There are Celtic Music specialty radio shows and on-demand audio channels. Celtic Music albums are sold in health food and yoga stores. We know it when we hear it. Right? So, what is it? There’s a loose definition (or maybe tacit agreement) that Celtic Music is found in those European cultures where the Celtic tribes invaded. Aside from Ireland and Scotland, Wales qualifies, as does Brittany, the Galician part of Spain, the Isle of Man. If we focus just on the Gaelic language group and fine tune it to just Scotland and Ireland, we really know what we are hearing, right? Do we? While there is plentiful cross-pollination between these two nations and an ancient shared heritage, they are not the same place, and their music is not a single common recipe using slightly different ingredients. Irish stew is not haggis. There are differences grand and small, subtle and great. Distinct nations with different histories will evolve different artistic natures, and this is played out in a joyful noise in our Celtic lands. Ronn McFarlane’s heritage and lifelong interest in Scottish music allows us to walk first (as Neil Munro put it) “song-haunted over the Moors.”

CONTENTS:

• Carolan's Welcome
• Banish Misfortune
• The Battle of Harlaw
• Pipe on the Hob
• Cliffs of Moher
• Hey My Nanny - Guzzle Together
• Carolan's Dream
• Sheebeg Sheemore
• The Flowers of Edinburgh
• Miss Noble
• Fanny Power
• The Flaggon
• The Stool of Repentance
• The Lone Vale
• Flee Over the Water
• Hoop Her and Gird Her
• If I Had a Bonny Lass
• Lady Athenry
• The Seas Are Deep
• Tune Without Title, No. 172
• The Monaghan Jig
• The Kid on the Mountain
• Blind Mary
• George Brabazon
• Separation of the Body and Soul
• The Butterfly

REVIEW:

For the latest album in his already rich discography, Ronn McFarlane takes us on a musical journey to Ireland and Scotland, highlighting both the vivacity and delicacy of the lute. The album is laid out with incredible care. You’ll hear the touching sadness in “The Lone Vale”, a traditional Scottish tune played with such a soft insistence you could fall into a melancholy trance. Then comes “Flee Over the Water,” another Scottish traditional tune, but with such a spirit of happiness and a sense of recovery, it seems to offer the courage to look up and out at the horizon. Irish tracks, like “The Monaghan Jig” and “The Kid on the Mountain” are irresistible.

And what a beautiful way to end the CD: “The Butterfly”, a traditional Irish piece that concludes the album, will make you fall hard for the magic of Ronn McFarlane’s lute.

– WCRB 99.5FM (Boston, MA)

Includes work(s) for organ by Johann Pachelbel. Soloist: Antoine Bouchard.

The recording project Northscapes weaves works-from the first decades of the twenty-first century by composers from the Nordic and Baltic countries of Europe-into a tapestry of soundscapes, vibrating between landscape and the imagination, between the external and internal, between nature and psyche. What these works for piano solo share is a particular attunement to nature, reverberating out of the ever-present reservoir of pagan myths, legends, and folk music of the region. Their sensitivity to the sonic environment allows these composers to explore the liminal space dividing yet connecting landscape, soundscape, and mindscape.

More than mere musical "representations" of the striking natural landscapes of the North, each work, in it's own way, attempts to transform the natural world into a sonic landscape, a mindscape, into imaginary geographies. More than simply pastoral nostalgia, these sonic meditations on nature reach beyond the physical to the spiritual, probing the limit dividing the objective and subjective. Whether it is vast cosmic space or the intimate, interiority of the expressive voice, these works harness the power of music to probe the emotional contours of the tension between world and mind.

Haunted by landscapes colored by memory, fantasy, dreams, decay and infused with emotion, this music shifts consciousness through a transformational synthesis of landscape, soundscape, and mindscape - a shift from imaginary soundscapes to soundscapes of the imagination. In the hands of Lithuanian pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute, Northscapes is a sonic Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights of the ear and mind. -- Christopher Zimmerman

REVIEWS:

A superb recital disc from a quite exceptionally talented pianist…I was consistently won over by the fabulous talents of Jokubaviciute. The representative of her agency described her in an email introducing this recording as “one hell of a pianist”. For once, such a comment is an understatement!

-- MusicWeb International

This fascinating, unusual and at times enthralling selection is performed with a great balance of precision, understanding and respect. Importantly for a program in which textural considerations are central, Northscapes is beautifully recorded with warmth, plenty of space and no brassiness in the upper registers.

