Studio Masters

Savina Yannatou, Primavera en Salonico – Songs Of Thessaloniki (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 1:07:42 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: HDTracks |  © ECM Records GmbH
Recorded: February 2014 at Sierra Studios, Athens

Savina Yannatou’s fourth ECM album is a dazzling evocation of her band’s hometown, plunging deep into its rich and complex history. Once known colloquially as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thessaloniki has been home to a host of cultures, religions and ethnic communities. Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Slav-Macedonians and Pontiac Greeks have shared the city’s diverse life. Yannatou gives all of them a voice, even casting an Irish song about Salonika into this multi-lingual programme in which she shines as a unique interpreter and spokeswoman for the city’s ghosts. As ever, Primavera en Salonico are a delight, one of the most resourceful bands of any idiom, as they negotiate the inspired – and very varied – arrangements of Kostas Vomvolos.

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Claudio Monteverdi – Vespers of 1610 – The Sixteen, Harry Christophers (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz  | Time – 01:46:02 minutes | 1,76 GB | Genre: Classical, Baroque, Choral
Official Digital Download – Source: HDTracks | © Coro/The Sixteen Productions Ltd.
Recorded: St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, London, 31 March – 3 April 2014

Following the success of their Monteverdi Selva morale e spirituale recordings, The Sixteen and Harry Christophers release a work often classed as one of the most significant collections of sacred music ever written: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. It is a work grand in conception and structure; revolutionary techniques established in his secular music, such as recitar cantando – speak through singing – are brought to the church platform with stunning effect.

Harry writes: ‘Its variety alone makes it unique – thrilling psalm settings with virtuosic writing for both multi-part choir and instrumentalists to exotic and sensual settings of texts from the Song of Songs for solo voices. Every movement is full of luscious harmonies, drama and an evocative musical language which is so beautifully constructed for all concerned.’

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Lutoslawski, Bartok – Musique funebre – Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Dennis Russell Davies (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44.1 kHz  | Time – 01:00:45 minutes | 566 MB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: highresaudio.com | © ECM Records GmbH
Recorded: May 2004 and February 2010, Liederhalle, Stuttgart

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies leads the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in a program of music by, and dedicated to, Béla Bartók. The disc opens in the latter vein with Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, composed between 1954 and 1958 for the 10th anniversary of Bartók’s death. The title, often erroneously translated as “Funeral music,” is better rendered as “Music of mourning,” and connotes homage to one of Lutosławski’s greatest inspirations, if not the greatest, for he never dedicated a work to another composer. Although the piece’s overarching development resembles Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the opening cellos closely prefigure the robust, overlapping memorial of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, even if they do chart a vastly different geography, from collective to individual landing. That initial feeling of density and weight gives way to a dark airiness. Motives bend and sway—at moments pliant, at others sharply angled. Darting violins bring us closer to a sense of inner turmoil and bold reckoning. The Bartókian flavor is clear yet faged, and falls back where it began: in the solemn cellos. Ashes to ashes.
As Wolfgang Sandner observes in this album’s liner notes, for Bartók the music of Hungary’s peasants “was the source of a radical new musical system, not material for reverting to a nostalgic transfiguration of the original sounds.” In light of this, we might reckon his Romanian Folk Dances of 1917 not as an archival storehouse but, more like Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s choral arrangements, as an experiment made fresh by extant impulses. While for me the reference recording by Midori and Robert McDonald (1992, Sony Classical) gets to the core of the music in ways I’ve not since heard, the Stuttgarters’ soaring performance of this 1937 arrangement for string orchestra by Arthur Willner articulates the orbits of its moons with surprising precision. A delicate piece of nevertheless sweeping proportions, it moves by a hand unseen. The solo violin stands out like a red rose among a field of black, its changes organic, even a touch mournful, in the present setting. As the mosaic evolves, it gives light to the translucent cells of its becoming. The flute-like strings in the enlivening finale give us reason to rejoice in the shadows.
So, too, does the Divertimento. Composed 1939 in dedication to Paul Sacher (who commissioned the work) and the Basler Kammerorchester, it achieves novel balance of spiritedness and restraint under Davies’s direction. Its unmistakable beginning lures with its insistent rhythm but would just as soon fragment into multiple galaxies of melodic thought. There is a smoothness of execution in the tutti passages and a paper-thin delicacy to the solo strings. While one might expect that energy to be sustained, it waxes and wanes in a most natural, thought-out-loud sort of way that lends especial insight into Bartók’s compositional process. The second movement proceeds slowly at first, but then, with the coming of dawn, stretches its gravity. The lower and higher strings forge an implicit harmony, an acknowledgment of the invisible forces connecting them both. The contrast between double basses and violins is one not of tone but of purpose: the lowers an unstable fundament, the uppers a firmament in turmoil. This chaos they share as if it were blood. The final movement returns the promise of that dance with wit. There are, of course, intensely lyrical and slow-moving parts, with the violin carving surface relief, but always returning with that whirlwind of fire.
In the wake of this dynamism, selections from Bartók’s 27 Two- and Three-Part Choruses (1935-41) come as something of a breather. They are not adaptations of folksongs, but were composed in such a style at the behest of Zoltán Kodály. With evocative titles like “Wandering,” “Bread-baking,” and “Jeering,” each is a vignette of imagined life. A snare drum pops its way through the choral textures, by turns martial and lyrical, adding colors of interest throughout. And while these pieces hardly hold a candle to his a capella choruses (the orchestral writing feels at points superfluous), they provide welcome contrast to the veils that precede it with gift of vision. –ecmreviews.com

