Tracklista:1. Get Out While You Can2. Blind Justice3. Work Or Riot4. The Employer's Blacklist5. Nobody Listened6. Surburban Rebels7. Mortgage Mentality8. Guttersnipe9. Real Enemy10. Another Rebel Dead11. Sabotage the Hunt12. Harry May13. Drinking and Driving
Tracklista:1. Bourbon Street Parade2. Down in Honky Tonk Town3. Original Dixieland One-step4. Bogalusa Strut5. Maryland, My Maryland6. I'm Confessin'7. Alabama Jubilee8. Moonlight and Roses9. When You're Smiling10. Lou-easy-an-I-a11. The Old Rugged Cross12. Just a Little While to Stay Here13. Basin Street Blues14. Lady Be Good15. Sister Kate16. Eh La Bas17. Jim Robinson Blues
Francesca Caccini, or « La Cecchina », Florence-born composer. Soprano Shannon Mercer reveals herself has the perfect performer of her vocal oeuvre, heartfelt baroque music with a foot in the Renaissance era. Sylvain Bergeron (theorbo, baroque guitar), Luc Beauséjour (harpsichord, organ) and Amanda Keesmaat (cello) are the ideal musical companions on this path to baroque music discovery. One of the first album entirely devoted to Francesca Caccini.Discerning affinitiesFor musicians, whose individual career paths are constantly overlapping, it is not an uncommon experience for affinities to develop during joint projects. But occasionally, the synchronicity of such affinities can be completely unexpected. After having explored the liturgical repertoire of Vivaldi and Bach, as well as music from France, England and Wales, soprano Shannon Mercer wanted to tackle a program of 17th-century Italian music that would include works by the female composers Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini. At about the same time, harpsichordist and organist Luc Beauséjour came across the latter composer’s name in a work that mentioned she was known to Monteverdi. “He had spoken of the exceptional quality of her music, which piqued my curiosity,” explains Beauséjour. Over the summer, his research turned up facsimiles, and he suggested a reading session to get a better sense of Caccini’s musical personality. Given the variety and quality of these forgotten works, the idea of a recording project dedicated entirely to Caccini was a natural outcome.A full lifeBorn in Florence in 1587 and often nicknamed “La Cecchina” (the singing bird), Francesca Caccini first studied music under the watchful eye of her mother, a soprano, and her father, Giulio Caccini, a prolific and respected composer and member of the Florentine Camerata, a circle of artists dedicated to the representation of the human soul through music. Along with her brother Pompeo and sister Settimia, she was a member of the Concerto Caccini, an ensemble whose notable performances included singing at the marriage of Henri IV of France and Maria de Medici in 1600. Four years later, when the king heard her in Paris, he was profoundly moved. “You are the best singer in France,” he unequivocally stated and immediately offered her a position at court, but the Florentine officials refused to release her from her engagement. In 1607, Francesca’s reputation was solid enough to win her a position with the Medici as a teacher, singer, vocal coach and composer of lyric and chamber music. The same year, she married another court musician, Giovanni Battista Signorini, whom she bore a daughter. In 1617, while the couple toured Milan, Parma, Lucca, Savona, and Genova, the poet Gabriello Chiabrera wrote: “Unquestionably, she was seen as a marvel and, in just a few days, her reputation had spread far and wide.”Soon after the death of her first husband in December 1626, Francesca married a music-loving nobleman from Lucca, Tommaso Raffaelli, the father of her son. But Raffaelli died three years after their marriage, prompting her to return to the Medici court. In 1634, she took on the position as music teacher to the Medici princesses and to her own daughter, Margherita, with whom she also performed. She left the service of the Medici in 1641 and subsequently disappeared from the public record. She is buried in San Michele Visdomini cemetery in Florence, alongside her father and sister.A unique styleA singer, lutenist, guitarist, and harpsichordist, by 1614, she had become the best paid court musician anywhere. Over the years, she composed an impressive number of works, including at least 16 stage works, of which unfortunately remain only the manuscripts of La liberazione di Ruggiero—the first Italian opera performed outside of Italy—and excerpts from La Tancia and Il passatempo. An examination of the few remaining scores of her works indicates the high degree