-- Limelight

It is a fascinating, well-balanced programme, played with engrossingly undemonstrative virtuosity…Jokubaviciute navigates the contrasting demands of each work with hugely impressive skill and Sono Luminus’s sound is superb. This is an enthralling programme from the northern world that no listener wary of contemporary music need be fearful of (Vasks’s nostalgically evocative score, for instance), though demands are sometimes made of their ears. Recommended.

-- Gramophone

Zachary Carrettín writes: “I chose “Metamorphosis” as the title of this album for several reasons. Having lived with these works for a quarter century, they have changed me, and I have changed along the way. During this project my dear friend of thirty-three years, and former mentor, passed away. Ken and I spent most of my first master’s degree studying Bach manuscripts and first editions, and I think his influence is with me all the time. He always felt that the treatises and other primary sources were there to provide possibilities rather than to limit our scope. Our conversations went deep and wide, and included a couple of extended journeys in Europe and the United States, studying manuscripts together. I recorded these pieces during the Covid-19 pandemic, just weeks after my uncle in Italy passed away, and my aunt in Florida passed away, and while my dear friend in Colorado was preparing himself to pass onward from this life as well. Due to Coronavirus concerns, my partner in life and music–Mina, our chihuahua Apple, and I drove thirty hours each way from Colorado to Virginia and back, not stopping at restaurants nor hotels, to make this recording at the chapel of Sono Luminus Studios…”

REVIEWS:

The metamorphosis referred to in the title of this release by violist Zachary Carrettín is that experienced by the musician himself, who writes that the Bach Suites for solo cello “have changed me, and I have changed along the way.” He is not the first to have recorded the cello suites on a viola, and his performance is not of the pathbreaking sort; it does not contain any of the various systems and innovations that have been applied to the suites. It’s a satisfying performance, but the main thing here is the engineering and how it intersects with the playing and with Carrettín’s instrument, an 18th century viola by an unknown maker fitted with gut strings and historical bridge, tailpiece, and bass bar. Carrettín also uses a historical tenor viol bow. The intimate sound catches numerous small details of the instrument’s sound without devolving into heavy breathing, extraneous instrument noise, etc. A fine audiophile Bach release. 

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

 The works’ depth and beauty are unmatched when they are heard on cello, but their brighter elements are particularly well highlighted here, resulting in a disc that cannot supplant the many fine cello versions of the music but that supplements and complements them to excellent effect.

– Infodad.com

Finally available worldwide in physical format is this amazing album by Kristín Anna, of the band Múm. Produced by Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur rós. Kristín Anna is an Icelandic vocalist and classically trained multi-instrumentalist. In addition to her membership in the band Múm, during which time the band released three full-length albums, she was accordion player in a Bulgarian goth punk band Storsveit Nix Noltes from 2003-2010. She performed her own songwriting for piano and voice for the first time April 21, 2006 at The Stone in New York under the name Kría Brekkan.

REVIEWS:

Dirty Linen (8-9/99, p.65) - "...one of America's best lutenists....offers 44 tracks of music from three manuscripts from the 17th century. There is generally more nobility than abandon in the treatments...masterfully played."

Bach, the lute, and the lautenwerk (lute-harpsichord) have fascinated me for years. Upon investigating Bach's connection with the two instruments, one is immediately faced with the striking absence of one vital piece of evidence: though we know that many lautenwerks existed, none, to our knowledge, have survived into our time. The lautenwerk, the name by which it is usually known in German and English, was a harpsichord like instrument of one or two manuals with the same range as lute, but somewhat lower than the harpsichord. It was strung with gut rather than brass. - Nigel North, London, June 1994

What Artemisia Heard: Music and Art from the Time of Caravaggio and Gentileschi is the culmination of a unique project envisioned by El Mundo artistic director Richard Savino. Enraptured over the work of female Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, Savino began to question why the music of Artemisia’s time is not as widely appreciated as the visual arts of the era. Recognizing a ubiquitous connection in popular music between the aural and visual, Savino had the ingenious idea to integrate the sublime painting of Artemisia and her contemporaries directly with the equally sublime music these painters would have heard at the time.

Featured alongside paintings by Artemisia and her contemporaries is music by composers Uccellini, Kapsberger, Frescobaldi, Caccini, Piccinini, Monteverdi, Falconieri and Rossi, among others, as performed by El Mundo and distinguished soloists. El Mundo is dedicated to the performance of 16th – 19th c. Latin American, Spanish and Italian chamber music. Under the direction of guitarist/lutenist Richard Savino, El Mundo was formed in 1999 and is made up of some of today’s finest period instrument performers.