Catalog

AL COMBATE, the debut release from the Chicago Arts Orchestra (Javier José Mendoza, Artistic Director), highlights New Spain as a mecca of baroque and galant music through a handpicked selection of works from two of eighteenth-century colonial Mexico's most prolific and influential composers, whose music explores the period's transatlantic cultural flow from Europe to New Spain: Ignacio Jerusalem, a master of the galant style who brought modern European styles and techniques across the Atlantic; and Santiago Billoni, whose harmonic experimentation and erudite voice helped shape late baroque repertoire.

The music of Irish composer Gráinne Mulvey explores the juxtaposition of polar opposites, pitting the real against the synthetic in finely crafted and thought-provoking works. AKANOS, an all-Mulvey album on Navona Records, includes seven of her works.

Strong convictions make for strong emotion, and in Michael J. Evans' case, emotion transforms into operatic scenes. A FINE AGITATION is an eight-part stage work based on Susan B. Anthony's letters during her infamous voting trial, which sheds light on the beloved social reformer from a personal, intimate, and profoundly charming angle. Both biographies and political subjects are notoriously difficult to set to music without becoming either dry tragedies or kitschy pastiches, but Evans circumvents this pitfall with a compositional style that is subtly, tastefully shaded, and at times almost light-footed. It shows Anthony, an American social justice icon, from a perspective that might have been disregarded for the better part of a century – the perspective of being human.

Jonathan Sacks composer “Incantations: Book V” Recorded August 2003 with the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra. Conducted by Carl St. Clair “Litanies” and “Ghost Horses” Recorded December 2006 at Futura Productions in Boston, MA. Produced by Bob Lord “5th (S)eason” Recorded July 2000 [...]

It is tempting to compare Matej Meštrović's compositional style to his great predecessors in the late-Romantic tradition. After all, much of the Croatian composer's style and techniques would be right at home in Rachmaninoff’s concertos, Tchaikovsky's works, or Prokofiev's neoclassicism; and the name of the album's first work, Danube Rhapsody, naturally evokes associations with Smetana's similarly river-themed Vltava. Add to all of this that Meštrović, like most of his great musical ancestors, is a talented virtuoso pianist, and it's easy to see why 3 RHAPSODIES is bound to meet with enthusiasm.