Various Artists - Semina Rerun - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

An accomplished performer on the viola, piano, and clarinet, Paul Hindemith used to brag that he could play any instrument in the orchestra with a little practice. Over the course of his prolific career, the German composer proved that he could write for any instrument as well, and that very notion became something of a mission for him- to ensure that each instrument had it's share of solo repertoire. Convergent Winds, a new recording from Oberlin Music, showcases five sonatas Hindemith wrote for woodwinds. It features performances by a host of esteemed Oberlin Conservatory faculty clarinetist Richard Hawkins, pianist James Howsmon, flutist Alexa Still, oboist and English hornist Robert Walters, and retired bassoonist George Skakeeny. The works were written between 1936- a time when Hindemith's music was banned from performance in Nazi Germany- to 1942, by which time he has resettled in America. For Howsmon, a longtime professor of instrumental accompanying at Oberlin, the recording pays tribute to an exacting neoclassicist whose music has unfairly fallen out of fashion. InchRather than being a huge innovator, Hindemith took his inspiration from past eras, and yet he had a really wonderful approach to it,Inch Howsmon says. InchHe took old models and made them look new, and no matter how wild he gets, you can always find where his starting point was, and it was always 150 years before. He's like a master furniture builder- a total craftsman. There have been others who have done that, of course, but to me he is the best of them.

Acclaimed pianist Inna Faliks breaks new ground with REIMAGINED on Navona Records, an homage to Beethoven and Ravel which manages to do the impossible be breathtakingly innovative while remaining respectful to the source material. Nine contemporary composers, including Richard Danielpour, Paola Prestini, Billy Childs, and Timo Andres, were commissioned to craft responses to Ludwig van Beethoven's Bagatelles, op. 126 (incidentally, the master's favorite) as well as Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. The results are exhilarating, not least owing to Faliks's stunningly precise and sensitive pianistic interpretation the Ukrainian-born American pianist ties together Classical, Romantic and modern pieces with disarming nonchalance and rock-solid technical skill. Defying the challenge of uniting three centuries of musical styles and social commentary, as well as producing an album during a global pandemic with the help of Yamaha's Disklavier technology, REIMAGINED proudly raises a monument not only to the genius of Beethoven and Ravel, but also to the perseverance and verve of some of today's most exciting and important composers.

In his latest album Intermissions, pianist Svetozar Ivanov continues his tradition of creating compact discs with thematic unity and artistic cohesiveness. In the year of Beethoven's 250th anniversary, Svetozar Ivanov juxtaposes the composer's last Piano Sonata in C Minor op. 111 with Contrapunctus I from J. S. Bach's last work The Art of Fugue, and Mozart's Sonata K. 330 in C Major. Four Intermissions, by the American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, who describes the peace and timelessness of these works as Inchvibrating stasisInch, serve as an audio palate cleanser between each work. The album cover displays one of Edward Hopper's last paintings Intermission, a powerful representation of a solitary figure in a public space. Intermissions is Svetozar Ivanov's fifth solo album with Gega New. In a fast-paced world where one rarely listens to an entire album, he keeps producing albums with unifying feel and pace, ones that ideally should be experienced as a complete concert.