Category Archives: CDs

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…

The Peace Creeps, Cold

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My colleague AJay McLaughlin is the co-songwriter, along with Richard Bush, for most of the tunes of the Philadelphia rock band The Peace Creeps. On their new album Time Machine is the song “Cold,” for which they wanted to have a string quartet accompaniment, à la “Eleanor Rigby” (Peace Creeps founder Richard, who also led The A’s way back when, makes no bones about his love for The Beatles).

AJay knows I write “classical music” and so wondered if I might like to take a crack at string arranging for them. He sent me a demo of the song, I was immediately hooked, and I wrote it up for quartet, doubling and quadrupling them at the high point. I sent them the score and mp3, and they hired the players and recorded them. Now the CD’s out.

Let me tell you, I’m thrilled. My name’s on a rock ‘n’ roll CD, and the song sounds great. The whole CD sounds great. Listen to samples and buy it at CDBaby or iTunes.

Here’s part of a review:

The most surprising song on the album is “Cold”–just one minute and a mere ten lines long, with only a string quartet for accompaniment (arranged by Philadelphia composer Kile Smith)–perhaps a nod to Beatles producer George Martin, who pushed for the use of orchestral instruments in “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby.” None of these are even close to being “copies” of Beatles songs, but their tone and attitude nevertheless pervade.

More reviews here and here.

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.”

Vespers on WQXR

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The Crossing will be featured on the the June 19 edition of WQXR’s new weekly radio show, The Choral Mix with Kent Tritle. Kent selected Piffaro and The Crossing’s recording of my “Vater unser” from the Vespers CD. You can listen Sunday at 7am and 11pm EST on WQXR 105.9 FM and any time online at WQXR.

So when Jeff Dinsmore told me about this, I said, “Well, I like ‘Vater unser,’ but I wouldn’t think that’d be the first thing someone would pick from Vespers if they were going to play one thing from it.” Jeff responded, very nicely and patiently, as if to a child, “Father’s Day.”

Oh.