• These Bach's cello suite recordings are cellist Kivie Cahn-Lipman's first solo recordings. • Recorded in Sweeney Concert Hall, Smith College, in Northampton, MA • Kivie Cahn-Lipman is the founding cellist of the • International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and the director of the new period-instrument ensemble ACRONYM. Further recordings projects are upcoming in 2014.

Composer Arthur Levering releases OceanRiverLake, a collection of his music for chamber orchestra, string quartet, solo piano, and mixed trio that reflects his affinity with the core repertoire of the modern era, Celtic music, and the work of an esteemed colleague who recently passed, Steven Stucky. The album features performances by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lydian String Quartet, Donald Berman, Sarah Brady, and Maarten Stragier.

For many years, composer Tina Davidson has written music that endeavored to connect with issues larger than herself. "Barefoot" is no exception, though here Davidson looks inward towards her personal ties to music and how they can be a portal to a more holistic sense of being in the world. Featuring chamber works performed by the Jasper String Quartet and Natalie Zhu, "Barefoot" is an earthy invitation to a subtly powerful musical world.

Martin Scherzinger is a South Africanborn composer and media theorist, who works on and engages with the music of Africa. African Math is an album of piano trio music that "Africanizes" these western instruments (flipping the typical appropriation of indigenous instruments on it's head). Piano, violin, and cello are used as conduits for material originally intended for mbira, or kalahari, or Ugandan xylophone. Underlying the layer of transcription, Scherzinger highlights and delights in the rich musical mathematics which exist at the core of so many musical traditions in Africa.

Classical Music

On “Three Burials,” Pablo Santiago Chin merges several aspects of his creative process to create an immersive, sensual recording chronicling his music for the flute, and featuring his sister and fellow member of Chicago based ensemble Fonema Consort, flutist Dalia Chin. The centerpiece of the program is the title work itself, a three movement piece that includes movements that can be heard either in solo versions, as they open and close the recording, or in ensemble settings, as they are heard in tracks 4-6. The genesis for the material in Three Burials comes from an interesting transcription process from Peruvian indigenous flute material to the modern flute. Pablo asked Dalia to transcribe this material in a natural and non-literal way to the moder flute, and then this material was subjected to further manipulation and distortion, resulting in the multiphonics laden material that can be heard in the opening solo flute track. In the ensemble setting of Three Burials, the insistent, almost desperate quality of the quasi vertical flute sonorities manifests itself in prismatic textures tspread through the ensemble, as guitar and piano punctuate the texture with percussive snaps, plucks, and creaks, and cello and double bass offer sighing glissandi and grinding dissonances.

Soprano Tony Arnold and guitarist Daniel Lippel both members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) take a pause from new music to delve into the intimate world of Franz Schubert's lieder. These transcriptions for solo guitar and soprano and guitar are based on historical transcriptions made by Schubert's contemporary Johann Kaspar Mertz (for solo guitar) and published by Schubert's publishers (for voice and guitar). Mr. Lippel performs these works on a period reproduction of a 19th Century Stauffer guitar made by German luthier Bernhard Kresse. The selected songs are culled together into a song cycle tracing a journey from alienation to despair to renewal. Ms. Arnold and Mr. Lippel lend their insightful interpretive approaches to this canonic repertoire shedding new light on twelve of Schubert's most beautiful songs.

