartet embraces the boundaries of chamber music, featuring cutting-edge works for saxophone, guitar, piano and percussion, while spanning electric and acoustic worlds. “Jarring, compelling” (Washington Post) “fearless and flawless… some of the most exciting playing I have ever heard.” (Sequenza 21)

Duo della Luna (Susan Botti, soprano/composer; Airi Yoshioka, violin) releases "Mangetsu," centered around the multi-movement title piece that Botti wrote that catalyzed the duo's formation. Botti's sensual setting of otherworldly texts is contrasted with her inventive arrangement of Bartok's famous violin duos that excavate original folk song texts. Kaija Saariaho's "Changing Light" and Linda Dusman's "Triptych of Gossips" round out this collection that explores the intimacy of the voice/violin duo through text settings that prioritize narrative shape and point to the timeless link between song and text in folkloric traditions. As solo artists, Susan and Airi have devoted their musical careers to new music. After performing together in various chamber settings, Airi commissioned Susan to write a work for just voice and violin, resulting in Botti’s Mangetsu. Realizing that there was a special spark when the music was stripped down to just their two voices intertwined, they formed Duo della Luna to explore this further. The duo has performed in the US, Canada and Italy. Given the unusual vocal/instrumental combination, it was natural that their individual devotion to contemporary works would continue as a duo. Their repertoire celebrates the natural world, myth, story-telling, and folk songs... for their universal, timeless messages.

Violinist David Bowlin releases a program of works for solo violin, with and without electronics, alongside select chamber works. Featuring works by close colleagues Du Yun, Alexandra Karastoyanova-Hermentin as well as music by luminaries Mario Davidovsky, George Walker, and Martin Bresnick, Bird as Prophet is a poignant snapshot of a performer who at once embodies the virtuoso tradition and brings those prodigious talents to the music of our time. Violinist David Bowlin has won critical acclaim for his performances of a wide range of repertoire from The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and many others. First-prize winner of the 2003 Washington International Competition, Bowlin has performed with such leading artists as Mitsuko Uchida, Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, Jeremy Denk, Robert McDonald, and members of the Juilliard, Emerson, and Brentano string quartets. His solo performances include premieres of violin concerti written for him at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival and at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, and in recent seasons he has performed concerti at Miller Theatre in New York, the Aspen Music Festival, and with the La Jolla Symphony. On air he has performed in broadcasts for WQXR New York, WFMT Chicago, Vermont Public Radio, and nationwide on NPR’s Performance Today.

In the mid-1990s a community of composers and performers came together at Montreal’s McGill University, loosely centered around composer Michael Oesterle and pianist Marc Couroux (who together went on to form the influential Ensemble KORE). This group included many of today’s leading Canadian composers such as Rose Bolton, Paul Frehner, Nicole Lizee, Scott Godin, and Brian Current, and dedicated performers from McGill’s Contemporary Music Ensemble (led by Bruce Mather and, later, Denys Bouliane), the members of the Bozzini Quartet and violist Pemi Paull. It was a transitional generation: the composers were moving away from avant-gardism and re-embracing popular forms, looking away from academia and creating their own groups while still dependent on the local institutions for support and recognition. It was a unique time of intense creation and collaboration that has had a lasting effect on the Canadian new music scene, as the composers’ lives and careers spread them to communities coast to coast, introducing their work to new audiences and a new generation of students. The three works presented here were selected to represent this Canadian voice in new chamber music. The works were championed by Music in the Barns from 2011-2015 as part of their vision to advance this voice within the international musical community.

DUO Stephanie & Saar’s third release on New Focus Recordings, The Art of Fugue, is the first ever complete piano duo recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s final enigmatic work. The duo performs the work’s different movements as either four-hand, two piano or solo piano works. Bach never specified the instrumentation of the work and this new version is a kaleidoscope of textures and colors, a probing journey that seeks answers and illumination. Dated 1748, some scholars see The Art of Fugue as an academic endeavor by an aging master paying tribute to the fugue, which was by then falling out of fashion. Others consider the work as a sort of “Da Vinci Code” of numerology, puzzles and musical coding. The mystery of Contrapunctus 14, notable for both the inclusion of Bach’s name as a theme and for its unfinished state adds to the mythology and cult status that surrounds the work.Bach found fugues to be a source of endless creativity. The Art of Fugue, a collection of fourteen fugues and four canons, is an exploration of the full spectrum of contrapuntal possibilities, all derived from one monolithic theme in D minor. From a purely technical standpoint, Bach’s compositional prowess is in full display as he employs inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminution, multiple fugue subjects, mirroring and canonic writing- all while creating an intense and emotionally gripping musical experience. Bach was a deeply devout Lutheran, and while Th Art of Fugue has no direct religious connotations, the work’s reverence for “musical math” and the severity of the techniques used are in line with Bach’s devotional output. Bach’s need to exhaust as many possibilities of permutations from one theme is in essence a quest to find meaning, an unending spiritual journey reaching towards the divine.