of attention she paid to musical notation, in the rhythmical placement of syllables and words, especially beneath ornaments, in explicit phrasing indications, and in the meticulous notation of her frequently long and fluid melismas.Francesca Caccini made use of surprising harmonies, which powerfully convey the various affects of the music. Instead of merely assuming their musical function, chords become colours. “She employed uniquely personal turns of phrase, especially in her cadential figures, and her bold dissonances do not always resolve where one would expect,” notes Beauséjour. “Cadences often end on a minor chord, when in Italy at the time, the major resolution was almost always preferred,” remarks Sylvain Bergeron, who also observes that “certain recurring melodic formulae are quite unusual.”A seminal workIn 1618 she published Il primo libro delle musiche, dedicated to Cardinal Charles de Medici, a striking portrait of the artist in 36 tableaux. The varied collection includes euphoric religious songs, emotionally troubling laments, madrigals and canzonettas expressing the joys and perils of love, inspired by her own poems. While most of the pieces were probably accompanied by theorbo at the time, the musicians on this recording decided to use a fuller continuo, as implied by the inclusion of a bass line in the score. “We felt we would do better service to the music by having a more varied and lively instrumentation, giving us a wider palette of sounds to choose from,” states Beauséjour. It was Bergeron who proposed the choice of musical colours. “Above all, I tried to match instrumentation to style. Hence, the secular songs (canzonettas, arias, romanescas, etc.) employ Baroque guitar, cello and harpsichord, while the sacred songs use organ, cello and occasionally theorbo. The lighter, more rhythmical pieces were better suited to Baroque guitar, while for the more serious pieces, theorbo was the appropriate choice. And for songs with several verses, I used the text itself as a guide.”In order to give the program some variety, the recording includes several instrumental tracks. Some songs were adapted for organ or cello, though strictly observing the written bass and melodic lines. The only works not by Francesca Caccini are Bergeron’s arrangement for Baroque guitar of four short songs by her father, Giulio, which Bergeron entitled Quattro Canzoni di mio padre, “as if Francesca had arranged a few of her father’s songs as a tribute.”In tackling the interpretive challenges of this little-known repertoire, Mercer had to take a new approach to the trills, while also working on the control and breathing required to sustain Caccini’s long phrases and on clearly conveying the text, which includes many sonorous images. “It’s almost as if we were creating something completely new, or solving an equation. We had to be spontaneous and creative, and use our improvisational skills, and that’s what I love most about this repertoire. But we were all driven by the importance of bringing the work to light and recognizing the talent of this remarkable composer.”© Lucie RenaudTranslation: Peter Christensen
Following a series of highly acclaimed recordings dedicated to individual composers, Yevgeny Sudbin has combined works by Liszt, Ravel and Saint-Saëns into a recital with the three-stranded theme Love, Delirium and Death. First to make its presence felt is death, in Funérailles, Liszt’s grandiose elegy for his Hungarian countrymen who died in the 1849 uprising against Habsburg Rule. It reappears in Ravel’s depiction of a hanging – Le Gibet (The Gallows) from the triptych Gaspard de la Nuit – and closes the programme in Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre in which Death personified provides the music for a morbid ballet of corpses, playing a fiddle and tapping his foot on a tombstone. Love enters the programme with the Petrarch Sonnets, originally song settings by Liszt of three of the many poems in which Petrarca immortalized Laura, the object of his life-long but unrequited passion, and later reworked for piano solo by the composer. A similarly hopeless attraction is described in Ravel’s Ondine – the tale of a water nymph tempting a mortal to join her in the depths of the lake. Delirium, finally, is present throughout the disc – most manifestly in the nightmarish portrait of the goblin Scarbo, but also as an essential ingredient in many of the other works. The programme thus poses a huge challenge for the performer in terms of transmitting a wealth of super-charged emotions and images while simultaneously negotiating immense technical demands – a worthy task for Sudbin, whose Scriabin interpretations were described in BBC Music Magazine as being ‘as terrifyingly changeable and emotionally all-engulfing as the music itself’, while his Rachmaninov disc to the reviewer in Piano Magazine revealed ‘a musical dramatist of exceptional acumen and sophistication; a poet who moves seamlessly between unbridled rhetoric and extreme intimacy; a stylist who catches the particular spirit of everything he plays…
