It’s not everyday you come across a work for cello, chamber orchestra and flamenco dancer but Alice Ping Yee Ho has created one. It’s about fifteen minutes long and, as one might expect in a sort of homage to the genre, it’s melodic and percussive. It was recorded in a Vancouver performance featuring Rachel Mercer on cello and dancer Cyrena Luchkow-Huang with the all female Allegra Chamber Orchestra and conductor Janna Sailor. There’s some interesting choreography beautifully danced as well as excellent music making. The sound and picture quality on Youtube is excellent and the EP version sounds fine in standard CD quality. It’s also available in other formats.
The digital EP (audio only) is available from Centrediscs (catalogue number CMCCD 29922) or there is full video on Youtube.
Continuing my exploration of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies I’ve been listening to a 1992 recording of a couple of very different pieces inspired by Orkney. The first is Black Pentecost from 1979. It’s somewhere between an orchestral song cycle and a symphony inspired by the threat to start mining uranium ore on Orkney (which also produced the very lovely piano piece Farewell to Stromness). It’s a four movement work for orchestra, mezzo-soprano and baritone and it’s uncompromisingly modern in idiom. The text depicts environmental destruction and decay and “the Controller”s increasingly strident justification of it as necessary to “human progress”. It begins with orchestral music evocative of the unspoiled landscape but becomes increasingly tougher with menacing brass and percussion and screechy vocals from the baritone before collapsing into a matter of fact description of environmental degradation.
Dissonance is a new CD of Rachmaninov songs from Lithuanian pair Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas. Regular readers will know Ive been getting quite excited by Ms. Grigorian’s opera performances so I jumped at the chance to hear her sing art song; especially paired with Geniušas who is more of a concert pianist than an accompanist.
Here’s what I’m looking forward to this month (previously mentioned gigs omitted):
operaramblings 