In a historic first, critically acclaimed Guitarist Daniel Lippel brings these three beloved masterworks in their original keys to a classical guitar refretted in Baroque well temperament. They were written at & for the keyboard, where each key has its own unique Affekt. What a joy it is to finally hear them in all of their original key-colored glory. Composer/critic Kyle Gann has said, “Playing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in today's equal temperament is like exhibiting Rembrandt paintings with wax paper taped over them.” The same may well be said of Bach played on the modern equal tempered guitar. "Aufs Lautenwerk" is a co-release with John Schneider's Los Angeles based MicroFest Records and available in digital format through their catalogue.

REVIEW:

In his notes prefacing the recording, guitarist Daniel Lippel acknowledges the validity of many different approaches to Bach performance practice, and assures his listeners that his own approach, while certainly distinctive, is in no way meant to make a definitive argument–“after all,” he continues, “I am playing an instrument that didn’t exist when the music was written.”

The instrument in question is a guitar invented and built by German luthier Walter Vogt; its fingerboard (as you can see in the CD cover photo) consists of movable (sliding) frets, allowing each note to be adjusted to a very specific tuning, in this case a temperament devised during Bach’s time by one of the composer’s students, Johann Kirnberger. Unlike today’s system of equal temperament, Kirnberger’s “well-tempered” structure (this one known as Kirnberger III) adjusts certain intervals to allow all keys to be played “in tune” while celebrating each key’s distinctive “color”–thus, E-flat major will have a quality different from A major.

If you happened to first listen to this recording unaware of the above details, you may, as I did, notice something special about the sound of this guitar, about the character of the chords and melodic lines–a full-bodied, pleasing resonance, and an especially vibrant quality overall. Of course, much of this could just be due to the nature of the instrument itself, and to Daniel Lippel’s clear, even execution and particularly well-managed fingering technique. But no doubt the unique resonating properties of strings differently tuned to conform to key-specific relationships also is a significant factor–anyone who’s spent time tuning and re-tuning and playing various keyboard and/or plucked-string instruments will confirm this. Even singers in a cappella ensembles are very aware of these key differences.

I’m not sure how many guitarists would devote the effort to mastering the technique required to play on a fingerboard virtually remade and fraught with dozens of slight but potentially disorienting alterations, but Lippel has done it, and the whole experience for the listener is pure delight. Lippel treats these three Bach works–usually heard these days on guitar, but originally either for lute-harpsichord or lute or some other keyboard instrument–with a style that keeps melodic lines flowing yet allows some breathing room for expressive phrasing.

The difficulties of playing these works on the lute–or guitar–are notorious, but unless you’re a serious student of this repertoire, all you will notice here is how easy and natural Lippel makes everything sound. And speaking of sound, it couldn’t be better in its detail and in the way we are situated relative to the instrument–just the right distance to fully appreciate the marvelous tone, and to enjoy the satisfying few moments of a richly-resonant chord as it dies away.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Vernier)

“American Romantics II” is the second volume in a project initiated by conductor Reuben Blundell after he discovered several scores for string orchestra through the Fleischer Collection. These scores were all written by American composers during the last decades of the 19th century, both native born and recently immigrated. "American Romantics" presents the premiere recordings of these pieces, some of which draw on Americana melodies while others reflect the prevailing Central European compositional style of the day. Blundell’s recent release, “American Romantics, Volume I,” with the Gowanus Arts Ensemble, received glowing reviews, including Gramophone Magazine, and American Record Guide: “I was completely mesmerized by this lovely recording, one of the best I’ve heard in some time.” The album continues to be played regularly on WQXR and other stations across the US. He is a voting member of The Recording Academy (responsible for the GRAMMY Awards).

Initiated by Hunter College’s conductor Reuben Blundell, this project features premiere recordings of turn of the century works for string orchestra. The works included on this album are by composers such as Carl Busch, Horatio Parker, Arthur Foote, and many more. Reuben Blundell conducts the Gowanus Arts Ensemble for this recording.