Vanessa Wagner INLAND

 

INLAND

 

Jan Vogler / WDR Sinfonieorchester / Cristian Măcelaru MUHLY - HELBIG - LONG "Three Continents" SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 2

THREE CONTINENTS - CELLO CONCERTO No. 2

Anne Sofie von Otter / Brooklyn Rider SO MANY THINGS

SO MANY THINGS

Timo Andres / Jeremy Denk / Brad Mehldau / Randy Newman I STILL PLAY

 I STILL PLAY

Mishka Rushdie Momen VARIATIONS

Making an impressive solo debut on SOMM this month is the young, fast-rising pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen. No stranger to SOMM, she joined two of today’s finest pianists – Valerie Tryon and Peter Donohoe – in Mozart’s dazzling Piano Concerto for Three Pianos, K242 in 2018.

Mishka studied with Joan Havill, Richard Goode and Imogen Cooper and was mentored by Sir András Schiff, who presented her in recitals throughout Europe and in New York for his acclaimed Building Bridges series.

This superbly realised recital includes Variations by Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, and first recordings of two new works, specially commissioned by Mishka for this recording, by Nico Muhly and Vijay Iyer. A single theme from Robert Schumann’s Bunte Blätter is the prompt for completely different, sometimes opposing, sets of musical mutations, the result as exciting as it is intriguing.

A birthday gift for her husband, Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann are “an outpouring of generosity and love” that inspired Brahms’s Op.9 Variations (Op.9), which Rushdie Momen describes in her booklet notes as “one of his most intimate and personal expressions”.

The “burst of harmonic and rhythmic invention” that are Robert Schumann’s Op.5 Impromptus, and Mendelssohn’s “concise, rigorously constructed” Variations sérieuses were both modelled on Beethoven’s Eroica Variations.
Completing a recital brilliantly illustrating Rushdie Momen’s conviction that “the possibilities of the variation form seem infinite” are two world premiere recordings: Nico Muhly’s Small Variations – “a five-minute chorale with an explosion halfway through it” – and Vijay Iyer’s Hallucination Party, a “fever dream” packed with surprises.
A Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate, Mishka Rushdie Momen is also a committed chamber musician who has partnered Steven Isserlis, Midori and members of the Endellion, Belcea and Artemis String Quartets.

Jonah Sirota STRONG SAD

Strong Sad is a classical new music commissioning and recording project featuring newly composed elegies for violist Jonah Sirota.  The elegy as a musical form has often found a home in the plaintive middle-register voice of the viola—it tugs, and makes us aware of our inner landscape. On Strong Sad, rather than the big catastrophes, the music will mourn the small, everyday losses. While some of these works may refer to lost friends and loved ones, this project will reaffirm that mourning is too important to save only for funerals, and that sadness, when given a chance to breathe, can be our best path to deep and lasting contentment and joy. The project features new works by Paola Prestini, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigur∂sson, Robert Sirota, A.J. McCaffrey, and Rodney Lister, as well as a new work from the duo Mondegreen, and a debut composition by Jonah Sirota.

“Maybe this is the secret chord – that each of us is whole within ourselves, to fully know and sing out our single note, so that we may join the wider chord, the set of strings, so that the sound we make moves and shakes each of us together in a dynamic, terrifying, shivering joy, covering us like light, clinging to us like dark.”  (Wes Sam-Bruce)

I made this album not because I am particularly obsessed with the emotion of sadness, but because I believe in the humanity of every feeling. We can’t have joy without sadness. We can’t be whole without knowing our brokenness. Each of the composers on this record has offered their own beautiful, vulnerable response to a sadness. Let us learn to mourn every day a little. To help heal ourselves, each other, and this world. (Jonah Sirota)

Choir of the Queen’s College Oxford / Owen Rees THE HOUSE OF THE MIND

This Friday, 8 June, sees the release of House of the Mind, the Choir’s new CD. The Choir celebrates the works of choral music icon Herbert Howells in a disc that sets his works alongside pieces that they inspired and influenced – such as Nico Muhly’s Like as the Hart for choir, solo violin and percussion – as well as works that, in turn, influenced him. The disc features two world premiere recordings by David Bednall: settings of two Marian Antiphons Alma redemptoris mater and Ave regina caelorum that ‘complete’ the partly-lost set of works that Howells wrote for Westminster Cathedral.

Hilary Hahn RETROSPECTIVE

On January 19, Hilary Hahn releases Retrospective, an album showcasing all of her recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, along with new, unedited live performance recordings, which provide the full immediacy of the concert experience.

The collection includes at least one track from each of her 12 Deutsche Grammophon albums and live recordings from Hahn's Meistersaal concert in Berlin, an event especially dedicated to her fans. The recording includes the live performance of Mozart's Sonata KV 379, in addition to Max Richter's “Mercy” and Tina Davidson's “Blue Curve of the Earth,” with pianist Cory Smythe, from In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores.  

Hahn made her first record at the age of 17: Hilary Hahn Plays Bach. She has gone on to release sixteen more albums on Deutsche Grammophon and Sony, in addition to an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack and an award-winning recording for children, and win three Grammy awards. This latest release Retrospective references Hahn’s latest decade and a half of recording activity, from age 23 to the current day. 

