Browsing: Romantic

Composer Gregg Kallor’s new opera, Frankenstein, premieres at Arizona Opera on Friday the 13th…. Kallor has rightly been commended for his fusion of classical gestures and jazz inflections in works that range from solo piano outings to highly accessible art songs to chamber music to full orchestral works. He also has a strong affinity for literature –notably but far from exclusively for works that smack of the gothic. Kallor is the creator, for instance, of a tour de force one-woman setting of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (check Poe’s story — the gender of his psychopathic protagonist is indeterminate), scored for…

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Concerto Antico: à travers un miroir fumé Jaap Nico Hamburger, composer; Orchestre classique de Montréal; Ensemble Caprice Leaf Music, April 2023 Jaap Nico Hamburger brilliantly explores centuries of musical history in a powerful 11 minutes on Concerto Antico. Hamburger suggests in the album’s booklet that just as Nostradamus “stared into a smoke covered mirror to look at the future,” Hamburger himself is “star(ing) into the mirror of our times to look at the past.” Split into five concise tracks, Concerto Antico addresses modern, romantic, baroque, and classical eras through a variety of styles. An airy flute conjures the image of…

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Paris 1790: The Music of Monsieur Vidal Pascal Valois and Jean-Guy Côté, baroque guitar; Jacques-André Houle and Olivier Brault, violin; Amanda Keesmaat, cello; Jessy Dubé, alto Analekta, September 2023 Seeing a new release by Pascal Valois is enough to make a classical-guitar fan giddy; his elegant fingerpicking is a beautiful sound to behold. Paris 1790, featuring compositions by Monsieur Vidal —a baroque composer with no known last name—offers great additions to the modern maestro’s solo repertoire, and proves him to be a highly skilled accompanist. The album opens with the first guitar concerto ever composed, an immediate burst of energy.…

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Schumann & Brahms Benjamin Grosvenor, piano Decca, 2023 One of the most original and gifted pianists of our time, Benjamin Grosvenor’s playing is marked by its unconventionality, the sudden and extreme changes of colour, a unique management of time. His extremely clear and limpid touch make him a true genius of contemporary piano, and these qualities come to light in an impressive way on this CD. There is always a light in Grosvenor’s interpretations. Even in a complex and sometimes twisted piece like Kreisleriana, which opens this recording, the young pianist manages to locate a clarity and positivity so rare…

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Brahms in Solitude Jarred Dunn, piano Self-published, 2023 This album’s 11 pieces create a well-planned trajectory through Brahms’s poetic music, and Jarred Dunn demonstrates a natural ability in performing this music. The album opens with three pieces from Klavierstücke Op. 118, perhaps the most well-known opus of Brahms’s late piano music. Dunn gives us a taste of Brahms’s various meditative styles: first, the dramatic and emotional Intermezzo in A minor; then, the lyrical Intermezzo in A major (the Brahms Intermezzo), beautifully played with interior lines of counterpoint; and ending with the foreboding, intense, chromatically colourful Intermezzo in E-flat minor. Two…

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