Recorded Nov 13th & 20th 2016 at the Duderstadt Center @ University of Michigan Deadbird is released March 1, 2017.

This is a remarkable record. Jasper Hoiby is a bass virtuoso of the highest order. But the real interest of the recording is the compositions/arrangements. The group is keenly attuned to the bassist's concept and play as if their lives depended on it. And perhaps they do, for the CD has a eco-concept behind it with titles like "Plastic Island" "Song for the Bees" and 'Collective Spaces". If ever there is a documentary about what life was like on planet earth, this could be the soundtrack. It seems to catch us in a final desperate plea (to ourselves) to CARE for all this beauty. The interactions within the group ably represent a kind of care and caring. Lots of dialogue, subtle ensemble work, joyful bursts of enthusiasm and musical jests. It is serious music but also serious fun.

Jenny Scheinman ‘Here on Earth’ presents songs that were composed for the film, ‘Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait,’ a collaboration with director Finn Taylor and commissioned by Aaron Greenwald at Duke Performances. The movie collects archival footage taken between 1936-42 by H. Lee Waters, a North Carolina photographer who traveled across the Piedmont, taking short movies of ordinary, small town folks living through the Great Depression.

The title Nuances is uncommunicative and has nothing to do with the ballet of that name assembled from Scriabin's music by composer Alexander Nemtin. Instead, this recital by pianist and Internet marketing phenomenon Valentina Lisitsa represents a very specific kind of program, and it's good to see her essay something like this rather than the mainstream repertory she has generally done thus far. What Lisitsa offers here is a recital that focuses on a composer's youth, and the signs it may offer of that composer's maturity.

Not many world famous composers have been equally successful at writing both absolute and programme music. Moreover, only a mere handful has managed to achieve something truly extraordinary in both genres. One of these coposers was Peter Tchaikovsky. When inspired by great literature, his passion for reading likely stood him in good stead: after all, as far as Tchaikovsky was concerned, reading ranked ‘among the greatest moments of pleasure’.

For Zig-Zag Territoires, Yury Martynov has undertaken the complete Beethoven symphonies in Liszts transcriptions on historic instruments. The third volume of that cycle came out in January 2014 and, like the previous instalments, has enjoyed great critical success.

Damien Guillon has chosen for his first solo recital disc a refined, subtle and melancholy repertoire, which he has gone on to explore in depth and polish in genuine chamber style with the lutenist Eric Bellocq, an expert in Renaissance music. Dowland is heir to the English polyphonic tradition (middle age conception) where words and music coincide not on meaning but through proportions generated by the planets, however he also explores the new modes of expression which were emerging on the continent related to italian renaissance which linked meaning of the words and musical effect, favoring harmony towards polyphony.

Just as the seventeenth century saw the rise of the trio sonata to its position as the most important chamber music form, so the eighteenth century saw its decline and eventual demise. The seventh and penultimate disc in London Baroque’s highly acclaimed survey of the genre through the two centuries lets us sample these later developments in Italy, the nation where the genre had evolved some 100 years earlier.

Ricercar could not help but participate in celebrating Rameau Year. It is Florence Malgoires ensemble LES DOMINOS that pays this tribute with a very rarely played repertoire. This is what Camille Saint-Saëns called Concerts en Sextuor in the edition of Rameaus works that he undertook at the end of the 19th century. To carry out this monumental project, he started from a manuscript executed, it would seem, by a certain Monsieur Decroix in 1768, i.e., four years after the composers death. These Concerts de Monsieur Rameau are, in fact, transcriptions in six parts of the Pièces de Clavecin en Concert that Rameau had conceived at the outset from his harpsichord pieces with accompaniment by violin or flute and bass viol. This adaptation by M. Decroix is quite enigmatic, and Les Dominos give us a colourful reading of it, combining with the strings two emblematic instruments of Rameaus orchestra: flutes and bassoon.

For this release from Zig-Zag Territoires, Heinz Holliger leads the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in two works of Arnold Schoenberg, the string orchestra version of Verkl?rte Nacht, and the Chamber Symphony No. 2, followed by Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz, also arranged for string orchestra. All three pieces are tonal, predating the development of atonality and the later twelve-tone system, with which these composers are most strongly associated.