Blaze is a record of (mostly) solo piano music by Alice Ping Yee Ho played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. There are eight pieces on the disk adding up to just over an hour of music. It’s quite varied. There are pieces like the title track which are colourful and intricate with others like “Shade” being slower and, perhaps, more lyrical. It’s all highly virtuosic requiring not just excellent orthodox technique but quite a bit in the way of extended technique. It needs more than technique too as this is music with a lot going on that needs to be interpreted sensitively. The performances are really impressive.
Blaze
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Browsing the back catalogue for fun stuff a few days ago I came across a record of English song featuring Dame Felicity Lott and pianist Graham Johnson. It’s called Favourite English Songs and was released in 2006 so. at the height of the singer’s interpretative powers and with the voice still in excellent shape. It’s an interesting mix of the very familiar; Vaughan Williams’ :High Noon” and some of the Britten folk song arrangements for example, and the less familiar with songs by Maude White, Cecil Gibbs and Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson among the composers I’ve never heard of.
Have you ever asked yourself “What if Liszt had written an opera?”. I hadn’t either. But he did start one; Sardanapalo. It’s based on a Byron poem and tells the story of Sardanapalus, king of Assyria, who met a rather grisly end with his favourite concubine Myra after his subjects revolted, objecting to his decadent lifestyle. The libretto is by an unknown hand and it seems only Act 1 ever got written. Liszt made a start on setting that, leaving just about enough material for Cambridge scholar David Trippett to produce a performable version. This was duly performed and recorded in Weimar in 2018.
I’ve been listening to an intriguing new album.
The latest release from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Storgårds is a generous coupling of two Shostakovich symphonies; Symphony No. 12 in D Minor (The Year 1917) and Symphony No.15 in A Major. That’s a total of 85 minutes of music. It’s also an SACD release from Chandos so technically it’s exemplary.
Decca have just released a 3CD set of previously unreleased recordings made by the late Jessye Norman between 1989 and 1998 with various orchestras and conductors.
I’ve listened to and liked a lot of Missy Mazzoli’s operatic and vocal music but hadn’t had much exposure to her purely instrumental writing so was interested to get hold of a copy of her new SACD release Dark with Excessive Bright.
From the good people of Silicon Valley, who brought us the iPod and the iPad and the iDontknowwhatelse, we now have iSing Silicon Valley; a choir of young women. Their new album is titled love and light and features the choir with, on some tracks, harpist Cheryl Fulton and soprano Estelelí Gomez in settings of Latin texts ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to contemporary composers. It’s all sort of in the range of plainchant to polyphony with young bright vibrato-less voices with maybe a New Agey touch (though that may be guilt by association),
field studies is a CD of chamber music by Canadian composer Emilie Cecilie Lebel. There are five tracks on the record; each around twelve minutes long, scored for various small forces and recorded in different locations.
sweet light crude is a 2010 album by the ensemble Newspeak. It contains six pieces by different composers in a style that has been called “punk classical”. To me, the six pieces are varied enough that I’d be reluctant to put a two word label on the “style” but it’s certainly reflective of a certain kind of New York music making that combines contemporary classical influences with a whole lot of other stuff.
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