For many years, Hahn has received unsolicited works of art from fans of all ages at concerts, which she features on her website and social media. To include her fans in this retrospective and acknowledge their longtime presence in her career, Hahn decided to use fan art for both the cover and the internal booklet. She chose pieces by professional and amateur artists in Turkey, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S., and the artists will be compensated for the use of their work.

Christine Fraser, who drew the cover art says, “Fan art seems like a way to honor a person and to visually say, 'thank-you.' In Hilary's case, she has provided me with such a wonderful array of music that I frequently listen to while drawing or painting, I wanted to show her my appreciation by creating something to convey that message. For me, it's exciting to see an artistic exchange like this, as music has always been a huge influence in my own creative process. I am both honored and inspired by this opportunity and it is an incredible feeling to be part of a collaboration that includes artists of different age groups, with different styles, and from various locations around the world.” 

Angela Chun / Jennifer Chun PHILIP GLASS In the Summer House - Mad Rush NICO MUHLY Four Studies - Honest Music

The sister violin duo Angela and Jennifer Chun, originally from Seattle, have blazed new trails for the violin duo (and violin-viola duo) repertoire, commissioning new works by George Tsontakis and Osvaldo Golijov while performing existing rep ranging from Vivaldi to Martinu. Their new album presents music of Nico Muhly with the composer on the keyboards, together with music of Philip Glass, a composer with whom Nico has a close personal and musical relationship.

The synthesized sounds of the Muhly Four Studies that open the recording add an ethereal backdrop to the motion of the two violins, and in general the four short movements are enjoyable to listen to. It’s amazing how much the synth background adds to the character of the violin duo, and the listener hears the various characters and emotions of each movement as if in suspended animation, like walking through a gallery of fossilized amber. Honest Music, and earlier Muhly, takes the duo in even more serious, occasionally dark directions. Angela and Jennifer attack this one with a fervent purposefulness, and display virtuosity with notes that occasionally leap up in high exclamations.

The Philip Glass works on the disc are arrangements, and are considerably less successful. Mad Rush was originally a piano work written for the Dalai Lama visit to New York in 1981, and In the Summer House was incidental music for a play by Jane Bowles based on a short story, originally written for violin, cello, voice, and synthesizer. Presented here solely on their own and navigating tricky arpeggios that would be no sweat on a keyboard instrument, the violin duo struggles throughout both Glass pieces. Inaccuracies of pitch and rhythm occur throughout, showcasing the difficulty of this arrangement of vignettes more than anything else.

Glass’ music is most successful when the repetitive figures are perfectly even and metronomical, with rhythms repeating smoothly and identically. The unevenness of the duo’s playing disrupts the spell, and though the violinists mostly eschew vibrato as they strive to portray the pure simplicity of this music, moments of poor intonation are made all the more obvious. Shaky bow pressure also becomes clearly apparent in softer passages. It’s likely that this music would be much better served in its original instrumentation; it’s also likely that this duo’s performances of Bartok and Shostakovich would be more enjoyable to listen to. (Geoffrey Larson)

Anthony de Mare LIAISONS Re-Imagining SONDHEIM From The Piano

Conceived by acclaimed concert pianist Anthony de Mare, LIAISONS is a landmark commissioning and concert project based on the songs of legendary musical theater composer Stephen Sondheim. The Project invited 36 of the world’s foremost contemporary composers to choose a song by Sondheim and re-imagine it as a solo piano piece.
Both an homage and a celebration, LIAISONS makes the case for Sondheim as one of the 20th century's most influential composers - as at home in the concert hall as on the Broadway stage. It is also an expression of de Mare’s versatility and renowned commitment to contemporary composers: the Project’s roster spans the worlds of classical, jazz, opera, pop, musical theater and film. Composers hail from seven different countries and range in age from 30 to 75, representing more than 34 Pulitzers, Grammys, Tonys and Academy Awards.

 Since 2011 de Mare has performed over 30 different LIAISONS concerts to full houses across the U.S. and Canada, including San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago and Minneapolis among others. The first 32 pieces received their New York premieres over a series of two sold-out concerts at Symphony Space in 2012 and 2013, which also featured special onstage interviews of Mr. Sondheim by Mark Horowitz.
This fall, in celebration of the release of LIAISONS on the prestigious ECM New Series label, de Mare will play the entire collection across a three-concert series at Birdland, the Sheen Center and Symphony Space, where the project will come full circle with the final four NY premieres. We hope you will join us!

“To hear composers take my work and take it seriously... it’s a thrill.”
– Stephen Sondheim

Nico Muhly / Owen Pallett / Bryce Dessner / Shara Worden DAVID LANG Death Speaks

Death is present in so many of Schubert's lieder, and those appearances provide the starting point for the five songs that make up David Lang's Death Speaks. Lang went through the 600-plus texts that Schubert set, extracting all the lines that are either attributed explicitly to death, or to characters representing him, translating them "roughly" into English and creating lovesong-like lyrics. The settings are wonderfully spare and insistent, with accompaniments from guitar, piano and violin. Shara Worden, lead singer of My Brightest Diamond, is the vocalist, recorded in a close perspective, while the other work on the disc, Depart, offers a very different kind meditation on death. It was commissioned to be played in a French morgue, a peaceful setting in which the bereaved could see their loved ones for the last time. A sequence of slowly changing drones for wordless women's voices and cello, makes the perfect foil for Lang's naggingly memorable songs. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)