Various Artists - Arie Senza Voce: Dramatic Soprano / Various - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Composer Douglas Boyce, composer in residence of acclaimed new music ensemble counter)induction, releases his debut portraig album, featuring three of his kinetic chamber works in riveting performances by counter)induction, Aeolus Quartet, and Trio Cavatina. Boyce's music reflects a wide array of interests, from Renaissance traditions to modernist aesthetics, embedding these influences in works that oscillate between tightly organized ensemble mechanisms and carefully curated moments of independent instrumental freedom. Boyce opens the program in a haze with the murky intersection of '102nd & Amsterdam.' His Piano Quartet No. 1 begins with Bartokian off-kilter accents, alternating with hocketed passages between viola and piano. Finally 'Fortuitous Variations' opens with similarly angular music, pillars of repeated octaves in the piano alternating with swooping gestures in the strings. Douglas Boyce is a composer with a powerful focus and impetus in his music, but also a fantastic capacity for expressive range and an uncanny ability to sustain complex rhetorical arguments within his sophisticated structures.

Inspired by Ovid's InchMetamorphosesInch and Calvino's deconstructive analysis of the classic Roman recasting of Greek myths, John Aylward's InchCelestial Forms and StoriesInch establishes musical analogs to Ovid's way of depicting the world. Featuring musicians from Klangforum Wien in chamber formations, InchCelestial Forms and StoriesInch encapsulates the transformative nature of myth, constantly being reimagined and reinterpreted over generations and retellings. Aylward writes InchThe entire nexus of Greek mythology is in constant need of new analysis and artistic interpretation lest it become stale and unable to reflect the 'universal contiguity' Calvino so aptly recognizes. Even Ovid's stories were not his own, but rather the myths of the day retold under his own artistic renderings. And so perhaps Ovid is one of the first to abide by the old adage that the act of writing is to rewrite the already written. I would like my Celestial Forms and Stories to be received also as an act of rewriting these myths that Ovid immortalized, in my own way, and through my own revelation of transformation.Inch

Various Artists - Operatic Arias [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/23/1993