Based in Palermo, Italy, Homunculus Res is an often breezy group whose music harks back to the pop side of the '60s-'70s Canterbury sound and early Italian prog of the same era, with suitably retro elements but also the compositional complexity and production touches one would expect from a 21st century release on the Milan-based avant-prog AltrOck label. The Sicilian band centers around a core of musicians including guitarist/vocalist Dario D'Alessandro (who also plays keyboards), keyboardists David Di Giovanni and Federico Cardaci, drummer Daniele Di Giovanni, bassist Domenico Salamone, and flutist Dario Lo Cicero.

Ten years is a long time, especially in pop music, but waiting ten years to deliver an album is a clear sign that you're not all that interested in the pop game anyway. Such is the case with Peter Gabriel, who delivered Up in 2002, a decade after Us and four years after he announced its title. Perhaps appropriately, Up sounds like an album that was ten years in the making, revealing not just its pleasures but its intent very, very slowly. This is not an accessible record, nor is it easy to warm up to, which means that many may dismiss it upon a single listen or two, never giving it the time it demands in order to be understood (it does not help matters that the one attempt at a single is the ham-fisted, wrong-headed trash-TV "satire" "The Barry Williams Show," which feels utterly forced and out of place here, as if Geffen was pleading for anything resembling a single to add to the album).

The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) will release an album of George Walker’s five sinfonias, conducted by Music Director Gianandrea Noseda, on September 8, 2023. The recording project celebrates NSO’s connection to Walker—the first African American composer to receive a Pulitzer Prize and a D.C. native—and honors his centennial, which was in 2022.

"David Pohle created his Zwolf Liebesgesange in the early seventeenth century, crucially advancing the emerging genre of the German song. The settings of the 26-year-old Pohle are valuable testimonials to the development of this genre. The poems by Paul Fleming, on which these settings are based, bear autobiographical features, mirrored by David Pohle in his compositions by the use of two equal voices. In a varied manner, the music and text tell of love, loss and pain, of happiness, determination and abstinence. Audite presents this premiere recording with a top-class cast of soloists and instrumentalists.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose present the world premiere recording of The Lord of Cries, a breathtaking opera by John Corigliano and Mark Adamo. Telling the story of Euripides’s The Bacchae with the characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the piece explores the power of sexual desire and humans’ need to blame and attack others for what they can neither resist nor accept in themselves. Corigliano returns to opera for the first time since his The Ghosts of Versailles, introduced by the Metropolitan Opera, made an international sensation in 1992. The brilliant cast—most of whom introduced their parts in the world premiere in 2021—is led by star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role.

Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) was one of the longest-lived members of the wave of Hungarian nationalist composers which began with the rise of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. A student of Ottorino Respighi in Rome, Farkas blended Respighi’s Latin melodiousness with the Magyar folk-heritage that Bartók and Kodály had made the central element of Hungarian music. His Old Hungarian Dances of the 17th Century have become a staple of the wind-quintet repertoire; the other five works on this disk display the same irrepressible joie de vivre.

Richard Hol (1824-1904) was a leading figure in Dutch music during the 19th century. The son of an Amsterdam milkman, he graduated from the Royal Music School in 1844 and went on to become a nationally famous composer, conductor, organist, pianist, and teacher. Hol composed a large body of choral and vocal music, an opera, and a comparatively small number of orchestral works, including four symphonies. Both symphonies on this disc bear the influence of mid-19th-century German composers (particularly Schumann and Mendelssohn), but Hol’s own voice is readily discernible.

The importance of the Stamitz family in the development of 18th century European musical thought is well known; perhaps more well known than its actual music. And this is understandable since every member of the family seemed to focus not so much on breaking compositional ground, but on teaching, performance, or even some other interest peripheral to music. For instance Carl’s father Johann is remembered today primarily as the founding conductor of the legendary Mannheim Court Orchestra, a collective renowned for rigorously training the most promising young musicians of the day. In the family tradition, Carl studied with his father in Mannheim and performed as a second violinist with the orchestra, though eventually he left because the competition there became too intense.