As part of my research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have undertaken extensive scholarly work on Baroque composers who have written operas about the Armenian King Tigranes II (140–55 BCE). There are at least twenty-four operas about him; most are lost. I have now gathered three operas—in entirety and in excerpts—by Hasse,…
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) composed his Sérénade mélancolique for violin and orchestra (or piano) in 1875, shortly after completing his First Piano Concerto. It was first heard a year later, performed by Adolph Brodsky, who stepped in to replace the work’s dedicatee, Leopold Auer, when he backed out of the first performance. Several years later…
Delos’ new Sing Me a Story: Musical Tales from Delos collection — available July 19, 2019 — celebrates music’s ability to touch our hearts and minds through the path of narrative texts. While love is the subject of several of these songs, the others evoke and examine an even wider range of human expression and…
Composer John Knowles Paine (1839 – 1906)—also an acclaimed organist, choirmaster, pianist and pedagogue—is primarily known as the first American to earn recognition for his larger-scale symphonic and choral-orchestral works: music that has attracted renewed interest in recent decades. Of lesser renown are his choral, chamber and keyboard compositions. Recordings devoted to his beautifully crafted…
When I first moved to Riverdale, Maryland, in 2012, I was immediately enchanted by the beauty of the Riversdale House Museum. This wonderful house, built in 1806, seemed like the perfect location for a concert series. Within days I approached the director of the mansion about creating a performance series and I was delighted to…
In “Rag of Ragnar,” Mass Transmission’s bonus track, Mason Bates has remixed elements of Mass Transmission’s choral and electronic sound-worlds into a beguiling “mashup” meant as a tribute to his friend and collaborator Ragnar Bohlin, who made this recording possible. Pre-Order Delos Music Amazon ArkivMusic
Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for their 2012 Mavericks Festival, Mass Transmission brings to life the true story of a distantly separated mother and daughter speaking over the first long-distance radio transmissions between Holland and Java. Ethereal choral sonorities processed through a haze of radio static unfold into virtuosic organ toccatas. The texts for…
Hamburg-born Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker is one of today’s most renowned German violinists. Joachim Kaiser, the legendary music critic, described her playing as “beguiling” in its powerful blend of reserve and bravura, of tender restraint and intoxicating spirit and esteemed it as “luck” that coincidence had allowed him to become acquainted with Sabrina-Vivian, whose three CDs in…
Introducing A Lost World‘s Bass-baritone: Shenyang Bass-baritone Shenyang, 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World and 2010 winner of the Montblanc New Voices at Stars of the White Nights Festival, embodies a 21st-century bridge between the cultures of East and West. He appears frequently at the Metropolitan Opera, in repertoire from Mozart to Puccini, with such…
Fair world, where are you? Alas, only in the magic land of song Does your fabled memory live on. Friedrich von Schiller, The Gods of Greece Schiller’s poignant verses express the longing of the German Romantics to connect with the power and pathos of the classical world. Several years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art…
Watch Ryu Goto performing composer Sayo Kosugi‘s “Lilac Nova” at the Kyoto National Museum with AANMI musicians and conductor Yuga Cohler: Sayo Kosugi: Lilac Nova I find it difficult to describe in words what I felt when writing Lilac Nova for violin and chamber orchestra. It was a feeling of something subtle and mysterious.…
Theme and Variations on a Theme by Pablo Milanés was composed in 1993. It contains fourteen variations based on a segment of the song “El breve espacio en que no estás” (The brief space in which you are not), by the Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés. These variations are not only technically challenging but also intellectually…
Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss after 60 In this unique Delos album, two-time Grammy Award-winning composer, librettist, and producer Herschel Garfein introduces Mortality Mansions: a stunning new song cycle setting poems by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. Hall’s plain-spoken, yet profound poetry reveals his candid perspectives on aging, with its inevitable physical…
As a capstone to Mortality Mansions, the music on this album concludes with a setting by Garfein of a poem by Jane Kenyon, sung by the soprano Marnie Breckenridge, with Dimitri Dover on piano. The poem, “Otherwise,” is one of Kenyon’s best-known and most moving: a paean to the precious quotidian pleasures of life while…
With the second piece of Mortality Mansions, “When I Was Young”, the song cycle shifts into the present tense and dives into the themes of ardor and eros, commitment and loss, in its aging characters. “When I was young and sexual/I looked forward to a cool Olympian age/for release from my obsessions,” Slattery sings with the…
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