Sara Sant'Ambrogio - Elgar Piazolla Wolosoff - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Praetorius / Abel / Bahr / Hasse / Flamme - Comp Organ Works [SUPER-AUDIO CD] Hybrid SACD date 01/13/2015

There's Stravinsky, there's Bartók, there's Hindemith; but where is Piazzolla? With this question, the leading composition teacher Nadia Boulanger set the course of a musical about-turn in the work of her student Astor Piazzolla. We speak of tango nuevo - the new tango - created by this very man, Astor Piazzolla. At first, it brought the young composer little more than hostility in his Argentine homeland, but it later brought him world fame. To reach that point was a long journey. The present presents Piazzolla's concertos and chamber works performed by the trio of William Sabatier, Friedemann Wuttke, and Wilfried Holzenkamp. The trio first emerged as a duo when in 2017 bandoneon player William Sabatier and guitarist Friedemann Wuttke met at the Kiosk European Festival in Lyon. Out of this encounter arose a successful collaboration and beautiful friendship.

Florence Price had an abiding love of literature, setting poets affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance as well as Byron and Robert Frost, among others. Her largest choral work is Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, which sets a poem published in 1914 imagining Lincoln surveying the modern world with dismay. It's chorale-like passages and fugal finale, allied to her use of spirituals, gives the cantata a thoughtful, sometimes introspective grandeur. Song of Hope, which uses Price's own text, is an emotionally intense supplication that also draws on spirituals. Charming smaller settings devoted to the natural world, and two sacred numbers, complete the album.