Stereophile Magazine’s Jason Victor Serious has a RAVE review for the Asia / America New Music Institute‘s new recording, Transcendent:
There is music so new, so original, so contemplative, and so deeply felt that it makes you want to listen, and then demands that you listen again. It’s music whose layers peel back over time, as it draws you deeper into its mysteries. For premiere recordings of compositions that address time and place, and then often take you beyond them, Transcendent (DE 3555), the first offering on Delos from composer/orchestrator Chad Cannon’s Asia/America New Music Institute (AANMI), earns its title.… [The composers] are unapologetic in their creation of true art music—music intended for deep and concentrated listening rather than as background wallpaper for our ever so occupied lives. Theirs is the musical equivalent of the brilliant artwork that may surface first in a Soho Studio (if any artists can still afford Soho), and then find itself on the walls of the Whitney or MOMA. It’s the kind of music that intellectuals will gobble up for its layered brilliance, and others will love for its emotional commitment, deeply passionate expression, and imaginative expanse. … [One] unifying factor, on Matthew Aucoin’s Two Whitman Songs, Chad Cannon’s 6-part Wild Grass on the Riverbank, and Sun-Young Park’s My Beloved, is Davóne Tines’s marvelous voice. Resonant and full, it can also rise to a sweet sliver of sound. Tines’s singing comes across as unedited and in the moment—there are occasional real world blemishes—which results in some of the most emotionally charged performances of new vocal music I’ve heard in some time.
Jason Victor Serious, Stereophile
Read the full review on Stereophile.com
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