Art Deco Trio - Gershwinicity - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

United States Army Field Band Jazz Ambassadors - Legacy of Mary Lou Williams [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/15/2011

This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra focuses on works by Perttu Haapanen (b. 1972), one of the most important and interesting Finnish composers of his generation. It includes a recently-written Flute Concerto with Yuki Koyama as soloist and conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk, and two other works conducted by Hannu Lintu a song-cycle written for soprano Helena Juntunen and an orchestral work, Compulsion Island, written for the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Compulsion Island was written to a commission from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and makes full use of the resources of a full-sized symphony orchestra. Haapanen creates a multi-layered and richly sonorous texture where extended instrument techniques play a significant and carefully considered role. Quiet, stagnant and expectant yet tense moments alternate with charged and punchy rhythmical passages that increase in force until the final culmination, followed by a subsiding, dreamlike and unreal epilogue. The Flute Concerto lasts about 25 minutes and is in a single movement divided into two halves featuring different materials, according to the composer. At the surface level, it comes across as a flexible and elastic structure consisting of several short sections in rapid succession, with contrasting moods either alternating or superimposed. The palette of sonorities is rich, augmented by extended instrument techniques and a number of rare sound sources such as a typewriter producing crisp rhythms and the absurd sounds of wheezing toys. Ladies' Room for soprano and chamber orchestra was written to a commission from the Musica nova Helsinki festival. Originally written and premiered in 2007 by Helena Juntunen, it was revised by Haapanen in the following year. The texts come from a wide variety of sources poems by conductor and mezzosoprano Jutta Seppinen, the Bible, Google, the archives of S

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Classical Changes, a second disc by the Art Deco Trio which treats favourite classical pieces to delightful and often dazzling jazz-accented re-workings in variegated arrangements by Iain Farrington. Comprising three remarkable instrumentalists - Peter Sparks clarinet, Kyle Horch saxophone, Iain Farrington piano - the Art Deco Trio is a virtuosic powerhouse in performance and made it's acclaimed tag debut with Gershwinicity (SOMMCD 0631) in 2021. Also featuring five African-American Spirituals and three sea shanties, Classical Change takes the early-20th-century fashion for InchJazzing the ClassicsInch at face value with a collection of 20 first recordings of scintillating new arrangements, translating the works' Inchoriginal sober environment into one that was more intoxicatedInch, as Farrington tellingly comments in his booklet notes. Familiar pieces by Beethoven, Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov are respectively refashioned in the, by turns, evocative, exuberant and ecstatic 'Elise's Blues', 'Hungarian High-Five' and 'The Bite of the Flumblebee'. Similar treatment is afforded Bizet (The excitable 'Jiffy Dance' and sultry 'One Night in Seville'), the ceremonial pomp of Handel ('Arrival Revival'), grandeur of Elgar ('Saturday in the Park with Elgar'), and grandiosity of Wagner ('Valerie Takes a Ride') alongside vivacious re-imaginings of Satie and Vivaldi. The trio of sea shanties in A Sea Shanty Shake-Up and the five-part Lay My Burden Down, drawn from African-American Spirituals, prove pleasingly amenable to Farrington's jazz-laced re-fashioning of their various messages and moods. Of the Art Deco Trio's Gershwinicity, BBC Music Magazine declared InchWhat's not to love? It's a winning combination and the arrangements are top-notch too. This is a recording that is guaranteed to get you movingInch. Fanfare approvingly commented InchN