Sarah Willis - Horn Concertos - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sarah Willis - Concerto for Horns & Orchestra [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/23/2003

Montreal-based composer / producer Chris d'Eon's catalog encompasses everything from richly melodic keyboard music to glitched algorithmic abstractions to high-definition pop- and R&B-adjacent songwriting to holy post-classical minimalism to unabashed dance floor bangers. Hausu Mountain has the honor to d'Eon's Rhododendron, his first album to appear on physical formats since 2015, following a swath of releases on seminal modern electronic tag Hippos In Tanks in the early '10s. On Rhododendron, d'Eon highlights a palette of synthetic woodwinds, plucked string instruments, and choral voices, though he molds these tones into pieces with vastly different moods and levels of density and intensity. His ornate melodies in two- to four-part counterpoint trace out thrilling mini-narratives of electronic chamber music loaded with warm sentimentality and euphoric peaks, revealing how much emotion he can wring as a composer out of a small ensemble of digital instruments. In other moments, his orchestral tones are treated as fodder to scramble and reconfigure into rippling mosaics that morph into arrhythmic arcs and rapid-fire bursts of texture. When he dials everything back down to the bare minimum of one or two elements, as on the album centerpiece InchOutskirtsInch which highlights a central voice akin to a harpsichord or hammered dulcimer, d'Eon's keyboard wizardry comes to the forefront as his nimble, heavily ornamented runs wind their way through expanding improvised helixes. While the elements that populate his tracks call attention to their own synthetic quality, d'Eon exploits their distinct textures, their crystal clarity, and their pure malleability to give life to the digital chamber music in his head. Even when his pieces veer towards more hectic stews of tones glitched together in unpredictable fashion, the notion of clarity remains central to d'Eon's work he has

Sarah Willis is a tireless ambassador for her instrument, the horn, which she champions around the world. Already a horn player with the Berlin Philharmoniker, in 2014 she launched for the German television channel Deutsche Welle what was soon to become a famous programme, 'Sarah's Music', a series of interviews with personalities ranging from Gustavo Dudamel to Wynton Marsalis, which presents music with warmth and in all it's diversity. But Sarah's other passion was born when she arrived in Cuba to give a masterclass. The music and musicians she met there had a huge impact on her. Since then she has gone back regularly, founding an ensemble, The Havana Horns, that originated in a flash mob filmed for 'Sarah's Music'. Now she has decided to make an album combining the most famous of classical composers - 'Mozart would have been a good Cuban', a musician told her one day in front of a statue of the Austrian genius in the middle of Havana - and the local pride, the Cuban music that is everywhere on the island... With the Havana Lyceum Orchestra and it's exuberant conductor Pepe Méndez, she presents Mozart works for horn and orchestra (the Concerto no.3 and the Rondo K371) alongside a Rondo alla Mambo inspired by another Mozart rondo, a Sarahnade Mambo, a Cuban Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and other treats. A number of famous local musicians take part in this recording, which also pays tribute to Cuban repertory, with the song Dos Gardenias para ti made famous by Ibrahim Ferrer and the Buena Vista Social Club.