Stark/Shank - American-Jewish Art Songs - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

On her fifth album, Ellen Arkbro brings her instincts for structurally elegant songwriting to extended improvisations. Her durational works move like water They can be choppy on the surface, disturbed by harsh gusts of wind, or suspensefully still, belying the roiling forces deep below. Her towering organ chords billow and undulate, seeking internally discordant phrases and resolving them incrementally, slipping against one another with a luxuriant friction. While Arkbro's For Organ and Brass (2017) took a formalist approach, testing the mechanical limits of it's instruments, and Sounds While Waiting (2023) took a contextual one, offering up an explicit (if tongue-in-cheek) social-spatial function, Nightclouds is unabashedly Romantic and representational. Arkbro, steering directly into the storm, conjures the mortal awe of the sublime. LP

Various Artists - Great Jewish Music [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/21/2003

New Jewish Music, Vol. 3 - Azrieli Music Prizes features the world premiere recordings of works by composer Keiko Devaux, 2020 Laureate of The Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music, and composer Yotam Haber, 2020 Laureate, The Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music. The album also features works by Yitzhak Yedid, 2020 Laureate, the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music and composer Pierre Mercure. These wonderful works are performed by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne under the direction of Lorraine Vaillancourt, with soloists Sharon Azrieli and Krisztina Szabó. The Nouvel Ensemble Moderne is a chamber orchestra of 15 musicians that performs in Quebec, Canada and internationally. Lorraine Vaillancourt is it's founder and musical director and Normand Forget, artistic director.