Category Archives: CD Reviews

Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale 

It’s well past time to listen to historical instruments because they’re, well, historical. Or “informed,” or “accurate,” or whatever word we might use to feel scholastically correct. It’s time to listen because they sound beautiful.

Musik Ekklesia, “music for the church,” is an Indiana-based Baroque ensemble led by bassist and violonist Philip Spray. He’s rounded up some of the top period-instrument players—including Stanley Ritchie, violin, Wendy Gillespie, viol, and Kathryn Montoya, oboe—for this sparkling CD of surprising chorale arrangements.

It’s immediately surprising because in addition to the expected chorale setters Praetorius, Scheidt, Crüger, and the later J.S. Bach, who should show up but 20th-century Carl Nielsen? There’s also Grieg, and Mendelssohn’s deeply felt Verleih uns Frieden (Now grant us peace, Lord, in these troubled times), sung in Danish (Forlen os freden, Herre, nu). The light sweep and brilliance of the older instruments bring out new colors, which ought to make Mendelssohn, that lover of old music, smile.

The Lutheran chorale began in Germany but quickly spread to Scandinavian and other countries. They added their own tunes to the repertoire, and emigre enclaves in the U.S. continued those traditions. Musik Ekklesia brings the music all the way to today. There’s some Christmas music here, and even a brand-new work, an improvisation by the Budapest-born Bálint Karosi, Music Director of the First Lutheran Church of Boston, performing on its new 27-stop North German Baroque-style organ.

The times and instruments and composers spin, making any putative correctness happily unnecessary. It just sounds beautiful.

Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Harvest Home

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

Harvest Home: Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Nashville Chamber Orchestra

“Classical music” is not a single style, but an ever-widening variety. Because of this, classical audiences have the broadest tastes, and will happily listen to music on the borders of what others might consider “classical.” Take this CD by fiddler Jay Ungar and guitarist Molly Mason, which will also match the Thanksgiving spirit of any gathering you may be planning. The music blooms with the excellent Nashville Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Gambill.

It’s a fusion of mostly-new music in a mostly-folk style, with salutes to Yanks, Cajuns, and Copland. It also includes one tune you may already know from the Ken Burns film The Civil War, “The Ashokan Farewell.”

Ungar wrote that tune as the closing song for the fiddle camp he runs in the Catskills. Its genius is that it sounds like it’s an Appalachian or Scottish lament, hundreds of years old. It’s a timeless melody, given a ravishing reading here with orchestra.

The Harvest Home Suite includes “Autumn,” with a re-imagining of “We Gather Together to Ask Our Lord’s Blessing,” a Dutch hymn-text translated to Latin by Austrian Eduard Kremser (who composed the tune), then to English by the New Yorker Theodore Baker, the originator of one of the standard music reference resources, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary. New Yorker Jay Ungar now folds this classic Thanksgiving hymn into this lovingly-played suite. Everything on the CD is performed with beauty and sheen. That’s something all classical audiences love.

Listen to the podcast…

John Williams

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 

A lone violin plays a simple, haunting melody, and you think of the people: the many taken away, the few saved, and the one who saved the few. His name is Schindler, and the violin plays. This forlorn, soft, heart-rending music—performed here by Itzhak Perlman—is by John Williams, the king of Hollywood composers. It transforms the movie, because as sad as Schindler’s List is, it is the sweetness of the music that drives the sadness deeper. John Williams makes magic happen in front of our eyes. In more than 75 films and counting, that’s what he does…. read more…

Where flames a word, CD review

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Quebec’s François Couture’s Listening Diary, in French and English, ”IS NOT a collection of thought-out reviews. It’s a set of on-the-spot reactions.” He listens to tons, and likes The Crossing’s latest CD It is Time:

The Crossing is a strong choir devoted to classical and contemporary music. Navona Records just devoted a record to it. Conducted by Donald Nally, the choir performed works by David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Paul Fowler, Frank Havrøy, Erhard karkowschka, and Kirsten Broberg,. Shapiro’s two pieces explore deeply mastered dissonant harmonies. The other composers are less bold, but “Where flames a word” by Smith and Broberg’s ‘Breathturn” develop original ideas. And all in all, It Is Time is a pretty nice offering.

Hermann Baumann

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

Grande Messe de Saint Hubert. Hermann Baumann

Hunting music for natural horns, valve horns, organ
Hermann Baumann, horn soloist and conductor
Folkwang Horn Ensemble, Deutsche Naturhorn Solisten, Wolfgang Klasener, organ

It would be difficult to choose one musical instrument to represent a country, but if the country is Germany, the instrument would have to be (of all things) the French horn. The horn really is French, but Germans adopted it early on for its nobility of tone and noblesse oblige in ensemble playing. Well, everyone prizes those qualities, but there’s something that particularly resonates with the German soul, and that is its naivete, its unaffected folk simplicity. This comes out of its origins as a hunting-horn… read more…

It is Time, CD review

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In Philadelphia, a choir among choirs…
Bruce Hodges in Monotonous Forrest

“…Meanwhile, the group has an impressive new recording out, It is Time (Navona Records NV5845), with works by David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Paul Fowler, Frank Havrøy, Erhard Karkoschka and Kirsten Broberg. This superb program, most of which uses texts by Paul Celan (except for Fowler’s gorgeous Breath, by Philip Levine), shows off the group’s impeccable tuning, rhythmic accuracy and shimmering texture. Shapiro’s title piece makes a blazing opening, but the album is almost worth getting just for the arresting final chord of Broberg’s Breathturn that ends it all. The immaculate sound is by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Online, who regularly records the ensemble in the Chestnut Hill church’s pristine acoustic.”

The Wanamaker Organ, my first podcast

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On the WRTI homepage is my first-ever podcast for them. It’s the mini-review I wrote last year of A Grand Celebration, the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Rossen Milanov, accompanying Peter Richard Conte on the Wanamaker Organ at Macy’s. You can listen here. It focuses on the main piece of the CD, the Joseph Jongen Sinfonia Concertante, composed for this organ and this orchestra.

Wanamaker Organ Day is tomorrow, Saturday, June 25th, the center of a bustle of activity around the world’s largest functional musical instrument. Check out the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ website for information on this and my friend Rick Seifert’s sound-and-image tribute to the Wanamaker Organ in Greek Hall on Sunday, June 26th.

I “voiced” the review (which jargon I’m now picking up means that I spoke the review into a microphone), and grabbed audio from the CD for a bed under the voice. Tricky, to get the right music to match what I’m talking about, leaving time for the music, and time for the words, fading in and out to (I hope) make it interesting.

Actually, I edit the copy somewhat, because hearing spoken words is a different experience from reading them on the page, so there’s some little changes from the original copy to the podcast. Those who do this all the time know this, of course, whereas I’m just learning. But anyway, take a listen, and by all means check out the CD, and the celebrations at Macy’s if you can.