This release comes from one of the hardest-working and most respected pianists in the world today- Stewart Goodyear. Every album from Goodyear is released to widespread critical acclaim, and this one is sure to be no different. Goodyear writes of this release: “It was the year Glenn Gould died when I first heard his legendary name. It was his Bach that introduced me to his playing. His sound struck me immediately… a sound that was compelling and uncompromising. It was not designed to speak words of mere prettiness, but of an individual truth… My decision to record Glenn Gould’s program came right after performing it in Montreal. While playing homage to one of the great Canadian legends, I was being transported to childhood memories of growing up in Toronto, Gould’s home town, studying at the Royal Conservatory, Gould’s home alma mater, and being an artist from Canada, Gould’s country.

REVIEWS:

The Bach is brisk and crisp and the ornamentation with the Gibbons piece is tightly coiled. The Brahms selections are robustly songful. If the concept and execution of this release aren’t appealing enough, Goodyear’s program was engineered by Daniel Shores at the Sono Luminus studios in Boyce, Virginia, the source of some of the finest piano recordings on earth.

– Absolute Sound

He does have a good grasp on the way Gould played, capturing his crisp attack and emotional impact. Goodyear perfectly captures Gould’s unusual approach to Brahms, which was resolutely unsentimental. His performance of the Berg Sonata again captures Gould’s approach, albeit with a piano sound more resonant than the one Gould himself favored.

– The Arts Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

Before television or radio, the piano was the focal point of the home. Holiday recordings such as Jacqueline Schwab's DOWN CAME AN ANGEL evoke the spirit of days gone by.
Best known for her solo piano soundtracks to Ken Burns's PBS documentaries, Schwab has a quaint, inviting touch on the keyboard and a wonderful appreciation of Appalachian musical tradition. The result is a warm, familiar Christmas sound filled with nostalgia. Schwab's piano shimmers with a delightful tone, like a parlor with a fireplace on a snowy day.
Though the album is entirely instrumental, the traditional hymns, carols, and spirituals were meant to be sung. To that end, the producers have included lyric sheets, giving families the opportunity to gather around the piano once again to experience a Christmas tradition.

This unique recording of Ronn McFarlane's original music composed for the Lute, enables Indigo Road to bridge the gap between traditional and modern music. All of the compositions were originally conceived as solos, however McFarlane adds parts for bass, flute, harp, percussion, cittern, harmonium and string quartet to several of the tunes, in order to heighten individual mood and character. McFarlane has made a recording of very accessible music as he stays true to the title song, 'Indigo Road', which signifies a spiritual path or the road we take through life. The pieces take the listener down aural roads from one composition to the next: from the peaks of Denali, to Pinetops, into a storming sky in Blue Norther an across Uncharted Waters...we are transported to the future through dreams and left feeling wistful and nostalgic as if remembering the distant past.

Includes work(s) by Michael Praetorious, Vincenzo Galilei, Johann Hermann Schein, Pierre Attaingnant, various composers. Ensemble: Ensemble Doulce Mémoire.

Frescobaldi, G.: Harpsichord Music

The life of the itinerant musician during the reign of Elizabeth I was not a happy one. In 1572, Elizabeth's government enacted a law that banned all musicians, actors and vagabonds who were not attached to aristocratic families. Because of this repression, many musicians packed up their lutes and recorders and went overseas to more tolerant courts in Denmark and Northern Germany. These musicians also brought with them enormously popular English ballad tunes. These tunes took root in foreign lands and inspired Northern European composers like Sweelinck, Praetorius and Scheidt.
This recording by the ensemble Les Witches presents a set of tuneful English ballads in their simplest, harmonized versions. As an added treat the ensemble, comprised of violin, recorder, lute, and harpsichord, improvise on a number of the tunes. The greatest composers of the Elizabethan era are presented, including Dowland, Morley, Johnson, and the wonderfully named Nicholas le Strange. Les Witches are superb instrumentalists and their performances are colored with exuberant energy and, when necessary, a touch of melancholy. This is an ideal introduction to the unique sound of the English Renaissance ballad.

Dorian made some of its best recordings, both technically and artistically, in Venezuela, and this performance of Antonio Estévez’s Cantata Criolla got the ball rolling. Although made locally, the sonics are every bit as good as the later productions by Dorian’s own engineers, and the performance is stunning. Estévez’s masterpiece is subtitled “Florentino, the one who sang with the devil”, and it tells the story of a singing contest between a Venezuelan cowboy and Satan, with Florentino emerging victorious by reciting the names of the saints. The work has three concise parts and lasts a bit more than half an hour. The third part, the actual contest, is set to a sort of samba arrangement (I know, that’s Brazilian, but you get the idea) of the Dies Irae, and if there were any justice in the universe the piece would be as popular as Carmina Burana. 

