Catalog

Composer Michael Cohen delivers an enticing follow up to his 2022 Navona Records release with ARIA, his second full album of original chamber works. Featuring a mix of studio and live recordings captured from various points in his diverse and expansive career, Cohen’s music emanates a thorough line of vitality and fervor. While strikingly rooted in tonal principles, these works embrace an elegant, confident, and ebullient character, permeated by a magnificent, effervescent spontaneity throughout.

GRAMMY-nominated conductor Eugene Rogers brings to life Jocelyn Hagen’s setting of the Roman Catholic Mass in AMASS. This work stands apart from the Mass settings of other composers who have practiced this centuries-old genre, including Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Joseph Haydn. While the music relies on the traditional Mass structure, it incorporates the spiritual writings of a diverse group of thinkers, ranging from a Muslim woman writing in the sixth century to a German theologian tried as a heretic 500 years later. In this way, the music is less about a particular religion but instead reaches toward the ineffable.

"Havel havalim hakol hevel," — “Merest breath, all is mere breath.” In the throes of lockdown, Nicholas Weininger found himself reflecting on this Hebrew verse; what is the nature of our collective life sustained on if not breath and breath alone? It was a breath robbed and convoluted during the COVID-19 pandemic: the ravaged breath of the afflicted, the fear of coming too close to the breath of another. Our world seemed to pause and take a breath, busy city streets gone barren amid our collective anxieties. Debuted and recorded by the Empire City Men’s Chorus, ALL IS MERE BREATH asks us to question the nature of our changed society in the thought of mere breath alone, and offers us refuge in the breath of song, perhaps, now and then, the purest form of it.

Following his 2022 release, STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, this latest collection of vocal music by Baltimore-based composer Peter Dayton reinforces his establishment as a mature and formidable talent in the world of art song. ALL IN THE SOUND captures the heart of the genre: duet between voice and accompaniment. Characteristically and integrally, Dayton’s songs exhibit internal compositional logics of pervasive rhythmic patterns and intervallic relationships that create music that still viscerally satisfies. The album takes listeners on a captivating journey through physical, emotional, and abstract imagery. Triumphantly, Dayton’s music realizes the poignancies possible in the duet that is art song.

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 Renaissance Men are back with their latest release on Navona Records: A VERY RENMEN CHRISTMAS: LIVE! The album, which features lush choral arrangements of traditional hymns and holiday classics, captures the festive spirit of the RenMen’s annual Christmas galas for listeners everywhere.

Tenor Brian Smith Walters is a force to be reckoned with — endowed with a dark, thundering timbre and magnificent, towering style, he is the embodiment of a Heldentenor. His first Navona Records release is a challenging cross-section of chansons and Lieder spanning five centuries, and Walters navigates them with stunning bravado. It doesn't matter whether he sings Purcell or Copland, Schubert or Saint Saens, Tchaikovsky or Barber, Wagner or Szymanowski – the energetic grip Walters has on every single piece is awe-inducing, every rendition buzzing with vibrance and profundity. Accompanied here by only the piano, there is only one word to describe the tenor and A PHOENIX RISING: intense.

Navona Records presents A NATIVE HILL from Philadelphia’s professional chamber choir, The Crossing. This monumental unaccompanied work is the result of a collaboration with composer Gavin Bryars, whose previous work for The Crossing won them their first of two recent Grammy awards. With intimate knowledge of the individual voices and art of each singer, Bryars composed A NATIVE HILL to capitalize on the group’s unique sound, personality, and esprit de corps.

The Newberry Consort and EnsAmble Ad-Hoc present A MEXICAN CHRISTMAS, an album of 17th century traditional music for worship and celebration. The collection features pieces commonly heard in both liturgical service and in the streets, and evoke the solemnity and fanfare heard in Mexico City’s convents and plazas, with jubilant vocals and lively strings, guitars, and percussion. Organ, harp, bassoon, and a variety of Mexican traditional instruments bring this exuberant and diverse music to life.

Composer Dan Redfeld presents A HOPEFUL PLACE: A SONG CYCLE FOR SOPRANO & CHAMBER ORCHESTRA, his debut release on Navona records showcasing his nine-movement song cycle of the same name. A Hopeful Place follows a woman’s journey through life from birth to death—a life-cycle-song-cycle, as librettist John Gabriel Koladziej describes the piece.

A love of poetry lies at the core of Monica Houghton’s A BREATH OF AIR from Navona Records. She has set to music not only lyrical giants such as Whitman, Dickinson, and Hughes, but also some contemporary poets with their own magnificent lyrical gifts. These soul-touching works are performed to the highest possible standard by select world-class singers and accompanists. A perfect symbiosis on all fronts.