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.''

The critically acclaimed Jack Quartet perform four new works by the Áltavoz Composers, a group of Latin American composers who have emigrated to the U.S. and Europe. Felipe Lara, Jose-Luis Hurtado, Mauricio Pauly and Jorge Villavicencio Grossman are all dynamic compositional voices working in the modernist tradition; their works are heard here in the context of one of the most challenging and revered trajectories of the classical canon, the string quartet repertoire. "explosive virtuosity." (Boston Globe) "viscerally exciting." (New York Times) "thrillingly vital." (New Yorker)

Loadbang, a unique New York based ensemble of bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, baritone voice, has been energetically expanding the repertoire for their instrumentation since their formation in 2008. Their new release and the works on it pay tribute to the biological organ that generates the sound for these four instruments, the lungs. Beyond the title, the works by composers Alex Mincek, David Brynjar Franzson, Reiko Fueting, Alexandre Lunsqui, and Scott Worthington engage with breath, wind, and air as it passes through the instruments in conventional ways, but also through whispers, clicks, and extended sounds, creating a beguiling sound world that constantly inhales and exhales.

In WAM, British composer Michael Finnissy plays with various elements of "musical culture" - rearranging and re-contextualizing old "classics", writing chamber music without traditional synchronicity, and allowing performers the freedom to reorder their pages of music. Through this deconstruction of classical conventions, Finnissy creates music that is endlessly surprising and wide-ranging in it's emotional character.

To Quince, Motherland means our natal home, worthy of love, critique, and support. It represents the terrain of those who identify as women, as mothers of varying types- creators and producers and live-givers and life-sacrificers. Mother-land is both embodiment and inversion of Emily Dickinson's 'Nature, the gentlest mother'- capable of supporting all life, and of obliterating it with forces as simple as a breath of air. This album features never-before-heard recordings of pieces by Laura Steenberge, Gilda Lyons, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley. As long as we have breath left in us, we will sing our gratitude, our love, our frustration, and our hopes. There is no greater privilege. With this bold statement, Quince Ensemble presents it's ambitious, socially engaged second album with New Focus, Motherland. Featuring premiere recordings of works by Gilda Lyons, Laura Steenberge, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley, Motherland's range is as wide in terms of subject matter as it is in terms of sonic palette.

Violist Anne Lanzilotti releases her debut solo album, focusing on the art of transcription, with repertoire by Caroline Shaw, Andrew Norman, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Lanzilotti herself. Featuring premiere recordings of the viola versions of all these works, "in manus tuas" is a celebration of the expressive and lyrical side of the contemporary viola repertoire by one of it's most accomplished and active advocates. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti is a "leading composer-performer" (The New York Times) dedicated to the music of our time. In Fall 2019, Lanzilotti will begin her tenure as the new Curator of Music at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Lanzilotti has performed with contemporary music ensembles such as A Far Cry, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Ensemble �chapp�, and Ensemble Signal. As a recording artist, she has played on albums from Bj�rk's Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne's Love and Hate, to Dai Fujikura's Chance Monsoon and Ted Hearne's The Source.

Classical Music

Fernando Benadon has a rich background as a composer, saxophonist, improvisor, and scholar. He brings this experience to his most recent recording project, delight/delirium, particularly to the final two tracks, Búgi Wúgi and Rhythmensional, both of which engage with the boundaries between improvised and notated music in interesting ways. For Rhythmensional, Benadon recorded an improvised drum solo by acclaimed Cuban jazz drummer and composer, Dafnis Prieto. Benadon then composed a through composed piece to be performed along with the recording of Prieto's solo - essentially turning Prieto's improvisation into fixed media. As a scholar, Benadon has had an enduring interest in the field of "microtimings", which investigates the aspects of time in a performer's performance that go beyond notation, particularly as they relate to different styles. By recording Prieto and then placing his playing at teh foundational level of the piece, in a sense, Benadon has frozen the microtimings in the improvisation while guaranteeing microvariation in the rhythmic realization of the score by the live performers playing along with Prieto's track. Búgi Wúgi consciously goes in the opposite direction, achieving the looseness of ealry jazz piano masters Earl Hines and Bubber Miley adn the post-modern sensibility of contemporary experiemental improvisors like Ethan Iverson and Vijay Iyer by keeping the left hand steady and meticulously notating improvised "sounding" material in the right hand. Cotxes in inspired by the visual imagery of Barcelona, as this unique quartet of sax, vibes, harp, and piano spin out lush, impressionistic harmonies through notated lines that again sound improvised. delight/delirium opens with materal that perhaps could be improvised, but reveals itself clearly as a fully through composed piece when we hear tightly coordinated unisons between clarinet and piano near the on eminute mark. Nevertheless, the work often falls forward like an improvisation, with a sense of structure that is less oriented towards managed development of material than it is towards a journey whose changes of directions are suggested each moment anew. Cosmicomics is the odd man out aesthetically on the recording, not only because it is the only large ensemble work, but also because it inhabits a more conventionally composerly sound world. The work ebbs and flows between the gently pulsating, impressionistic chords of the opening and more explosive moments that bristle with orchestral color. Cosmicomics is a more direct look at Benadon's material palette apart from his engagement with exploring the subtle boundaries between improvised and notated music.