Classical Music

This program spans two-and-a-quarter centuries of compositions that reflect a state of unusual spiritual solitude. A composer's solitary journey can lead to very different places, as each reflects the unique journey of the soul-and a work for solo piano can give perfect voice to such introspection, creating a complete world of sound. Gy�rgy Kurt�g began his J�t�kok (Games) in the early 1970s. This series of ingenious miniatures first served as a cure for the composer's writer's block; it also aimed to be a new method of teaching piano, inspired by Bart�k's Mikrokosmos. Kurt�g started again from scratch, using basic building blocks of intervals, harmonies, and sometimes primitive methods of playing the instrument (palms, fists, forearms). As the cycle developed-there are now eight books-Kurt�g started dedicating the pieces to close colleagues. When I worked with Mr. Kurt�g in Darmstadt, Germany, he magically demonstrated, at the piano, some ideal phrasings. I was amazed, and humbled, by how much direction and energy he could convey in a single two-note melodic interval. Kurt�g's profound expressive ability is hard-won, the result of much struggle. These varied pieces plumb every element of the music for complexity and effect. Mozart's well-known and endlessly mysterious Rondo in a minor is one of his most unusual solo piano pieces. Relentlessly chromatic, the work alternates between extremes of simplicity and density, often in quick succession. The piece formally adheres to a rondo, alternating a main idea with contrasting material. Notably, the emotional change the listener feels each time upon the theme's return is profound and complex: the fragile melody is weighted by the memory of all that has come before. The piece concludes with a winding coda, and is capped by the simplest cadence imaginable. Schoenberg's 1923 Suite for Piano is the first large-scale twelve-tone work ever written. Schoenberg was so completely energized by his newfound compositional tools that the piece bursts with wild invention in every dimension: melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint. Yet this uncompromised expression is combined with a nominally strict form: the Baroque dance suite. Schoenberg limited himself not just by the formal and rhythmic structure of each dance, but by choosing to only use four versions of a single twelve-note row (with their retrogrades) as material for the entire multi-movement piece. Somehow, the restrictions spurred even greater invention-the many-octave-spanning melody that opens the Gavotte, or the driven, madcap Gigue. Schoenberg's journey as a composer, passing through free atonal composition into dodecaphony, could only have been undertaken by an extreme individualist. Schoenberg's individualism had political and personal consequences, as he later unwittingly branded himself an anti-Aryan intellectual in National Socialist Germany. My Song Without Words After Rilke (a German title better conveys it's debt to Mendelssohn) was composed in stages. I had long been familiar with Stephen Mitchell's wonderful translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus, in particular sonnet eight of the second set, an elegy to a childhood lost. I recited this poem in German several times into a tape recorder, and then made a transcription of each version in pitch and rhythm; I compiled the most naturalistic readings from each take and formed a melody. One of my most powerful early musical experiences took place at my elementary school, where I went many times a week during summertime, alone and always just after dinner, to hit a tennis ball against the brick back wall of the school as I sang to myself. The accelerating and decelerating rhythms of the ball against brick and blacktop formed a contrasting counterpoint to the long lines of my singing, and the effect was meditative. This piano piece, which contains no vocalizing but evokes it, recreates my tennis evenings. Shortly after correcting the printers' proofs for his Ges�nge der Fr�he (Songs of Dawn), Schumann threw himself into the Rhine River. Though he survived the suicide attempt, this suite of character sketches for piano was the last work that Schumann himself could prepare for publication. He clearly felt close to these pieces, and wished for their dedicatee, the poet Bettina von Arnim, to hear them, as he told her when she visited him at an asylum in Endenich. The opus was written in five days in October 1853, about four months before Schumann's complete mental breakdown. Schumann viewed the pieces as hopeful, but they are a ray of light in a very dark place. They are sometimes desperate and inconsolable, as in the fourth piece, which to me evokes the sweeping current of the Rhine. But the second and third pieces are heroic, and in the first and last, Schumann smiles through tears. These are extremely intimate, private works, and they represent the very best of Schumann's late music, idiosyncratic in spite of the composer's palpable efforts to restrain that quality. The dreamy last piece is brilliantly linked, via a common chord, to the end of the fourth, and the work ends with an odd appoggiatura that sounds like a benediction. --Jacob Greenberg.

