Many of this week’s new releases center on the music of American women composers. The Grammy-nominated duo of soprano Laura Strickling and pianist Joy Schreier present the first installment in a new series of recordings celebrating women as storytellers and bearers of cultural memory. Tucson, Arizona-based True Concord Voices and Orchestra present two multi-media works by the pioneering American composer Jocelyn Hagen, while the Luminae Trio (violinist Elizabeth Wright, cellist Jacob Nordlinger, and pianist Jestin Pieper) presents works spanning nearly a century of chamber music.
Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt presents the Cello Sonatina and Cello Sonata, Op. 4 by Zoltan Kodály paired with two works by the Finnish composer Olli Mustonen. Finally, Chinese Canadian pianist Bruce Liu showcases versatility and an inventive approach by focusing on the music of moonlight for his latest album.
Praised by The American Prize for their “careful choices, elegant phrasing and beauty of sound,” Luminae Trio (violinist Elizabeth Wright, cellist Jacob Nordlinger, and pianist Jestin Pieper) presents works by three American composers spanning nearly a century of chamber music. The program opens with Lowell Liebermann’s Piano Trio No. 1, a neo-Romantic single-movement work of searching intensity. Amy Beach’s Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 150, composed near her 70th birthday, offers a deeply personal retrospective. Jennifer Higdon’s first Piano Trio and its companion work Color Through paint with vivid sonic colors, with movements including “Fiery Red,” “Pale Yellow,” and “Brilliant Blue.”
Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt presents the Cello Sonatina and Cello Sonata, Op. 4 by Zoltan Kodály paired with two works by the Finnish composer Olli Mustonen. Born 1967, Mustonen was a student of Einojuhani Rautavaara. Mustonen’s Heavenly Lights (Taivaanvalot) for tenor, cello, and piano is the centerpiece of the program, presented here by Ian Bostridge, Nicolas Altstaedt, and the composer at the piano. “This work was a revelation to me the moment I discovered it. We are immersed in the era of Finnish bards and the folk poems of the Kalevala, a legendary and mystical world whose stories touch us all, regardless of our country of origin,” says Altstaedt. “A closeness to folk art like the one Kodaly sought and found.”
Tucson, Arizona-based True Concord Voices and Orchestra present two works by the pioneering American composer Jocelyn Hagen. Based in Minnesota, Hagen composes primarily for voice — solo, chamber and choral — and has explored large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, and opera. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci has been performed more than 50 times around the world since 2019, incorporating visuals, sound, light, and movement. HERE I AM was inspired by True Concord’s founding music director Eric Holtan’s suggestion that Hagen should write a piece celebrating the women’s suffrage movement and the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020. Recently presented by Consonance (formerly Chicago Choral Artists) with Spirito Singers and soprano Laura Strickling, HERE I AM is performed with live-concert projections of portraits of 47 inspiring women from across the world and across time, whose words form the libretto. For the world premiere recording True Concord is joined by the Tucson Girls Chorus and soprano Susanna Phillips.
The Grammy-nominated duo of soprano Laura Strickling and pianist Joy Schreier present the first installment in a new series of recordings celebrating women as storytellers and bearers of cultural memory. LEGENDS: Rebellion comprises world-premiere recordings from composers Cecilia Livingston, Jens Ibsen, Jodi Goble, Jasmine Arielle Barnes, and Juhi Bansal on texts by Duncan McFarlane, Susan Bywaters, Caitlin Vincent, and Jocelyne Jam, as well as poems by anonymous girls from Afghanistan. The album explores rebellion in many forms: from Afghan women’s defiance of oppression, to a reversal of the power dynamic between Schubert’s Maiden and Death, to mythic heroines reclaiming their own narratives, to an unflinching portrait of new motherhood and a powerful meditation on love as resistance. Celebrated for her work performing and promoting art song, with an emphasis on new additions to the canon, Laura Strickling is the curator of the NewMusicShelf Anthology of New Music for Soprano, Vol. 1 and a recent guest on Live from WFMT (with pianist Daniel Schlosberg) and Listening to Singers.
Chinese Canadian pianist Bruce Liu showcases versatility and an inventive approach to programming with his latest album. In the months leading up to the Chopin Competition, which he won in 2021, Liu found that many of his best musical ideas came to him in his dreams, and now, as a touring artist, he frequently finds himself working late at night. “It’s often the only time that silence and concentration, in the sense of timelessness, are possible,” he says. It was this experience of working in the small hours that in part inspired the idea of an album about moonlight and dreams, darkness and daybreak. Alongside core repertoire works such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and “Waldstein” Sonatas, Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata and Debussy’s Rêverie, the album includes gems by J.S. Bach, Federico Mompou, John Cage, György Ligeti and Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel.