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Omnibus Wind Ensemble – Music By Frank Zappa (1995/2014)
DSF Stereo DSD128/5.64MHz  | Time – 01:05:23 minutes | 5.17 GB | Genre: Avant-Garde, Jazz, Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: dsdfile.com | ©  Opus 3 Records
Recorded: June 1994 – June 1995; Mastered at Sony Music Studios, London

The Omnibus Wind Ensemble’s interest in Frank Zappa’s music dates back to the beginning of the 1980s, almost from the very beginning. Under the motto “From Mozart to Zappa”, which also became the title of their first, widely acclaimed CD under the Opus 3 label, they have had many of Frank Zappa’s compositions on their repertoire over the years.
The music of Frank Zappa has always defied classification, and those who have not studied it closely perhaps do not realize how much jazz and classical music it contains. (Zappa composed a percussion piece when he was only 15!) Arguably, Frank Zappa is one of this century’s most interesting composers and perhaps the best kept musical secret in the USA.
The Omnibus CD “Music By Frank Zappa” is a grand tour of his music – from the beautiful “Peaches En Regalia”, the highly complex “Revised Music For A Low Budget Orchestra”, the outstandingly humorous “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” to the jazz-bluesy introduction etc. of “Inca Roads”, with all the fireworks that follow it!
Also included are: How Could I Be Such A Fool, Let’s Make The Water Turn Black, The Black Page No 2, No 7, Igor’s Boogie, Be-Bop Tango, Alien Orifice, Dog Breath Variations, Uncle Meat and Sinister Footwear and 2nd Movement. The CD ends with a piece which was not written by Frank Zappa, namely Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” here in a big-band-influenced special arrangement inspired by Zappa’s own version from 1988. Classical, Jazz or Rock!?

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Gov’t Mule feat. John Scofield – 2015-03-03 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham, NC (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48kHz  | Time – 02:55:09 minutes | 1,87 GB | Genre: Rock
Official Digital Download – Source: muletracks.com | ©  Gov’t Mule
Recorded: March 3, 2015 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham, NC

The original leaders of Gov’t Mule, Warren Haynes and Allen Woody, were well known to Allman Brothers fans for their stint in Southern rock’s most famous native sons. In 1989, Haynes became the second replacement for Duane Allman, providing a good foil for Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts on guitar and vocals; Woody filled out the Allman sound on bass. Five years after their debut, the duo joined drummer Matt Abts in the side project Gov’t Mule, a band in which the Allman Brothers’ influence was apparent but complicated with the psychedelic, bluesy power trio feel of Cream.

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