Commotio - Rose in the Middle of Winter - Carols By Bob - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Saint-Saens's mature creative genius shines throughout these last two piano concertos, looking back over a glorious musical ancestry while at the same time opening the door to new worlds. The Fourth Piano Concerto is prescient of both his great Organ Symphony and the concertos of Rachmaninov, revealing Saint-Saens at his most inspired and innovative. The Fifth was composed in the Egyptian temple town of Luxor, and displays a rich tapestry of exotic cultural influences from Japanese, Spanish, and Middle Eastern music, as well as portrayals of chirping Nile crickets and croacking frogs, and the composer's representation of 'the joy of a sea crossing.' Volumes 1 and 2 can be heard on Naxos as well. Album Tracks 1. Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44 (1875) 2. Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, 'Egyptian', Op. 103 (1896)

SOMM Recordings announces the third and final volume of the enthusiastically received One Hundred Years of British Song, with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson. Focusing on songs written since 1950, Volume 3 celebrates what Williamson's booklet note describes as Inchastonishment at the depth of expressivity of the poetry and musicInch. Receiving first recordings are John Woolrich's settings of Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, The Unlit Suburbs, a deadpan yet evocative exercise in Inchalternative realismInch, and Geoffrey Poole's stylistically wide-ranging The Eye of the Blackbird, with texts from Virginia Woolf, traditional Nigerian poems, Wallace Stevens, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Requiem Mass. Also on album for the first time are Williamson's own song-cycle setting poems by Bryan Heiser composed especially for James Gilchrist, The Little That Was Once a Man, and solo-piano miniature, Intermezzo. Peter Dickinson's early, accomplished Four W.H. Auden Songs and dramatic and intense yet positive and joyful Let the Florid Music Praise, and Madeleine Dring's characterful Five Betjeman Songs, the product of a Inchfascinating and multi-faceted artistic personalityInch, complete the . Album Tracks 1. Peter Dickinson (B.1934) 2. Let the Florid Music Praise 3. Four W.H. Auden Songs 4. Madeleine Dring (1923-77) 5. Five Betjeman Songs 6. Nathan Williamson (B.1978) 7. The Little That Was Once a Man 8. John Woolrich (B.1954) 9. The Unlit Suburb 10. Nathan Williamson (B.1978) 11. Intermezzo 12. Geoffrey Poole (B.1949) 13. The Eye of the Blackbird

From out of the dark, sparks of feedback birdsong signal a return to the singular sonic environments of Rafael Toral's sound-world. A year after Spectral Evolution, his acclaimed album of electric guitar conceptions, comes the companion work Traveling Light. Sharpening his focus around a set of jazz standards, his move from abstract form to solid song elicits glints from beyond time and space, crafting a unique listening lens for deep listeners. Album Tracks 1. Easy Living 2. Solitude 3. Body and Soul 4. You Don't Know What Love Is 5. My Funny Valentine 6. God Bless the Child