Bjarnason / Iceland Symphony Orchestra - Recurrence (1 CD + 1 BluRay Disc) - COMPACT DISCS

At the risk of getting doxxed by my musician colleagues, I'm going to divulge a dark truth about classical music it's never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage. Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming. So not... immediate. Which is why I am approaching zealot status in my admiration for Sono Luminus and the way in which it submerges listeners within reach of the Atlantis that is the on-stage experience. Which is why, save for live performance, the often inimitable new-music originating in, or in proximity to, Iceland (homeland to an unreasonable percentage of the composers living rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found it's most ardent advocate and most clarion amplifier in Winchester, Virginia. Certainly it's exceptional national orchestra has. Despite a bewildering insistence by journalists to characterize music written by those with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this tracklist are as singular as hand blown glass. The inclusion of American sonic clairvoyant Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographic foil here, but there is one element fusing all of these inventions Your person is about to feel minuscule or massive, by contrast to - or motivated by - these sounds. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft- ian deities, but it simultaneously introduces an iridescent hope I have not encountered before in her music. Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsing solar system to the other while Daníel Bjarnason's From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from earth to the moon and back, seeming somehow both terrestrial and paranormal within a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir's Clo

Schubert Architect by pianist Mathieu Gaudet is the eighth volume from his remarkable collection The Complete Sonatas and Major Works for Piano of the great Austrian composer Franz Schubert. Schubert revered Beethoven and regarded his piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies as models of coherently elaborated architecture, harmonious works with affirmed individuality. This album features the great Sonata in C minor, D. 958 that reminds us of Beethoven. There is the ardent, tragic tone, deployed by the Bonn master in his great masterpieces. The whole work exudes fervour and heroism. It's slow movement is at once exquisitely tender and dramatic, and it's first and fourth, especially, display peerless compositional virtuosity.

Iceland Symphony Orchestra - Vikingasvar [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/28/2005