Montreal percussionist Ziya Tabassian’s new album, Remembrances, features original compositions inspired by Iran’s Safavid musical heritage.
Adam Zinatelli’s first solo album consists of pieces composed for trumpet by living composers.
The age of humans—the “Holocene era”—is at its end, suggests award-winning composer Frank Horvat on his latest masterpiece, An Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene.
For better or worse, En Route is a unique example of how track lengths, titles, and human voices (or the lack thereof) affect a listener’s experience of an album.
Bruce Liu’s new album, Waves, opens with Rameau’s well-known Gavotte et six doubles, a stately French dance with variations, each of which explore and ornament the theme in a different and more dramatic way.
Sumptuously capturing his famous chiaroscuro effects, Caravaggio’s Shadow is a frank, often brutal portrait smothered in a patina of good taste.
Recurrence is a collaboration between members of the ICOT (Iranian-Canadian Composers of Toronto) Chamber Orchestra, the New Orford String Quartet and two eminent Canadian composers.
With their new album Los Santos y Pecadores, Toronto-born band Battle of Santiago’s latest musical experiment continues to arouse the curiosity of audiences on the alternative Latin experimental scene.
I can’t remember a pre-Christmas season that started so sluggishly, without an obvious blockbuster on display. DG and Sony are leading with cultish solo pianists; Warner are dormant. Jonas Kaufmann is singing weakly about cinema. There are no big releases out there to drive a healthy economy. I turned to the continuation of the Boston Shostakovich cycle which I have reviewed before with some enthusiasm. The conductor Andris Nelsons is a Latvian who grew up in a post-Soviet country still shadowed by Shostakovich’s ghosts. The Boston Symphony Orchestra sound stronger on record than any of the original Russian performers and…
Canadian Scenes: New Works for Oboe & Piano Charles Hamann, oboe; Frédéric Lacroix, piano Leaf Music, June 2023 Five works for oboe and piano were commissioned by oboist Charles Hamann for this album, which depicts various aspects of Canadian identity. In collaboration with pianist Frédéric Lacroix (who also wrote one of the pieces on the album), Hamann sought to capture various aspects of Canada’s landscapes, and asked each composer to write a piece using nature as an inspirational starting point. Over the course of the album’s genesis, changes in climate and environment impacted the way works panned out. In the…