Fairy Tales, Folklore, & Fables or, Every Ogre is Unique At a time when children are bombarded with images that leave nothing to the imagination, it feels right to play a role in the centuries-old oral tradition of storytelling; listening to stories let's children make their own images. Add music to that (and let it tell it's own, parallel version of the tale) and you have the makings for something pretty interesting. The Philadelphia-based children's music and storytelling troupe Auricolae has performed for thousands of students throughout the Northeast. Audience participation and playful musical dialogue are hallmarks of the presentations and our aim is to introduce young people to the language of music through the telling of stories. The distinct palette available in music for violin, cello and narrator is quite versatile and has led composers down very different paths. In particular, the role of narrator changes depending upon the piece. Sometimes in dialogue with the instruments, other times it is completely separate and, occasionally, it even becomes an instrument in it's own right. The CD begins with Ferdinand the Bull, Munro Leaf's classic story about a peace-loving bull who, resisting the pressure of his peers, prefers to "smell the flowers" over fighting. Curiously, the story was written during the Spanish civil war and was banned in Spain after right-wing groups called it 'subversive." English composer Alan Ridout's (1934-1996) musical setting demands daunting virtuosity from the violinist. Eric Sessler (b.1969) had the inspired idea to compose multiple endings for The Rascally Rogue of the Beanstalk (a.k.a. Jack and the Beanstalk). All three additional endings are included on this recording following the original version of the piece. Robert Capanna's (b. 1952) unique take on Rumpilstilskin treats the narrator as an equal partner in the music-making. Employing sprechstimme, a technique first used by Schoenberg, the narrator weaves complex rhythms in and out of the violin and cello lines. An Adventure at Grannies by Gwyneth Walker (b. 1947) is a musical dramatization of 'Little Red Riding Hood' in which the instruments assume several character roles and play musical motifs to highlight the text. The Klezmer work Prince Rooster by David Yang (b. 1967) is based on a 19th Century Chassidic folk tale by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav about a young man with a unique problem and a doctor with a unique solution. Finally, Three Little Pigs was written by Daniel Dorff (b.1956) and contains quotes and references not only to other classical works but to the rhythm of the text itself ("not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin...."). Artistic Director and narrator for Auricolae David Yang is a viola player who has collaborated with members of the Audubon, Borromeo, Brentano, Lark, Muir and Tokyo String Quartets, amongst others. He is also Artistic Director of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival and founder of the Philadelphia Viola Society and Director of Chamber Music at the University of Pennsylvania. Unholy offspring of a Chinese landscape photographer and Jewish yenta from Brooklyn, David lives in Philadelphia with his daughters, Eliana and Alessandra.

Classical Music

•Duo Stephanie and Saar’s Beethoven Dialogues, the second New Focusrelease, contains three 4-hand piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s iconic op. 18 set of string quartets. It is fascinating to hear this timeless material lifted out of itsoriginal context and instrumentation and placed onto a keyboard, revealing much about the core strength and malleability of Beethoven’s writing. These transcriptions by Hugo Ulrich and Robert Wittman skillfully adapted the famous op. 18 set forfour hand play.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Duo repertoire is a fascinating exploration of the tension between monologue and dialogue, homogeneity and duality, and contrast versus hybridity. On their bold debut full length recording, the bass clarinet and marimba duo Transient Canvas present repertoire that explores the wide range of roles and textures these two instruments can assume with each other. Notably, the repertoire on this recording largely steers clear of the combination's most predictable texture - the marimba providing steady pulse oriented accompaniment to a soloistic bass clarinet. Instead, these works explore merged timbres, powerfully declamatory unison statements, and narrative structures to draw the listener into the colorful world of five substantial new works, all performed with a maturity beyond the years of these wonderful young performers. Daniel T. Lewis' sift, the title track, opens with ah aunting timbre. Each instrument intones in its low register, as beautifully revealed high overtones of the bass clarinet create a halo effect floating above. The work evolves patiently, as more pitches from the overtone series of the low fundamentals are explicitly articulated, and the bass clarinet begins to glide between the well tempered pitches of the marimba with gooey microtones. The bass clarinet takes a lead role in Tina Tallon's Dirty Water, framing blistering outbursts, plaintive wailing, and bravura rips with percussive punctuations. Midway through th epiece the dense activity gives way to haunting trills in both instruments before the insistent staccato punctuations signal a return to the denser, virtuosic material from the opening in a compressed coda. The raw energy of the attention grabbing opening of Curtis Hughes' Vestibule III leads quickly into more introspective material. The composer describes the work as a ''series of short, related duos that seem to exist in a state of perpetual transition between contrasting textural and stylistic worlds.''