From Bow to String
From the hugely talented husband-wife team of award-winning violist Karen Dreyfus and New York Philharmonic concertmaster Glenn Dicterow comes “From Bow to String”, their expressive interpretation of two masterful pieces by William Walton and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Aided by the Warsaw National Philharmonic with renowned conductors Carl St. Clair and Jerzy Swoboda at the helm.
Covering ground from the brooding, emotional intensity of the first movement of Walton’s Viola Concerto to the triumphant sweeping instrumentation of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, this collection showcases two masters of their instruments inviting the listener to fully experience this wonderful music.
Posted: October 25th, 2009 | No Comments »
Destinations
The concert hall housing the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra in Olomouc, Czech Republic is a world away from the varying locales the five living Latin American composers featured here call home. Their journey to this small Eastern European city in a way symbolizes the convergence of influence and exodus that make the story of Destinations all the more real. Like Argentinean-born 20th Century composer Astor Piazzolla, each of these North American-based composers had uprooted from Latin America and set out for the United States at various points in their lives. They came to America to study, teach, compose, and ultimately share their music influenced by the places that helped and continue to shape them.
“One could think of the Destinations project as belonging to a ‘Post-Latin American era,” says Ricardo Lorenz. “The sound is genuinely coming out of composers belonging to the Latin American Diaspora – composers born in yet uprooted from Latin America.”
This is a collection marked by musical diversity throughout; Alfonso Tenreiro’s Meditacion rich in Romantic harmonic passages; Astor Piazzolla’s Milonga en Re a tango-infused orchestral work; Sergio Cervetti’s Chacona para el Martirio de Atahualpa an energetic chaconne baroque-style dance flavored with minimalist aesthetics. With Destinations, a unified hope to change the game for an underserved segment of modern classical music brought together by a common story is ready for new ears.
Posted: October 24th, 2009 | No Comments »
Although all the works appearing on Michael G. Cunningham’s Colonnade were written during the 1970s, the album maintains a timeless quality throughout. Cunningham’s works are lush and dramatic, depicting everything from early to mid- Twentieth-century paintings (Free Designs) to Greek mythology (Aedon). Colonnade is rich in texture, with electrosonics seamlessly melded with orchestral timbres in Aedon, and vocalists pairing written works by Shakespeare and Longfellow with Cunningham’s haunting melodies in the album’s closer, Symphonic Arias – Night. Of the piece, Cunningham writes: “In spite of additional imagery that each poet intended in his poem, the arias each seem to convey one aspect of the night … there is an ominous implication here, in that lovely sounds and voices ultimately pass into an unending inscrutable night.” Luckily, for listeners, Cunningham’s gorgeous works on Colonnade will not disappear into the ether like Symphonic Arias harmonically implies. Colonnade will be available everywhere on October 27 2009, and distributed by Naxos.
Posted: October 24th, 2009 | No Comments »
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