Feel More. Think Less. During the winter of 2023, pianist and composer Stephan Moccio traded his home of Los Angeles for the South of France to record his album “Legends, Myths and Lavender”, far away from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan chaos at the iconic Chateau Miraval. Stephan Moccio: “Three things I’m most passionate about—music, wine, and architecture—combined into this experience”.

He transformed and redefined the sound of music in TV and films over a half-century, and now the Emmy®- and Grammy®-winning American composer and musical man-for-all-seasons Mike Post has realized his own creative challenge in Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta, a unique new recording from Sony Masterworks.

The album features a pair of original works by Post that combine the pure sounds of bluegrass (Message from the Mountains) and the blues (Echoes of the Delta) – joined by “dream teams” of soloists who are longtime friends and colleagues – with the expressive power and range of a full orchestra. Post’s musical signatures for The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Magnum P.I., NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues and other TV classics – not to mention the Law & Order family of dramas (including the landmark, two-note “stinger” effect he created) – are in the DNA of contemporary television culture.

In nine multifaceted movements, Message from the Mountains uses the sounds of bluegrass to celebrate the mingling of tradition and diverse cultural experience in American music. Collaborators in realizing the work are the soloists – Herb Pedersen (5-string banjo); Gabe Witcher (fiddle); Mike Witcher (dobro); Patrick Sauber (acoustic guitar/mandolin); and Amy Keys (orator).

 Echoes from the Delta reflects and explores the exuberant joy and the well of anguish that forged the blues in 14 short, expressive movements. Joining Post and the orchestra as soloists are Sonny Landreth (slide guitar); Eric Gales (electric guitar); Abe Laboriel Sr. (bass); Abe Laboriel Jr. (drums); Robert Turner (organ/piano); Jon O’Hara (keyboards); and Amy Keys (vocalist).

The way Mike Post firmly describes himself – “I am an American musician” – is as grateful and respectful as it is limitless in its compass and its ambition. Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta emerged as his own celebration of the American experience that made him who he is.

Scriabin – Scarlatti creates a dreamlike meditation in which the boundaries between pieces, eras and states of mind fade away. Julius Asal’s full performance of the Sonata is framed by a selection of Scriabin’s etudes and preludes, six sonatas by Scarlatti and two improvisatory Transitions by the pianist himself.

PERCUSSION CONCERTO

Percussion has always been an important part of my life. Beginning in my travels though West Africa when I was 18 years old, when I began collecting and learning to play ‘balafons’ (kind of like the African version of a marimba), and through my years of playing in metal-based Indonesian Gamalan ensembles in my twenties, as well as building my own strange metal and wood percussion ensembles in my early theatrical performance years, it has always been a lifelong obsession. 

Shortly after we premiered my first violin concerto, I had a chance meeting with percussionist Colin Currie in London. We decided it could be great fun to create a piece together. I was excited to plunge into the challenge of another concerto while at the same time to really go back to my roots with wood and metal, mallets and sticks and hands. I also knew Colin was an extraordinary musician who would be great to collaborate with.  

And I was aware that there were far fewer concertos for percussion then the more obvious piano, violin, cello, etc, and that meant there were far fewer models to guide me which made the idea of a percussion concerto far more enticing.  

Wunderkammer

It was just before the pandemic when I was in London working on a film score, and my publisher suggested I meet the NYOGB (The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain)  as they had expressed interest in the possibility of doing a commission. At first I was skeptical about the idea of a youth orchestra, but I decided to attend a performance they were giving. I was, to say the least, blown away by how good they were. I decided on the spot that I would indeed find a way to write a piece for them.  

So I jumped into the composition that’s now called Wunderkammer. My original intentions was to create something that was very challenging for them, as I knew they were up for that, and something that would also be fun and exciting for them to dig into which might feature different instrument sections throughout to give everyone a moment to shine. 

A Wunderkammer (or “wonder room”) is a cabinet of curiosities or even a room of mystery and oddities which can be fun, or scary, intriguing or instructive, but never boring! And that’s just what I was hoping to bring to the NYOGB with Wunderkammer. 

ARE YOU LOST? 

My first concerto was written for violinist Sandy Cameron. She had been besieging me for ages to write a duet for violin and voice. I finally relented on the condition that we add a piano and make it a trio. While talking about the project with two composer friends we all decided to write for the same trio for a collaborative project which will be called, appropriately, “Trio”. When I began discussing the possibility of recording the concerto and Wunderkammer with Sony Classical they suggested that I include something that had never been performed. It was then I decided to take one of the 4 moments I’d written for “Trio” and to both expand and  adapt it for choir and full orchestra. Thus, the origins of “Are You Lost?” 

Italian composer Luca D’Alberto reveals the last chapter “Tomorrow” with the release of his new album “In our Hearts” : a chapter on hope symbolized by electronic influenced tracks.

Kali Malone’s anticipated new album “All Life Long” is a collection of music for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet composed by Kali Malone, 2020 - 2023. Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L’Immaculée-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden.

Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone’s music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages.

Malone’s new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019’s breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone’s compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O’Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve.

All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony.

The titular composition “All Life Long” appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ and again in the final quarter, compactly arranged for voice. In the latter, Malone pairs the music with “The Crying Water” by Arthur Symons, a poem steeped in language of mourning and eternity. For organ, “All Life Long” moves with a patient stateliness, the drama concentrated in moments when shifting tonalities generate and release dissonance and ecstasy. For voice, each word is saturated with feeling, the singers swooping gracefully downward to capture the melancholy of the narrator’s relationship to the timeless tears of the sea. “Passage Through The Spheres,” the album’s opening piece, contains lyrics in Italian pulled from Giorgio Agamban’s essay In Praise of Profanation. In it, Agamban defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs.

