Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Giacinto Scelsi was much more than a composer. He was a poet, a writer, and an intellectual. Perhaps one of the greatest of the twentieth century. He is best remembered for writing music based only around one pitch, which he altered through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics. This new release is the seventh volume in Stradivarius’s exploration of his works, and features four works which utilize the piano, violin, and a combination of the two. Performing these works are violinist Marco Fusi and pianist Anna D’Errico, both of whom are experts in the field of modern music and the avant garde.

Pierre Boulez was one of the dominating figures of post-war classical music during the middle of the twentieth century. While his body of completed works is relatively small (largely due to his tendency to revise his early compositions over and over) his oeuvre includes several pieces regarded by many musicologists as landmark works of the era. One such work, Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master) is included on this release. The work sets the poetry of Rene Char for contralto and six instruments. The International Contemporary Ensemble along with mezzo-soprano Katalin Karolyi perform this work, as well as Eclat and Dialogue de l’ombre double.

Classical Music

When talent meets devotion towards an artistic expression, and a particular musical instrument appears to win the attention of a young girl, this combination of precious factors fosters the start of a life dedicated to that instrument. Growing up in such a suggestive land as Sardinia, whose song has inspired some great artists and poets, this lucky one, now a successful guitarist, has been uprooted by destiny, which has offered her skills, numerous challenges, and opportunities to fulfill her growing ability to express herself at her best in some of the most important centers of the Western world. This release, her first attempt to show guitar lovers and fans an exceptionally ambitious choice of classical Italian and Spanish repertoire, will be a successful step into the clan of our best recording artists. Renata Arlotti has chosen Tedesco and Asencio's solo masterpieces for this album. Renata Arlotti began studying classical guitar in her home town of Sassari before continuing in Milan with Lorenzo Micheli. She earned her Bachelor's degree from the Conservatoire de la Vallee d'Aoste, graduating in 2011 with highest honors. She went on to study at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiano and then the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Classical Music

Lou Harrison said: "A friend reminded me that Conductor L. Stokowski was about to celebrate his 90th birthday, and that several composers had already written short pieces for the occasion so in a hurry, I composed Jahla. It was performed, with other pieces, during the birthday party for this dear friend". In Jahla, the compositional technique was taken from that practiced in northern India, where a pedal is used between the notes of the melody, thus producing the sound of perpetual movement. About Avalokiteshvara, Harrison said: "Avalokiteshvara is the Buddha of compassion, he who saves all creatures. It is a piece written in the Korean style called The Delightful". Music for Bill and Me (1967), for Harp is dedicated to his life partner William Colvig, an electrician and passionate musician with a great interest in acoustics. Bill built several percussion instruments that were used by Lou over the course of many years. The mysteries of the sky greatly influenced ancient civilizations across the world, inspiring human beings in every era to travel through the heavens, imagining and creating stories and legends for their own cultures. Just as the planets seem to "wander" in the sky as they change position in relation to the fixed position of stars, our minds, with eyes turned upward toward the immense firmament above, wander in an imaginary and irrational world of stories about them. The Planets is a suite composed of a series of nine short musical tales inspired by the "moods", sensations and imagination that connect us to mythology and astrology. Each story is dedicated to a planet and it's characteristics, and this in their dreamlike game, has stimulated the imagination of the composer of the suite.

This collection of piano pieces by Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice, 1882 - Treviso, 1973) almost seems to take us along a winding Venetian canal as we move through the moods of a composer who made the contamination between art and life the cornerstone of his existence. As he himself wrote in a letter to the French musicologist Henry Pruni�res in summer 1924: "My work is the barometer of my life". From the extreme perspective of Bianchi e neri (1964), the last of his piano works, all the way back to the Poemetti lunari (1909-10), perhaps one of the first characteristic expressions of his style, Malipiero's music explores the evocative possibilities of free and concise forms. His proclivity for a laconic style leads him to repudiate thematic elaboration in favor of short musical panels; a rambling flow more than a narrative evolution, timbric quality over ornamental virtuosity. Gino Gorini, the first great interpreter of Malipierian pianism, has well grasped the paradoxical game of antithesis that is at the core of Malipiero's invention when he speaks of a "discontinuous continuity, an unregulated rule". The result, however, is an imaginative and coherent world, one of the most original and unique of the first half of the twentieth century in Italy.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music