Flexible Music is: Haruka Fujii: percussion Dan Lippel: guitars Tim Ruedeman: saxophones Eric Huebner: piano Hout- Louis Andriessen Flexible Music- Nico Muhly Around the Bend- John Link Closing Time- Ryan Streber Sustenance Variations- Orianna Webb Throw Down or Shut Up- Vineet Shende 'The quartet known as Flexible Music derives it's name from the title of the Nico Muhly piece that the group plays on it's new disc. Like that score, the program's other works by Louis Andriessen, John Link, Ryan Streber, Orianna Webb, and Vineet Shende take percussion, piano, saxophones, and guitars through fascinating textural, rhythmic, and coloristic terrain. The results are varied and vital, a feast of intimate musical possibilities. The disc's springboard is Andriessen's beguiling Hout, which has been recorded by several other ensembles. Dutch for 'wood', the piece is a canon that finds the instruments chasing each other at pell-mell speed, occasionally stopping in their tracks amid the hypnotic activity, sensual gestures and group exclamation points. Muhly's Flexible Music is exactly that. Inspired by video games, it's energy is relentless, with swirling, punching ideas momentarily relaxed with lyrical lines. In Link's Around the Bend, something surprising is always lurking, from exotic tambourine sighs to quickly shared fragments, dreamy piano lines and sudden outbursts. An electric guitar broods in Streber's Closing Time, which is animated through saxophone flights and feisty interaction. Tidbits emerge from hushed moments, and the saxophone and guitar have extended solos before the music fades away. The aura veers from the frisky to the still in Webb's Sustenance Variations, whose punchy chords and confrontational episodes find a keen balance amid lines of haunting poetry. Shende pays homage to James Brown in Throw Down or Shut Up, whose vigorous activity includes vocal grunts, riffs, shifting rhythms and a sassy finish. The members of Flexible Music are undaunted by the repertoire's formidable demands. Haruka Fujii (percussion), Eric Huebner (piano), Timothy Ruedeman (saxophones), and Daniel Lippel (guitars) appear to relish the sense of discovery that these composers have invested in their captivating creations.'- Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone August 2009 '... Flexible Music, a young and vigorous New York City-based quartet. Aggressiveness, virtuosity, and seamless ensemble playing are obviously Flexible Music hallmarks, and these strengths are revealed immediately with a blistering account of Louis Andriessen's Hout, the piece that one imagines was the catalyst that brought the quartet together. While calling any work a tour de force may seem terribly cliche, it's really the only term that aptly describes Hout. It's a relentless piece, beginning with what seems like a never-ending canon at the 16th note.

Experimental saxophone and percussion duo scapegoat (Noam Bierstone, percussion; Joshua Hyde, saxophone) releases "Threshing/Plastic," a recording featuring two path breaking works written for them by Mauricio Pauly and Santiago D�ez-Fischer. These works explore subtle gradations of timbre and sound through integration of electronic elements and processing, inviting the listener inside rarefied sonic environments before deftly managing their gradual evolution. Formed in Paris in 2013, close creative collaboration and multi-media projects form the basis of scapegoat's pursuit for artistic innovation and expression. Programmes are designed to broaden and challenge the musical experience of the audience, through original works featuring live electronics, performer-controlled sonic and visual amplification, video and lighting design, and improvisation.

Michael Hersch releases "I hope we get a chance to visit soon", a follow up companion piece to his critically acclaimed monodrama, "On the Threshold of Winter." Scored for two sopranos (Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy) and ensemble, the work revisits a common theme for Hersch, cancer - in this case, the music embodies the struggle and grief over the loss of a close friend of his. His work described by The New York Times as "viscerally gripping and emotionally transformative music... claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity," composer Michael Hersch is widely regarded as among today's most gifted artists. "so sincere in his darkness, and so sophisticated in his expressivity, that he can make the morbid magical" (New York Magazine)

Cellist Mariel Roberts releases her second solo recording with bold premiere performances of works written for her by George Lewis, Eric Wubbels, David Brynjar Franzson, and a collaborative work she wrote with Cenk Ergun. Wubbels’ manic Gretchen am spinnrade opens the recording in a frenzy, catching Goethe Schubert’s Gretchen in a psychic tailspin, as the metaphor of the spinning wheel is extended to her karmic life and to the careening of cause and effect in personal and public history. Vacillating between ominous tolling piano chords, demonically virtuosic repeated motivic cells, and snarling cello double stops, Gretchen am spinnrade is a relentless work that gives Gretchen, or the listeners, little respite during its sixteen-minute duration. As the piece closes, the spinning wheel creaks and moans in disrepair, damaged beyond repair. The boundary between acoustic and electronic in Cenk Ergun and Roberts’ collaborative piece Aman has as its ingredients dry, glitchy percussive sounds, airy bow textures, and grinding double stops. Texture and timbre supply the narrative arc in this work, named for a word that translates variously to “security” in Arabic, and expresses a sense of deep sorrow and loss in Turkish. George Lewis’ solo work, Spinner, is inspired by the ancient Greek belief in the Fates, three sister goddesses charged with determining the course of human life. The work energetically jumps between different disjointed and angular musical characters in a virtuosic technical and expressive display. In his liner note, Lewis observes that even in Plato’s explication of the role of the Fates, the ultimate responsibility and stewardship of our communities lies with humans themselves, a viewpoint that some might find perilous at this historical moment. In Icelandic born, New York City based composer David Brynjar Franzson’s The Cartography of Time is sonically expansive, exploring the dichotomy between micro and macro in local gesture versus structural context. Franzson paints a stark landscape and supplies an inward looking close to an album whose uncompromising energy is unwavering, intense, and at times unsettling in ways that reflect the complicated time in which we live.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The soundSCAPE summer festival in Italy was founded in 2005 by Artistic Director Nathanael May, and each summer hosts composers, faculty, and student performers for two weeks of lectures, performances, and master classes exploring rich contemporary repertoire. The essence of the festival is one of process and collaboration - giving rise to new music initiatives that have flourished long beyond the festival, all around the globe. We approach all music with open ears and a passion for making your voice heard. This release, the second by musicians from soundSCAPE on New Focus, features new works written for the ensemble by composers Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Jesse Jones, all of whom have been key figures in the festival since 2014.