Wild at Heart is the second album in the “Chaconne Project” series on Sono Luminus, which reaches into the realm of parallel universes — connecting the past to the present, into the future. A collection of contemporary chaconnes that echo reincarnations of Bach’s iconic work for solo violin, Wild at Heart reflects a spectrum of sounds from delicate harmonics to hardcore noise. The composers featured on this album are Yoon-Ji Lee, Elizabeth Hoffman, Annie Gosfield and John King, who each introduce a unique voice.

If this global pandemic made anything more clear, it is that we are all connected. By remembering something that is not physically here on earth anymore, it is “kept alive.” At first, these new works felt like mere reactions to the Chaconne. But now I really see this second album as a series of reincarnations of Bach’s Chaconne. Each composer found their own personal connection to the Chaconne, giving new life to those select elements from the original work that resonated with them. Performing the original work connects us to the past, keeping Bach present. Creating new works inspired by the Chaconne facilitates a dream for a future. And, the new works are reproductions of the past in new lifeforms.

Choral Concert: Saint Clement's Choir - HOWELLS, H. / BAX, A

Violin Recital: Koljonen, Elissa Lee - CHOPIN, F. / ELGAR, E

A New York Times 25 Best Classical Music Track Selection for 2018 - Loom

Titled H e (a) r, this album features 7 world premiere recordings, including a soundscape which lends its title to the album by the group’s artistic director; composer and violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir. The work H e (a) r connects to ecology, acoustics and embodiment; drawing on encounters and what happens in the connection. Many of the instrumental works are a continuation of Nordic Affect’s longstanding collaboration with some of the exciting talent to emerge out of Iceland in recent years, many of which were featured on the 2015, release Clockworking. The title track was chosen for NPR's Songs We Love series and featured in various best-of-the-year lists, including Steve Smith’s for Night After Night, The Chicago Reader, and The New Yorker.

In addition to composing her own music, Ms. Markan Sigfúsdóttir has toured the world with indie band amiina and recorded and collaborated with a range of other bands and artists. Her compositions have been performed in Iceland, Australia, Europe and the US. A continuation of the solo work 2 Circles, found on the Clockworking album, is Point of Departure by composer, cello player, and singer Hildur Guðnadóttir. Hildur has been manifesting herself at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary music. Her output has encompassed four solo albums, and numerous works for theatre, dance performances and films. H e (a) r also features Reflections and Impressions by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, a recipient of Lincoln Center’s 2018 Emerging Artist Award and 2018 Martin E. Segal Award. Anna Thorvaldsdottir frequently works with large sonic structures that tend to reveal the presence of a vast variety of sustained sound materials, reflecting her sense of imaginative listening to landscapes and nature. A new collaboration is presented through Warm life at the foot of the iceberg by the Estonian Mirjam Tally. Sound is central to the Estonian MirjamTally’s creations. Her music is a flow of playful contrasts where a sense of humour and poetic use of sound are blended to mix. Her music has been performed in over 20 countries and earned her various accolades, including the 2018 Swedish Manifest prize.

REVIEWS:

“Loom” begins with a thin thread of sound that is patiently roughed up and smoothed out in ways that seem both generous and brittle, with the light seeming to enter right where the texture appears most broken.

-- New York Times

The music is exceedingly beautiful and engaging. Not everything is new-lyric and that is good, just like a meal is best if it is not about one taste in unrelenting sameness. The space for the extended technique sort of Modernity is used creatively and wisely and it frames and brackets the tonal washes properly and bracingly.

