Edna Stern - Schumann & Stern: Carnaval - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Pianist Edna Stern offers her interpretations of the music of Schubert via a refreshing and personal method of recording, using analogue tape to record single takes of each piece in order to present the most honest and immediate performance possible. This ethos grew out of early experiences of hearing her own recordings InchI was shocked to encounter an interpretation that I myself could never have played or even imagined', and it was this that prompted Edna Stern Inchto go back to a mode of recording practice that would more faithfully do justice to the music and Schubert's humane masterpieces in particular.Inch The masterpieces heard on this album are Schubert's Four Impromptus and Six Moments Musicaux, works that lend themselves to, or even demand, performances of truthfulness and spontaneity. Edna Stern grew up listening to her favorite artists on tape, and so it seemed natural to look to this medium in order to achieve a similar quality in her own album. This recording is made directly to tape, without any editing, with the result that we hear Stern's Schubert unvarnished, in all it's humanity and warmth. As she puts it InchThere is a sense of freedom - even of danger - with the human and all their flaws. There is a coherent continuation of movement. Moreover, there is a sense of life.Inch

The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux's semi-improvised but keenly intentional songwriting to it's fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate. And Say Laura breathes like no other Chenaux album. Voice and guitar are inscribed with elemental clarity in a wondrously open, symbiotic sonic space. His pure tenor croon glides through a crisp, reverberant ether while his fried guitar careens dizzily and giddily, every gesture and timbre captured in unflinching detail. Interviewed as The Wire magazine's cover star in 2017, Chenaux said Inchthe details of our lives are often produced with improvisation and experimentation and in my music, improvisation is a way to hear those details.Inch The details on Say Laura achieve new heights of lucid acuity. Eric Chenaux keeps getting better; Say Laura captures him at his best.

2014 collection from the New Jersey-based Alt-Rock band. This compilation of non-album material features 11 tracks including InchShe Loves YouInch as well as acoustic versions of InchThe '59 Sound,Inch InchAmerican SlangInch and InchGreat ExpectationsInch.