As mentioned, the performance is spectacular, with two sensational soloists (particularly tenor Idwer Alvarez as Florentino), a big, enthusiastic chorus, and the resplendent Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra all under the enthusiastic baton of the late Eduardo Mata. The coupling, Villa-Lobos’ Chôros No. 10, is just as much fun and brings the playing time up to about 47 minutes. Yes, that’s rather short by today’s standards, but it doesn’t matter. This is one of those discs that belongs in every choral music collection, and I dearly wish that the better amateur choral societies would try this piece instead of their usual dreary diet of masses, requiems, and Messiahs.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Carolyn Surrick writes of this new release: “When I called Ronn McFarlane in January to ask if he wanted to play a house concert in April, he checked his calendar and said, “Sure, sounds great!” Members of Ensemble Galilei... are spread across the country, and we don’t usually get together until right before a performance. But Ronn and I live about twenty miles away from each other, so we started rehearsing. February turned to March in this year of COVID-19. There would be no house concerts. But we kept meeting on Saturday mornings... It was a few weeks into March when I turned to him and said, “Hey, let’s make a recording in June.” It was a crazy idea. We didn’t have much shared repertoire... That meant a huge investment of time and energy. I did not receive a resounding affirmative response. But days passed and the reality of the pandemic settled in. Nothing else was going to be happening this spring. No concerts. No tours. Cancellation after cancellation, with no end in sight. “Yes,” he said, “let’s do this.” I called Lindsey Nelson, Ensemble Galilei’s wonderful executive producer, and Collin Rae, the master of strategic marketing at Sono Luminus. I texted our producer, Dan Merceruio. Totally on board. We added rehearsals. Wrote harmony parts. Wrote new music. Arranged our favorite tunes for lute and viola da gamba… All in the shadow of the pandemic. Would we have done this a year ago? Not a chance. We were too busy… The recording exists because of this moment in time...”

REVIEWS:

This instrumental pairing, lute and viola da gamba, occurs only occasionally in Baroque and Renaissance literature. They augment Dowland’s Adew for Master Oliver Cromwell with newly composed works by McFarlane and with arrangements by both players. These are delightfully varied, taking up such works as The Allman Brothers’ Little Martha (originally an acoustic guitar solo by Duane Allman, so not as odd as it sounds), Amazing Grace, and Gounod’s Ave Maria. Some of the selections veer toward the Celtic folk side, including an intriguing version of Blackwater Slide modeled on one by Scottish musician Bert Jansch. Sono Luminus’ sound is, well, luminous, a pleasure throughout. Falling into a class of pandemic-time recordings where musicians rediscovered the enjoyment of home music-making, this is an unusually satisfying example of the genre. 

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)
What is wonderful and becomes most fascinating are the new compositions and the threading of two or three songs into one. Carolyn Surrick’s viola da gamba has a rarity in its ability to provide shadings of emotions that add great chemistry. Equally, Ronn McFarlane’s investments are worthy and in their own right.

– ConcertoNet.com (Christie Grimstad)

Les Violons du Roy: Encore!

Includes work(s) by William Byrd, John Dowland, Thomas Morley, various composers. Ensembles: Baltimore Consort, Toronto Consort. Soloists: Colin Tilney, Julianne Baird, Ronn McFarlane, Frederick Urrey.

Includes prelude(s) for keyboard by John Bull. Soloist: Colin Tilney.

An important contemporary of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the composer-pianist Jan Ladislav Dussek was born on February 12, 1760, in the small town of Czaslau, Bohemia. Music was a very important part of life of the Dussek family: his father Jan Joseph was a well-known organist and composer - who instructed his son at the age of five on the piano and later the organ - his mother Veronika an accomplished harpist, his brother Franz Benedikt an organist and composer, and his sister Katerina was a singer and pianist. Dussek died March 20, 1812, at the age of only 52 years in Talleyrand's Palace in St.Germaine-en-Laye. - Frederick Marvin

Like Chopin, Dussek wrote almost exclusively for piano. His style can be characterized as proto-romantic and an outgrowth as well as final florescence of the German Empfindsamkeit (sensibility) movement. Dussek's sonatas and concertos combine with a significant depth of expressive content, a wide range of dynamic levels varying from triple pianissimo to triple fortissimo, and a kaleidoscope of pianistic colors. They present great fluency and virtuoso polish. In his monumental three-volume 'History of the Sonata Idea,' the distinguished musicologist William S. Newman regards Dussek's best sonatas as being 'as close to the best of their day, including those of Clementi, Beethoven, Schubert and Weber - a view that may very well surprise all but the relatively few who have had the opportunity to explore or re-explore for themselves.' - Frederick Marvin

Icelandic cellist, singer, and composer Gyða Valtysdóttir, a founder of the band múm and 2019 winner of the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize, releases Epicycle II. Gyða Valtýsdóttir came to prominence with electronic experimentalists múm, the lauded Icelandic group leading the charge in the country’s fertile underground scene in the early 00s, rightfully gaining international recognition. She left the band to pursue her studies as a cellist; gaining a twofold Master’s degree from Musik Akademie, Basel, both as a classical player and a free-improvisational one. Since then she has journeyed with a colorful palette of collaborators, including The Kronos Quartet, Josephine Foster, Damien Rice, Colin Stetson, Jónsi (of Sigur Ros fame), Skúli Sverrisson, Ólöf Arnalds, Ben Frost, Aaron & Bryce Dessner (from The National) and visual-artist Ragnar Kjartansson. To name but a few.

REVIEWS:

Some of the musicians, like her fellow art-pop renegades Ólöf Arnalds and Jónsi, emphasize her crystalline, eldritch voice. Others, including Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daníel Bjarnason, deploy her cello in yearning lines and voluptuous waves. Altogether, the album offers otherworldly transport.

-- The New Yorker

Epicycle II is a wonderful experience and a tantalizing look into the future of experimental music collaboration.

-- San Francisco Classical Voice

Epicycle II is her crowning achievement to date.

-- A Closer Listen

From atmospheric micro-polyphony to heart-rending moments of electronic intimacy, the music is interesting and powerfully drawn.

-- Music City Review

A deeply cinematic score at times, this album is often transporting with great lift, giving the listener long opportunities to soar, bird-like, over the Icelandic landscape and beyond, for the most part leaving us safely and gently deposited on the earthly shore.

-- The Whole Note

Selections recorded 1975-1979.