This week’s releases run the gamut of human experiences, with an emphasis on mysticism and spirituality (Poèmes Mystiques), idiosyncratic early music (Strana Armonia d’Amore), a classical concept album on the theme of joy (Arc III), and an atmospheric evocation of summer (The Summer Portraits).
And there’s more. Aryeh Nussbaum-Cohen embarks on an exploration of the outer reaches of 19th- and 20th-c. lieder. Also take in an LSO recording of a Ravel’s cherished Daphnis et Chloé, his longest work, and an appreciative survey of Haydn’s Piano Trios.
Themes of art song, poetry and spirituality run throughout the second album by Korean-American violinist Danbi Um, performed with Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen. Poème Mystique centers Richard Strauss’s intimate Violin Sonata, written in the year he met his future wife, and Ernest Bloch’s Second Violin Sonata, the title work of the album. By turns ecstatic, spiritual, and fantasy-like, in his violin sonata, Bloch incorporates motifs from his Jewish-themed works, the Gregorian Credo, mass Kyrie, and traditional Amen. The program includes two transcriptions of art songs: Gabriel Fauré’s mélodie “Après un rêve” and Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”
Danbi Um and Juho Pohjonen are guests on Live from WFMT on March 3.
What can our ears really perceive when music deviates from a norm whose codes are no longer our own? Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in an exploration of the “strange harmonies” characteristic of the late Renaissance, as in the microtonal works of Nicola Vicentino (1511-1575), which divides the octave into 31 notes in a nod to Ancient Greek music, and the highly chromatic style of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), who notoriously murdered his wife and her lover.
The program includes a cappella and concerted Italian madrigals as well as purely instrumental arrangements of madrigals by Gesualdo and Vicentino and their contemporaries Cipriano de Rore, Pomponio Nenna, Hettore della Marra, Sigismondo d’India, Scipione Lacorcia, and Michelangelo Rossi. The program also includes a new work, VicentinoOo, by Francesca Verunelli, which pays tribute to the microtonal music of Nicola Vicentino. Most selections on this enthralling album are new to the WFMT library.
The new album from acclaimed pianist Orion Weiss features music by Brahms, Schubert, and Debussy paired with works from young composers after World War I and II: Ernst von Dohnányi, György Ligeti, and Louise Talma.
As the final issue of his ambitious three-part Arc series, this album is a set of pieces born from the bright points of life, inspired by peace, hope, love, ambition, optimism, and the divine. “After 2020, I longed to connect with feelings of hope and renewal—how else to chart a path forward? The arc of this recital trilogy is inverted, like a rainbow’s reflection in water,” says Orion Weiss. “Arc I’s first steps head downhill, beginning from hope and proceeding to despair. The bottom of the journey, Arc II, is Earth’s center, grief, loss, the lowest we can reach. The return trip, Arc III, is one of excitement and renewal, filled with the joy of rebirth and anticipation of a better future. As we envisage our ascent, music from times of joyful creation can create a road map leading us out and up… It is my message of faith in humans—our resilience, our rebound, our irrepressibility.”
The latest album from popular classical composer Ludovico Einaudi is as a song cycle in thirteen tracks. The Summer Portraits is inspired by a series of striking oil paintings adorning an Italian villa Einaudi and his family rented last year. Einaudi discovered that the paintings were produced over many summers by a woman from Rome who owned the house for some years and painted new scenes every summer. “This album is dedicated to all our summers, all our beautiful moments.”
The oil paintings are a symbol of Einaudi’s own impressionistic approach to music: each stroke so carefully chosen; powerful moods created by something delicate. In a departure from the sonic palette of his recent solo piano works, a majority of the new songs are scored for chamber ensemble or full string orchestra (The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Strings) with solo contributions from baroque violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, who impressed Einaudi with his take on Vivaldi concertos.
Einaudi has just announced a North American tour, which begins in Chicago in September.
Chicago audiences have had a chance to experience Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s artistry, with the countertenor having made debuts with the Newberry Consort, Music of the Baroque, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Uncharted ventures outside typical countertenor territory into 19th and 20th century lieder. Austro-Germanic lieder was the countertenor’s first musical love and on Uncharted, he indulges in music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms – music that resonates profoundly with Nussbaum Cohen’s family’s German and Jewish heritage. The moving program is heightened by the sensitive playing of pianist John Churchwell, Head of Music for San Francisco Opera.
Coinciding with the London Symphony Orchestra’s first US Tour with new chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, the LSO releases Daphnis et Chloé, one of Ravel’s largest and best loved orchestral masterpieces.
Marking their second recording together for the orchestra’s dedicated label LSO Live, the album captures their performance of Ravel’s ballet last April, for which they were joined by the Grammy-nominated Tenebrae choir. Their interpretation of the work prompted glowing praise. The Times of London hailed the “sumptuous performance,” which was “so vividly and dramatically characterized that the ballet seemed to play out in [the critic’s] mind’s eye.” Similarly, The Guardian found Pappano to be “in his element here, shaping the undulating lines to maximize their grace and sensuousness, with the wordless voices of Tenebrae adding that extra touch of color. … Simply wondrous playing.”
Trio Gaspard continues its acclaimed series of Haydn Piano Trios with this collection of later works.
As in the case of the previous volumes, the album includes the world premiere recording of a piece commissioned to complement Haydn’s works – in this instance Sally Beamish’s Trance. The British composer says of her trio: “The melancholic nature of Haydn’s [F sharp minor] trio affected my approach, combining with memories of my mother and her gradual disappearance into dementia. The title, Trance, indicates a meditative state, but also a ‘passageway’, or departure: the confusing journey of my relationship with my mother as her personality shifted, changed, and faded.”
