Welcome Party is a new record of music by British-Armenian composer Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian. Much of it is inspired by her residency with the LSO at 575 Wandsworth Road. That house, now a National Trust property, was the home of Kenyan born polymath and poet Khadambi Asalache, who decorated it with his own wood carvings and murals. Asalache’s poetry provides the texts for several pieces and others are inspired directly by the house and its contents. The house is also a factor in the composer’s visual scores which sometimes use visual elements in the house to shape the music and inspire the improvisatory passages. COVID looms large on the album too; from personal tragedy to the conditions under which many of the recordings were made. Continue reading
Welcome Party
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Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s opera Song From the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt is based on the journals of Isabelle Eberhardt; a Swiss explorer, mystic and writer who roamed the deserts of North Africa before her untimely death at the age of 27. It was conceived as a multi-media opera and staged as such at The Kitchen in New York in 2012. A studio CD recording was made by the original cast soon after. One can get a s sense for the look and feel of the stage piece from 
Transcendent is a CD from the Asia/America New Music Institute (AANMI). It features works by six American and Asian composers performed by Davóne Tines, Matthew Aucoin and members of the AANMI Ensemble in various combinations.
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