Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
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Grego Applegate Edwards's Classical-Modern Music Review blogsite covers recent releases or re-issues of recordings that feature classical and concert music, primarily of the 20th and 21st Centuries, but earlier music as well when warranted. All styles of relevance will be addressed from Late-Romantic and Neo-Romantic through High-Modern, Avant Garde and Post-Modern styles. Chamber music,..
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
1w ago
Not everything can be grasped in a single setting as we all have learned over time. For New Music these days it has never been more true. It used to be at times that you more or less knew what you were getting by gazing at an album cover, the art, the label, the liners and giving it a single listen but that is rare today in some settings. So with the one for today, distinguished Canadian composer Rodney Sharman and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa bring to us a stunning series of works based imaginatively on opera transcriptions, 18 works under the rubric Known and Unknown (Redshift TK539 C ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
1M ago
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), as many readers will ,know. was one of the 20th centuries most original and poetic of composers for the piano. His was a voice of great color and poise. He gives the contemporary pianist a manifold challenge for realizing great expression and symphonic dimensions, along with a great intimacy of voice that broke new grounds continually. Pianist Vincent Larderet appears with the first of several volumes devoted to The Complete Works for Solo Piano (Avie AV2623).
In this inaugural volume Larderet tackles five remarkably articulate and brilliant compositional sets ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
1M ago
Brazilian born classical guitar virtuoso Plinio Fernandes returns with more sparkling fare for solo classical guitar, this time flourishing within the Bachian strain with works initially written for lute by Bach, followed by Paulinho Noguera's Bachianinha Nos 1 and 3 plus other gems by Assaf, Villa Lobos and Mario Albanese on the album Bacheando (Decca Gold B0038-493-02). The eleven works here presented are substantial, the performances do not distract with a lot of rubato so much as they move nicely forward with a kind of infectiously rocking presence.
It all does not attempt to ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
3M ago
The state-of-the-art when it comes to Modern virtuoso music for the piano today can be had nicely in the recent album of piano works by Canadian-Chinese composer Alice Ping Yee Ho as played with insightful concentration by the formidable Christina Petrowska Quilico. This on Blaze (Centrediscs CMCCD 31323).
In all some eight compositions flow with dramatic High Modern intensity in the course of the program. It is a nice example of High Modernism today and how the more advanced sorts of musical contours thrive in dedicated hands.
"Erupting Skies" (2022) is doubtless the most sonica ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
4M ago
Today we roll into the modified Space Age and that robotic vision of Hal in 2001 is closer to our experience than certainly it was when the movie was made. And the music we hear now, is that any closer to the swirls of mad blips, bloops and barongs that formed part of the score in 2001? Well sure and you might argue that most of 2001 was already present in some form in the culture for which it was made, maybe inevitably we are what we are when we make things. It just was not perhaps as central as the movie made it. So then Ligeti's avant work "Atmospheres" graces the score and of cou ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
4M ago
Linda Catlin Smith is a composer getting attention in good ways with her work in recent years including especially her new album Dark Flower (Red Shift CD). The Thin Edge Music Collective commissioned the works and play them here with just the right (deep) level of understanding and participation. Six interrelated compositions follow a special, long form elevation of tone color and lyrical unfolding, from the larger chamber quintet of clarinet, violin, cello, piano, violin and percussion (wanderer), to dual cello, then cello, piano, violin and viola (dark flower) thereafter subtracting ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
5M ago
Ah, great, somebody I've never heard of has works I've never heard," some reader I've never heard of either might be saying as she confronts this article. OK, so I ain't gonna get rich covering the super new and in fact in the internet focus on immediate and continuous readership, I might be consigning myself to a kind of internet Siberia? Nonetheless I cover things I listen to closely, critically and actually like so you have nothing to lose in the reading of this, I believe. Today I cover another you might not know about, though I might also cover something famous ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
5M ago
US composer Stanley Grill takes inspiration from Hart Crane's epic poem on his recent World Premiere recorded orchestral work The Bridge (self released digital) featuring Brett Deubner on viola and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Marek Stilec.
This is a long flowing. multi-movement work which has musical roots in the tone-poem world of classic Americana of the most descriptively evocative orchestral works by the likes of Ives, Copland and a select few others, yet it has such roots without exposing them in obvious ways. Rather there is sincere lyrical att ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
6M ago
It is not precisely usual to experience an album sequence that pairs Beethoven with Stockhausen, excepting perhaps an old album of Stockhausen's that dealt with Beethoven themes on a 1970 Stockhausen recording marking the 200th birthday of the 19th century composer. But here we have the two together in a pairing by lucid and articulate pianist Marc Ponthus (Bridge 9584).
We get to hear Ponthus's take on Beethoven's long-formed Hammerklavier Sonata opus 106 and Stockhausen's monumentally expressive but somewhat more terse Klavierstuck X. In pure statistical terms, there are far fe ..read more
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review Blog
6M ago
Sonic Alchemy (Sono Luminus DSL92261) gathers together the considerable interpretive and sonically advanced gifts of violinist YuEun Kim, pianist Mina Gajic, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff for a rather magical program of chamber gems by Arvo Part, Peteris Vasks and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When you have a trio of the musical sensitivity you hear readily on this album, of primary importance perhaps are the commonalities one might sense between the composers and works covered in the seven dramatic and lyrically probing works heard here.
In many ways the central section of this program giv ..read more