Wokalistka Nightwish Floor Jansen oraz gitarzysta Pagan’s Mind Jørn Viggo Lofstad spotkali się na scenie „All Star Jam” podczas Progpower USA Festival w 2007 roku. Już w 2008 roku mieli gotowy materiał na płytę długogrającą. Ze względu na napięte harmonogramy związane z innymi projektami, premiera albumu przesunęła się aż o 10 lat. Northward to określa swoją muzykę jako wypadkową stylów Skunk Anansie i Deep Purple. Tracklista: 1. While Love Died 2. Get What You Give 3. Storm In A Glass 4. Drifting Islands 5. Paragon 6. Let Me Out 7. Big Boy 8. Timebomb 9. Bridle Passion 10. I Need 11. Northwards
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi is unquestionably one of the most fascinating personalities of the 18th century. While his life remains generally shrouded in mystery, his name and his works have so intrigued later generations that he has become a truly legendary figure.The three cantatas for soprano, strings and basso continuo presented here appear, along with a fourth for alto, in an elegant collection published around 1736. This was a posthumous compilation of works composed during the Neapolitan composer’s all-too-brief career. They all exhibit the new pre-galant manner characteristic of the latest Neapolitan music of the time, while remaining close to the baroque style with their dense harmonic language and expressive melodic lines.Pergolesi’s extraordinary popularity only a few years after his death coincided with a considerable craze for the Neapolitan school in most of the European courts. From the 1740s, Neapolitan music became the benchmark and model. Nicola Antonio Porpora in all probability played, along with many others, an important role in this growing recognition. His instrumental works, few in number, include some chamber sinfonie.
Tracklista: 1. Cruella De Vil2. Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat3. Little April Shower4. Gaston5. When I See an Elephant Fly6. I Wan'na Be Like You7. The Bare Necessities8. The Siamese Cat Song9. Hakuna Matata10. Circle of Life11. Under the Sea12. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious13. Let's Go Fly a Kite14. Following the Leader15. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah16. I've Got No Strings17. Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?18. Whistle While You Work19. Dig, Dig, Dig/Heigh-ho20. The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers
CD: 1.Cold as Christmas (In the Middle of the Year)2.I'm Still Standing3.Too Low for Zero4.Religion5.I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues6.Crystal7.Kiss the Bride8.Whipping Boy9.Saint10.One More Arrow11.Earn While You Learn12.Dreamboat13.The Retreat
Concerto for string orchestra 1948Sinfonietta for string orchestra 1935Symphony for string orchestra 1946Music for strings, trumpets and percussion 1958 This new disc from the New London Orchestra under Ronald Corp showcases the work of Graz.yna Bacewicz (1909–1969), whose centenary is celebrated this year. It contributes greatly to the knowledge of her music outside her native Poland, where she is still an important and well-loved cultural figure, one of those who led to Polish music becoming one of the main contributors to European culture in the second half of the twentieth century. It contains the premiere recordings of both the Sinfonietta and the Symphony for string orchestra. Bacewicz was one of the most significant composers of the mid-twentieth-century, with strong roots in the culture of Paris, where she studied both composition and violin in the early 1930s. Her most striking music is that which draws on her experience of the neoclassicism of inter-war France. She emphasizes neoclassicism’s vitality and clarity while at the same time giving it a combination of delicacy and muscularity which is all her own. While she demonstrates both wit and joie de vivre, her music is never frivolous.
Tracklista:1. Messiah of a Thousand Plagues2. Return to Walachian Battlefields3. Haunting the Vaults of Death4. Blood As Wine5. Drained While Somnambulant6. Consecration Bound in Cruor