Elena Denisova - New Night Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Piano music has always been important to Bechara El-Khoury it brings his compositional voice closer to the listener, allowing him to share his feelings more directly than in some of his orchestral works. These works represent different periods of El-Khoury's life, but share a conception aimed at creating atmosphere with expressive states that continually switch between violence, anger, suffering and rebellion, and inquiring explorations of peaceful or dreamlike meditation. Italian concert pianist and recording artist Giacomo Scinardo has appeared as a soloist with many orchestras including the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra and the Kiev Symphony Orchestra. He is a professor at the State Conservatory of Music Trapani, Italy.

The new Requiems is a funerary ritual that, in the course of six traditions and sacred languages, invites us to enter into eternity. The Requiems are an invitation, an introduction to rest, to the intangible peace that inhabits the depths of life. A Requiem ought to help us go beyond thought and enter into the rest of the non-mental. Is there a sound, a frequency, a rhythm, a voice that might help us live this? Such could be the function of a Requiem those who listen to it, by the grace of sound, would enter into this non-space-time, this non-mental and would thus be in communion with the one or with those who have just given their last breath. This album is released simultaneously with Requiem by Jean-Yves Leloup published by Éditions du Relié.

Conductor Mei-Ann Chen and the Chicago Sinfonietta - the adventurous, MacArthur Award-winning orchestra that champions racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in classical music - give world-premiere recordings of newly commissioned American works by Jennifer Higdon, Clarice Assad, Jessie Montgomery, and Reena Esmail on Project W Works by Diverse Women Composers, the capstone project of it's 30th anniversary season. Higdon, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and two Grammy Awards, invites listeners to luxuriate in the beauty of a virtuosic string orchestra with Dance Card, a five-moment suite that San Francisco Classical Voice praised for it's Inchpleasurable soundsInch and Inchintellectual heft.Inch Assad is a Grammy-nominated, Brazilian-American composer and performer. Her Sin Fronteras (Without Borders) lives up to it's title with an exotic blend of musical influences from throughout the Americas. Juilliard-trained African-American composer Montgomery, a violinist member of the acclaimed Catalyst Quartet and a collaborator with Yo-Yo Ma's Silkroad Ensemble, imbues her Coincident Dances with the frenetic energy and multicultural sound worlds of her native New York City. Esmail, an Indian-American graduate of Juilliard and the Yale School of Music, draws from Western and Hindustani (north Indian) classical music for #metoo, a composition rooted in her own personal experiences. Founded by pioneering African-American conductor Paul Freeman (1936-2015), the Chicago Sinfonietta also presents the first-ever recording William Grant Still's orchestral arrangement of Florence Price's buoyant, lyrical Dances in the Canebrakes.