This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and its fixation on the infinite, but draws its weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime.

Lang Lang presents with this album a treasure trove of musical discoveries. Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was recorded with a stellar cast, the Gewandhausorchester and Andris Nelsons and is for Lang Lang a true romantic masterpiece that rivals the greats like Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky.

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary Edition of Olafur Arnalds For Now I Am Winter, the album has been remastered for vinyl and pressed in a limited edition clear color with exclusive art prints inside.

What happens when the illustrious brass sections of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic come together? The answer is The Philharmonic Brass. This debut album is conducted by Tugan Sokhiev and includes virtuoso arrangements of some of the best-known overtures including Verdi’s La Forza del Destino and Gershwin’s Cuban Overture.

On SLEEP: Tranquility Base, composer Max Richter reworks material from his celebrated eight-hour magnum opus SLEEP. Referencing the 1969 moon landing site in the title, Tranquility Base offers a glimpse at the original material from a more electronic perspective.

For his first album as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, 2021 International Chopin Competition winner Bruce Liu has compiled an enthralling survey of 200 years of French keyboard music, from Baroque to modern. The phenomenal young Canadian pianist has subtly adjusted the action of his instrument to highlight the differing musical styles. The album’s title WAVES alludes not only to the nature theme that runs throughout the program, but also to the sheer spontaneity of Liu’s music-making.

Marking the debut orchestral recording of legendary Lang Lang’s illustrious career, this Telarc classic includes the pianist’s performance of Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra from Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 2001, as well as his solo performance of a variety of Scriabin’s Etudes. Mastered from the original Soundstream tapes by Paul Blakemore, cut by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, and pressed on 180-gram LP pressed at Optimal.

Hitchock and Herrmann, Spielberg and Williams, Zemeckis and Silvestri, Burton and Elfman, Fellini and Rota. There’s a certain kind of magic that happens when a director and composer work together for an extended period; their imaginations are fuelled by an artistic sensibility which becomes, inevitably, entwined. Such deep understanding between two artists has proffered memorable, even legendary, cinemusical experiences. But there’s another of these partnerships we must honour and mention in the same breath, that of director Hayao Miyazaki and composer Joe Hisaishi.

Rob Grant will release his debut album, Lost At Sea, on June 9, 2023. An accidental recording artist, Grant has never had a lesson on any instrument in his life, but when he sits down at a piano, something magical happens. Father of international icon Lana Del Rey, he enlisted an array of talent to contribute to the making of the album. Features and writing credits include Lana Del Rey, while production credits include Jack Antonoff, Luke Howard, Laura Sisk and Zach Dawes.

Commemorating the 25th anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in Quebec’s history while celebrating the courage and collective humanity that emanated from it, the album Ice Storm Symphony (Symphonie de la tempête de verglas) takes the listener into a whirlwind of music by Quebec composer Maxime Goulet. The program features Orchestre classique de Montréal under the direction of Jacques Lacombe performing three of Goulet’s compositions: Fishing Story, What a Day, and the title work.

The greatest recording of all time is sounding better than ever before. Now, Solti and Culshaw’s Ring Cycle can be enjoyed in the highest quality possible. The Hybrid SACD format combines the high-density 24bit/192kHz stereo mix with a standard CD layer that will play in any normal CD player. This compilation of Great Scenes contains a selection of incredible highlights from across the Ring Cycle, including the timeless, “Ride of the Valkyries,” and “Siegfried’s Funeral March.”

The Blue Hour is a song cycle written collaboratively by the composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider with the chamber orchestra A Far Cry (Shara Nova also is featured as vocal soloist).  Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s epic poem On Earth, the music follows one woman’s journey through the space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images. Exploring memories of childhood, of war, of love, and of loss, The Blue Houramplifies the beauty, pain, and fragility of human life from a collective female perspective.

Nonesuch Records releases the first recordings of Steve Reich’s Runner (2016) and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018), performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by Susanna Mälkki, available on CD on September 30, 2022; a vinyl LP version will be released on December 2.

Reich says Runner is written “for a large ensemble of winds, percussion, pianos, and strings. While the tempo remains more or less constant, there are five movements, played without pause, that are based on different note durations. First, even sixteenths, then irregularly accented eighths, then a very slowed-down version of the standard bell pattern from Ghana in quarters, fourth a return to the irregularly accented eighths, and finally a return to the sixteenths but now played as pulses by the winds for as long as a breath will comfortably sustain them. The title was suggested by the rapid opening and my awareness that, like a runner, I would have to pace the piece to reach a successful conclusion.”

“Music for Ensemble and Orchestra is an extension of the Baroque concerto grosso where there is more than one soloist,” the composer continues. “Here there are twenty soloists—all regular members of the orchestra, including the first stand strings and winds, as well as two vibraphones and two pianos. The piece is in five movements, though the tempo never changes, only the note value of the constant pulse in the pianos. Thus, an arch form: sixteenths, eighths, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Music for Ensemble and Orchestra is modeled on my Runner, which has the same five movement form.”

Bob Marley with the Chineke! Orchestra reimagines some of Bob Marley’s most recognized and listened to songs with contemporary classical orchestration. The Chineke! Orchestra provides opportunities to a diverse range of up-and-coming and internationally respected classical musicians.