Release Date: January 13, 2015
Catalog #: NV5985
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Chamber
Piano
String Quartet
Violin

Beneath Winter Light

The Music Of Heidi Jacob

Heidi Jacob composer

Barbara Govatos violin; Charles Abramovic piano
The Momenta String Quartet | Emilie-Anne Gendron violin;
Adda Kridler violin; Stephanie Griffin viola; Michael Haas cello
Charles Abramovic piano

Common threads between art forms are woven into the creative process of exploring and expressing our shared experiences, emotions, and uncertainties. On her debut Navona Records release, BENEATH WINTER LIGHT, composer Heidi Jacob finds inspiration in film and poetry, as well as in music from past centuries, illustrating her faculty of expanding on timeless themes within modern compositional settings.

Inspired by subjects on the nature of existence, divinity, and love in Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light (1962), Jacob’s work for violin and piano, Winter Light, uses a combination of minimalist and 12-tone techniques to create an often mysterious and ominous interaction between the deliberate remarks of the piano and the fluid patterns of the violin. Regard á Schubert: a Fantasy Impromptu, incited by Franz Schubert’s Impromptu in C Minor, Op. 90, explores the idea of context, placing the initial motivic cell in various harmonic settings from Classical to 21st-century musical styles, while Fantasy surveys contrasts in texture, virtuoso gesture, and lyricism stemming from melodic elements in the opening material. The electroacoustic piece Salome Revisited uses reprocessed themes and spoken texts from Strauss’ Salome (1905) to build a cerebral and tense atmosphere that reflects the dark imagery in the opera.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Artist Information

Heidi Jacob

Composer

Heidi Jacob’s music has been described by BBC Magazine as “compositions ...of complex mesmerizing beauty,” by David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a musical adventurer,” and by Gramophone Magazine as music with “.....forthright expressiveness [that] exposes a multitude of stylistic associations.” A composer, cellist, and conductor, she is a graduate of both the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, with a D.M.A. in composition from Temple University. She has performed as a cellist throughout the United States and Europe and has recorded as a cellist and conductor for the Capstone Records, Albany Records, and Navona Records.