Leif Vollebekk - New Ways - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Leif Vollebekk - Twin Solitude [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/24/2017

The German-Bohemian composer Wenzel Heinrich Veit (1806-64)- Vaclav Jindrich Veit, as he later became known in Czech- is one of music's most unjustly forgotten figures. As these first recordings of his four string quartets reveal, he is not only the link between the Bohemian composers of the end of the Classical period and the wave of Czech Romanticism that began with Smetana- he is also an outstanding composer in his own right. His four quartets trace the stylistic evolution of his time they emerge from a debt to Haydn, Beethoven and Spohr and embrace Mendelssohn and Schumann on their way to pre-echoes of Smetana and Dvorak. A review of Volume One in this series stated InchThis period-instrument quartet has a wonderfully rich, warm ensemble sound. I am very much looking forward to volume two.Inch At last, here it is. The Kertesz Quartet was formed in 2010 by four leading period instrument specialists following a desire to explore chamber music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, using historical instruments, bring it to audiences. The Quartet combines traditions of the central European and historic, period performance practices. Using gut strings and historic bows, the original sound world, liveliness and intensity of the music is revived in fresh performances that are relevant today. The members of the Quartet are all leading performers on the British early music scene.

Canadian singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk is a philosophy student turned troubadour who marries Carl Jung's I Ching musings and Wittgenstein's love of language with his own lyrical poetry on the aptly named Revelation, a product of the introspection brought on by the lockdown. The 11 tracks, including a pair of orchestrated, cinematic set pieces, evoke the narrative skills of fellow countrymen Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, the crystalline sound of The Eagles, anchored by the rich intimacy of Nick Drake. The completed work, organic, earthy and homemade, weaves themes of nature - water, astral constellations, mortality - into a meditation on living in an ever-changing present laced with existential doubt, the search for a higher power.