-- Gapplegate Modern Classical Music Review

Gershwin: Porgy and Bess

Haydn, F.J.: Symphonies - Nos. 23, 35, 42

“In reimagining the Bach Chaconne and Ockeghem’s Deo Gratias, I searched for meaning and connection to the greater, mysterious universe. My collaborator Spencer Topel, and I created an expansive sonic experience. It is as close to stopping time as I can imagine.” (Pauline Kim Harris)

Ambient Chaconne is an immersive exploration of the J. S. Bach Partita No. 2 in D Minor: IV. Chaconne (BWV 1004). Unfolding over 42 minutes Ambient Chaconne blends live and pre-recorded violin with electronics. Using both human and machine transcription, the Chaconne serves as the structural underpinning to the work, appearing often as small disassociated fragments, and at other times in extremes: consisting of extended passages of sounded or silent materials. As with renditions of the Chaconne by past composers such as Brahms and Busoni, Ambient Chaconne extends the notion of transcription metaphysical, framing the Chaconne both as a musical composition and as a collective-subconscious memory.

Deo is an acoustic-electronic transcription of Johannes Ockeghem’s stunning Deo Gratias devised as a complement to Ambient Chaconne. Notable as a 36-part canon, Ockeghem Ockeghem evokes singing of angels in heaven via an innovation on a traditional canon, using this ancient musical device as a kind of acoustic feedback delay. In essence, our Deo expands this idea of delays to a canon of thousands, in an ever expanding and infinite soundscape, where the melodies eventually dissolve into resonance.

REVIEW:

Pauline Kim Harris has become a major phenomenon in New York’s avant-garde milieu, and her work has taken her around the world as a virtuoso violinist and collaborator with leading artists and ensembles. These acoustic-electronic arrangements of, or inspired by, Bach and Ockeghem create a transcendent mood, expanding the original material into myriad combinations and resonances that suggest a metaphysical understanding of the potential of ambient music.

Ambient Chaconne preserves much of the sonorities and musical shapes of Bach’s original, though over its duration the music evolves and takes on a mystical, expansive feeling. Deo suggests an angelic choir in all its brightness and beauty. Both works, with their contrasting hues of darkness and light, give this album a balanced program that will fascinate and move many listeners.

– All Music Guide (Blair Sanderson)

This new release is a full album of hymn favorites written by Charles Wesley. Wesley is one of the greatest hymn writers in history, penning over 6,000! Included are titles such as 'Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," and "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing." The Choral Arts Society of Washington, founded in 1965, has experienced monumental success, performing with the national Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony, the Mariinsky Orchestra, and many more. The Chamber Singers is a small ensemble of thrity, launched on the Society's fiftieth anniversary. Scott Tucker, artistic director for the chorus, has prepared choruses for Christoph Eschenbach, Vassilly Sinalsky, Marin Alsop, among others. J. Reilly Lewis, a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and The Julliard School, is a world renowned organist and is the Music Director of the Cathedral Choral Society.

In Scotland we are fortunate to enjoy a living oral tradition which features the performance of lengthy ballads to simple melodies in a manner which would certainly have been recognisable to our forebears in previous centuries, and it seems sensible to draw on this tradition when reconstructing a performance of 'Graysteil.' This cross-fertilisation between the traditional and art music of Scotland also serves helpfullly to undermine our modern habit of catagorising music, an irrelevance which would never even have occurred to James IV or his 'fithelaris'! - D. James Ross

John Hsu performs on a Baryton with fifteen strings: six bowed and nine plucked. All three instruments are tuned to a= 430'

MOONBOW is Gunnar Andreas Kristinsson’s second album, the first to be released on a major label. The music, performed by leading members of the Icelandic contemporary music scene, was recorded in Kaldalo´n and Norðurljo´s, the two recital halls of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall. While Gunnar’s first album, Patterns, contains pieces from his study and freelance years in The Hague, MOONBOW is a selection of more mature works from a fruitful period in the composer’s life after moving back to Iceland in 2009, with all the experience from the Netherlands in his pocket. The album features a trio, a quartet and a quintet, flanked by two larger ensemble pieces. The works are diverse, not only in terms of instrumentation but also in terms of musical subject and give a good insight into Gunnar’s distinctive and personal sound-world.

