A particularly evocative group of releases this week features tributes to the night sky (and British women composers), dearly beloved family members, opera fantasies, and dreams. Plus, surveys of music by Johannes Brahms and Errollyn Wallen.
New Releases May 13: Dreams, Skies, Fantasies
Black Oak Ensemble (Photo: Ayaka Sano)
The Black Oak Ensemble (violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, violist Aurélien Fort Pederzoli, and cellist David Cunliffe) continues to push the boundaries of the string trio repertoire with their third album on Cedille Records.
The idea for the album was born out of a mistaken Google search. During the 2022 World Cup, with Switzerland, Germany, France, and England all in the running—all countries reflecting the ensemble’s heritage—a bit of rivalry emerged. Ruhstrat, searching for British string trio composers, had previously been looking for world cup scores and accidentally included “soccer” in her query, leading to the discovery of Shirley J. Thompson’s Concerto for Football and Orchestra. A subsequent deep dive into British string trios revealed that most were by women—and a new album concept was born. Dance of the Night Sky features eight contemporary trios by a multigenerational cohort of British women composers, including world-premiere recordings of works by Shirley J. Thompson, Carol J. Jones, Grace-Evangeline Mason, and Errollyn Wallen, and works by Judith Weir, Dobrinka Tabakova, Freya Waley-Cohen, and Sally Beamish.
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers presents the world premiere recording of Billy Childs’s In the Arms of the Beloved featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon. In the Arms of the Beloved is a requiem for Childs’s mother, Mable Brown Childs. It conveys a profound message of hope, love and resilience that is especially poignant in the wake of the devastation from the fires that decimated the communities of Altadena and the Palisades, in Childs and Meyers’s home state of California. “That this work is rooted in the very land — Southern California — that endured such hardship adds an extra layer of emotional depth, making it not just an incredible composition, but a collective expression of grief and renewal,” says Meyers. The piece is scored for solo violin, piano, string quartet, choir, and a small group that includes guitar. The album is rounded out by two short pieces also receiving world premiere recordings in new arrangements for choir and violin solo: Eric Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby, inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s classic bedtime story about a baby seal, and Ola Gjeilo’s meditative Serenity, a setting of the text from O Magnum Mysterium.
The BBC Concert Orchestra led by John Andrews present a survey Errollyn Wallen’s orchestral music written between 2000 and 2023, showcasing her distinctive voice across a wide range of moods. Recently appointed Master of the King’s Music by King Charles III, Wallen is a groundbreaking figure in contemporary classical music. The program kicks off with the newest composition: Dances for Orchestra, in twelve connected movements, draws inspiration form jazz, blues, spirituals, musicals, pop, and classical forms. Five other selections are recorded for the first time, including two that feature a vocal soloist — mezzo-soprano Idunnu Münch and soprano Ruby Hughes. The album concludes with one Wallen’s most-performed works, the evocative Mighty River written in 2007, which references American spirituals and quotes Amazing Grace.
The youngest cellist ever to win the International Tchaikovsky Competition, Zlatomir Fung presents his solo debut album with pianist Richard Fu featuring six fantasies on themes from opera, including fantasies on melodies from Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, Rossini’s William Tell, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Additionally, the album features Fantasy on Jenůfa which Fung arranged himself, and a Fantasia Carmèn, written especially for him by composer Marshall Estrin. After extensive research Fung found these fantasies for cello used recognizable tunes from famous operas to create a free medley and that there are few rules beyond the pure expression of the composer’s personality, interests, and strengths as a cellist. Following his Tchaikovsky competition win, the 25-year-old cellist has garnered acclaim for his performances around the world and has become widely recognized as one of the preeminent cellists of our time.
After a few albums that stretched the ensemble towards contemporary, crossover, and popular repertoire (including an all-Disney program), The King’s Singers, prolific recording artists at any rate, present a new album that can be characterized as a return to standard repertoire. “’Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On’ is an exploration of European choral music from the early 20th century (and a bit either side), much of it shaped and scarred by the spectre of conflicts that dominated the continent in that period,” say The King’s Singers. “For us, the album has been a chance to develop and exercise new and different colors in our singing, to dive deeply into text-centric interpretations and historical context, to savor and cherish the four languages in which we sing here, and – in one instance – even to expand our forces a little.”
The program features arrangements of songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn; settings of English poetry by Elgar and Vaughan Williams; French chansons by Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Ravel; little-known works by the “Swedish Vaughan Williams,” Hugo Alfvén; and Sibelius’s anthem Finlandia (sung in English). Sopranos Grace Davidson and Victoria Meteryard join the gentlemen for Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs. This is the last recording The King’s Singers made before the departure of the charismatic bass Jonathan Howard. Piers Connor Kennedy began his tenure as the new ensemble bass in January.
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective continues its series with this recording of Johannes Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, alongside Piano Quartet No. 1 of Louise Héritte-Viardot. The Third Piano Quartet gestated for a long time – the first sketches were made in 1855, whilst the work was not completed until 1875. Numerous commentators tie the work to the composer’s infatuation with Clara Schumann, who certainly heard many of the various iterations of the piece before its final version. But Brahms did not write program music, and whatever his motivations may or may not have been, the result is, like the rest of his output, pure music.
Louise Héritte-Viardot was a French singer, pianist, conductor, and composer. She was born in Paris, the eldest child of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Louis Viardot, and sister to the violinist and conductor Paul Viardot. Her singing career was cut short by illness, but with the help of Clara Schumann she found a second career as a singing teacher in Frankfurt. In contrast to the Brahms Quartet, Viardot’s work is extremely programmatic. Titled Im Sommer (In Summer), it comprises four movements which also carry evocative titles: “Morning, in the Woods,” “Flies and Butterflies,” “Sultriness,” and “Evening, under the Oak-tree.”
