Yolanda Kondonassis writes: FIVE MINUTES for Earth is a project that both celebrates our planet and illuminates our challenge to preserve it. In 2020, I asked each of the composers featured in this collection if they would consider contributing a work for solo harp of approximately five minutes in length that expresses a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of immediate responses and set about assembling this labor-of-love project. The endeavor quickly expanded to include a live, multi-media concert, fifteen unique videos for each track, a separate published collection of Earth-inspired solos for younger harpists, and most importantly, the opportunity for harpists all over the world to perform these innovative, Earth-inspired works for solo harp by some of today’s most lauded composers; in doing so, every verified performance of any of the works from the FIVE MINUTES for Earth collection, anywhere in the world, will result in a monetary contribution to a recognized earth conservation organization, sponsored by my non-profit organization, Earth at Heart. FIVE MINUTES for Earth is also a metaphor for the urgent and compressed timeframe that remains for our global community to embrace and implement solutions to our fast-growing environmental crisis.” 

REVIEW:

In 2020 harpist Yolanda Kondonassis asked each of the composers featured in this collection to consider writing a short solo harp piece that expresses “a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres.” Needless to say, the musical results prove as diverse as the planet’s ecosystems.

Takuma Itoh’s new-agey Kohola Sings shows how one can imitate a humpback whale song on a harp. For Hear the Dust Blow, Michael Daugherty checks his customary dazzle at the door and channels Roy Harris in slow motion. On Hearing Nightbirds at Dusk showcases Aaron Jay Kernis’ textural sensitivity and harmonic refinement at their best.

Chen Yi’s Dark Mountains offers wild contrasts in texture and touch. Reena Esmail’s Inconvenient Wounds utilizes a wide array of evocative scraping effects, while the subtle microtonal writing throughout Keith Fitch’s “as Earth dreams” mesmerizes. Sparsely deployed melodies and murmuring repeated notes hold attention throughout Zhou Long’s Green.

Perhaps Stephen Hartke’s Fault Line is the collection’s most probing, dramatic, discreetly resourceful, and least formulaic work: a substantial conclusion to a beautifully engineered contemporary harp collection that offers something for every musical taste. Well worth hearing.

-- ClassicsToday.com

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Choral Performance!

The wonderful Conspirare chamber choir, known for its interpretive depth and other-worldly sonic lushness, offers another of its captivating programs — this time joined by three superb guitar quartets — in a program remarkably relevant for our time. The choir is joined by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, the Texas Guitar Quartet, the Austin Guitar Quartet, and cellist Douglas Harvey for this release featuring compositions by Reena Esmail, Craig Hella Johnson, Nico Muhly, and Kile Smith. Conspirare is a virtuoso choir. The Grammy-winning ensemble comprises distinctive solo artists who are also committed to the highest level of ensemble performance. These professional singers travel to Austin from around the country to perform together, providing their audiences with a rare level of choral music making.

REVIEW:

Conspirare’s new recording featuring the Austin-based choral group and three guitar quartets bookends impressive large-scale works by Nico Muhly and Kile Smith with small jewels by Reena Esmail and founding conductor Craig Hella Johnson.

Smith’s The Dawn’s Early Light features only one guitar quartet but the most beautiful texts, from Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s 1883 autobiography, one of the earliest books by a Native American woman.

The participation of three guitar quartets from LA and Texas adds texture and warmth to Muhly’s How Little You Are, a thoughtful 40-minute meditation on the words of American pioneer women in the 19th century, its lovely solos sung by Estelí Gomez.

Esmail’s When the Guitar—inspired by a 14th-century Persian lyric, ‘When the guitar can forgive the past, it starts singing’—uses the intriguing sounds of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet as one of the layers of a fabulous wrap for the chorus. Johnson’s serene The Song That I Came to Sing, which sets a Rabindranath Tagore poem for cello and treble voices, was composed as a framing piece for the program ‘which would reflect aspects of unfulfilled purpose and a longing for intimacy with the Divine’.

-- Gramophone

The Conspirare chamber choir, known for its interpretive depth and otherworldly sonic lushness, offers another of its captivating programs—this time joined by three superb guitar quartets—in a program remarkably relevant for our time. Conspirare’s debut album on Delos, The Hope of Loving, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance in 2020. Here, the combination of guitar quartet and chorus is so successful that one wonders why more composers have not written for it. The works on this album were written by four of America’s greatest living composers: Nico Muhly, Reena Esmail, Kile Smith, and Craig Hella Johnson.

-- WFMT Chicago

Mary Elizabeth Bowden, praised for her “splendid, brilliant” artistry (Gramophone), celebrates the narrative power of the trumpet with "Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet." Bowden is joined by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Allen Tinkham in a collection of new concertos that redefine the trumpet’s voice in modern classical music. This recording, a testament to Bowden’s commitment to expanding the trumpet repertoire, features world premiere recordings of works by James M. Stephenson, Clarice V. Assad, Vivian Fung, Tyson Gholston Davis, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Reena Esmail, showcasing the richness and versatility of contemporary classical trumpet music.