REVIEW:

Kristinsson’s style blends elements of tonality, atonality, New Simplicity (especially in its obsessive repeated patterns) and postmodernist techniques. Patterns IIb (2016) is a fine example of that, with its louring atmosphere despite its use of an Icelandic folk song and euphonious chiming percussion: it was based on a piece of 2004 scored for quartets of gamelan and Western instruments. Roots (2019), by contrast, takes the overtone series as its abstract inspiration. The evocative titletrack, Moonbow (2017), played with relish here by the excellent Siggi Quartet, is more straightforwardly descriptive, reflecting in sound the lunar rainbow (or ‘moonbow’). As such, it is the most directly communicative, and put me in mind at some removes of Saariaho’s celebrated aurora borealis-inspired Lichtbogen (1986).

Sono Luminus provides sound to match Kristinsson’s often coruscating textures and the performers’ clean, luminous virtuosity. You will not regret investigating this music.

– Gramophone

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Baltimore Consort.

REVIEW:

Handel wrote his solo voice cantatas knowing that he had the most accomplished singers at his disposal, real virtuosos for whom no embellishment or high-speed flourish would be an obstacle. During his roughly four-year stay in Italy he wrote something like 100 cantatas and it was near the end of his sojourn that he began Apollo e Dafne--a work for soprano and baritone based on a theme from Greek mythology having to do with divine arrogance and unrequited love, desperate passion and the ultimate dominion of eternal purity. Handel was inspired to write his own eternal music for this story--music that he used and re-used in later works. No one could ever accuse Handel of not knowing a good tune (especially when he wrote it) nor of failing to get the maximum mileage out of it. In what amounts to a mini-opera he effectively dramatizes the story and gives each singer music that is both dazzling and lyrical, and as melodically aristocratic and agreeable as any composer ever conceived.

Chances are excellent that Handel would have heartily approved of the singers on this disc--and would have killed for an orchestra as technically accomplished and musically and stylistically informed as Les Violons du Roy. As I've said before: before you talk about Tafelmusik, the English Concert, New London Consort, or Les Arts Florissants, you should get to know this Quebec-based ensemble, in most respects the equal or superior of any of the world's chamber orchestras. Conductor Bernard Labadie is among the few contemporary conductors worthy of attention for virtually anything he directs--no jet-setting, fly-by-night projects ever cross his schedule, and you can be sure that he never presides over a performance that's beneath a personal standard that gives preeminence to the dictates of the score, supported by the highest artistic principles. For this he chooses performers that most precisely suit the work at hand and coaxes performances that sound absolutely natural and unforced yet astonishingly accurate and eloquent. (His St. Matthew Passion last spring in Toronto with Les Violons ranks among the most sublime performances I've ever heard--of anything.)

Karina Gauvin is an outstanding singer whose voice possesses that desirable combination of easy listenability and an almost frightening agility that allows her to keep us enthralled while she tosses off amazing runs and gentle expressive passages with equal authority. Russell Braun makes a perfect partner, believable both in his opening bravado and his later resignation. There's some terrific music here, and all concerned make it memorable and eminently repeatable, from Gauvin's heartbreakingly tender first aria "Felicissima quest'alma" (Happy is this spirit), her character's sweet innocence depicted in Handel's scoring for flute and pizzicato strings, spiced with Sylvain Bergeron's theorbo accents, to Apollo and Dafne's spirited duet "Una guerra ho dentro il seno" (My heart is consumed with turmoil) and Apollo's final plaint for his beloved--one of Handel's most compelling, profoundly emotional settings. The sound couldn't be better. It comes from the orchestra and recording team's considerable experience with the near-perfect acoustics of the Françoys-Bernier Concert Hall at Quebec's Le Domaine Forget. Whether your interest is Handel, Baroque music, vocal music, or just plain great music, don't miss this one.

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Includes galliard(s) by Anthony Holborne. Soloist: Ronn McFarlane.

Greenfire: Robin Bullock (6- & 12-string guitars, cittern, piano); Ken Kolodner (hammered dulcimer); Laura Risk (fiddle, viola).

Recorded at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, New York in May 1998.