Word: clarinets
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Quartet by Alexandros Kalogeras creates an engaging atmosphere of flute, bass clarinet, percussion and piano (keys and strings). The piece begins with a ringing pulse of percussion played by the pianist and flutist and soft, lush bass clarinet. Such stylized, ritualistic moments are followed by dramatic rushes of flute, clarinet, piano strings and swirling, pounding percussion. It is wonderful to listen to and a pleasure to watch...
MOST PEOPLE THINK OF CLASSICAL MUSIC as a white enterprise, but two new chamber-music CDs from Koch International Classics celebrate a pair of worthy black composers. The felicitously named SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912), an Anglo-African, was equally at home in the Dvorak-tinged idiom of his Clarinet Quintet and the simple strains of Negro spirituals, which he set compellingly for piano. The album boasts fine performances, especially by pianist Virginia Eskin. WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978) was similarly eclectic. A staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman band, he could pen a delicate gem like the Seven Traceries...
...most explicit example of his penchant for the ineffable, but the composer's acute sensitivity to the human condition is found in more intimate pieces as well. Chief among these, and his most famous work, is the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941), for piano, clarinet, violin and cello, a moving confessional made all the more poignant by its having been written in a concentration camp. Forty years later, nearing the end of his life, Messiaen completed the masterpiece toward which his entire compositional life had been aiming: the opera St. Francois d'Assise, which will be staged anew...
...high-flying decades at the head of ensembles as popular as -- and often more innovative than -- Glenn Miller's, Tommy Dorsey's and Benny Goodman's, after a succession of hits (Begin the Beguine, Frenesi) that sold millions of records around the world, Shaw, then 44, packed up his clarinet and quit the music business...
Most intriguingly, the album shows Shaw crossing the shadow line that divided swing from bop and the other modernist idioms that took over after 1950. In the hands of most other players, including Shaw's great rival Goodman, the clarinet did not make this transition -- at least not without sacrificing its warmth and lyricism -- which is why it soon was eclipsed by the saxophone as a primary jazz voice. But here Shaw effortlessly absorbs some of bop's angular chromaticism, and his out-of-rhythm codas, all fluttery murmurings or boiling surges of notes, seem to anticipate the free-form...