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  At Daybreak the First Greyness to Emerge

  The first simultaneous Somnambulists releases, 'At Daybreak the First Greyness to Emerge' and 'The Invisible Score' are instrumental works reflecting an engagement with minimalism, drones, and free improvisation and are studies in the inherent sonorities and internal hum of the electric guitar, it's tonality and timbre, spatial reflection and refraction, metallic resonances, and string tension, employing backwards sounds, struck, bowed, and sustained tones, occasionally accompanied by analog organ drones, minimal percussion, and radio noise. Somnambulists is the work of Brooklyn-based guitarist Warren Ng, also a member of experimental rock duo This Invitation.

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  Danza Del Parque de Las Acacias: A Collection of Solo Piano Music From Mexico & Brazil

  The Latin American Music Center is pleased to present the debut recording of pianist Daniel Inamorato, Grand Prize winner of the Second Latin American Music Recording Competition (2012). With multiple awards in competitions in his native Brazil and abroad, Daniel Inamorato first encountered the piano at the age of five, when he started learning from his sister Viviane Louro and by age nine he performed his first concert as a soloist with orchestra. He studied in Brazil with pianists Luciana Sayuri, Marisa Lacorte, and Eduardo Monteiro and received a bachelor degree in music from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, before being accepted at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music as a Barbara and David Jacobs Fellow to pursue a graduate degree under the tutelage of Arnaldo Cohen and Jean-Louis Haguenauer. "This CD offers a unique collection of compositions for solo piano by Brazilian and Mexican composers, works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have rarely or never been recorded. Most of the pieces are either short explorations into modern pianistic sonorities or fusions of popular Latin American music with modern compositional techniques." (Marysol Quevedo) For extended liner notes and more information by Marysol Quevedo, please visit the LAMC dedicated website recordings: music.Indiana. Edu/lamc/recordings.

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  Invisible Score

  The first simultaneous Somnambulists releases, 'At Daybreak the First Greyness to Emerge' and 'The Invisible Score' are instrumental works reflecting an engagement with minimalism, drones, and free improvisation and are studies in the inherent sonorities and internal hum of the electric guitar, it's tonality and timbre, spatial reflection and refraction, metallic resonances, and string tension, employing backwards sounds, struck, bowed, and sustained tones, occasionally accompanied by analog organ drones, minimal percussion, and radio noise. Somnambulists is the work of Brooklyn-based guitarist Warren Ng, also a member of experimental rock duo This Invitation.

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  Triumph: Beethoven Sonata

  The Mt. Everest of all of Beethoven's piano sonatas is the 'Hammerklavier'- his Op. 106. It is easily the longest in length and probably the most complex - just listen to the final movement with it's 4 voice double fugue. It also qualifies as one of the most spiritual sonatas that Beethoven ever wrote. With the second movement Adagio, Beethoven seems to transport us up to heaven and then bring us slowly back to this world. It is a sonata that the pianist needs to conquer on all levels in order to make his own- intellectually, physically, emotionally and of course spiritually. It requires lots of soul-searching to peel away all the layers and try and understand what it meant not only to Beethoven when he wrote it, but what it means to the performer of today and his audience. When we consider the complex world in which we now live, this is music that inspires - strong, triumphant and profound! Liszt was the pianist who first introduced Beethoven's mammoth 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, Op. 106 to his audiences. He was one of the few pianists around at the time when he was giving concerts who could understand the work and could play it as well as communicate Beethoven's musical message to the general public. That is why Liszt's music is also included with Beethoven's masterwork on this recital recording. Perhaps Liszt in the spirit of Triumph! Might have programmed all these pieces together. The program opens with Liszt's transcription of Bach's Organ Prelude and Fugue in A minor. Liszt knew how to transcribe for the piano- he does not alter Bach's musical content but because of the differences between the organ and the piano, the piano version has to fill in sonorities and this transcription becomes a virtuosic and romantic composition. After the Beethoven Sonata, we hear Liszt, the composer of difficult Etudes that only he was capable of playing. That's why Liszt revised his first set of Transcendental Studies- they are miniature tone poems- program music describing 'Evening Harmonies', 'Fire-flies' and a 'Snow- plough.' in this final piece, Liszt makes us hear what sounds like a true blizzard at the piano. The concert concludes with an encore by the 'Russian Liszt' Sergei Prokofiev - the composer who followed in Liszt's footsteps. Liszt probably would have enjoyed playing Prokofiev's 'Diabolical Suggestion.' "A standout 'Hammerklavier,' merely superb everything else." "She plays with a striking combination of urgency and repose. There is something very personal in her interpretations which manifests itself strongly in the great slow movement of the Beethoven." "a grand, sweeping account of this huge masterwork, swift, heartfelt in the slow movement, shirking nothing...?"

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  Visual Diary/The Mouth of Boredom

  Sergio Cervetti, born in Uruguay and a U.S. citizen since 1979, is a composer whose works include electronic, instrumental and vocal music. He graduated from Peabody Institute after studying with Ernst Krenek, Lazlo Halasz, and Stefan Grové. He went on to win the Caracas Festival prize and was subsequently invited by the DAAD to be composer-in-residence in Berlin. After moving to New York City he taught at Brooklyn College, worked for Virgil Thomson, and studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia University. Cervetti joined the faculty of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1972 where he taught history of music, composition and choreography until 1997 and returned in 2007-08. Cervetti's vocabulary draws from an early brush with twelve-tone and minimalism while his current approach is free and flexible. Each work is treated in an individual manner and may often reflect his South American, French and Italian heritage. A review of Concerto for Harpsichord aptly describes his style which "...does not make a distinction between folk elements, European tradition and minimalist aesthetics, they are all fearlessly and deftly blended together in a music that defies any classification." -Ritmo Magazine, Spain Noted works include: Guitar Music: Bottom of the Iceberg, a minimalist solo guitar piece "... is one of the most effective works in this style." -Los Angeles Times The Hay Wain, an electronic work inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch triptych. Sections are used in the soundtrack of Oliver Stone's film, Natural Born Killers. "The Hay Wain is a substantial recording, noteworthy in the sea of fluff that passes for electronic music these days." -Option Magazine ...from the earth... is a controlled improvisation for a variable number of sustaining instruments which borrows five notes from Mahler's Das Lied Von Der Erde. Elegy For A Prince, opera in two acts based on Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, libretto by Elizabeth Esris. Premiered in excerpt by New York City Opera at VOX 2007: Showcasing American Composers. Funded in part by American Music Center's Composer Assistance Program. Madrigal III, for two sopranos and chamber ensemble with a text by 15th century Aztec poet, Nexahualcoyotl, ruminating on life's transient brevity. Candombe II, for orchestra, the orchestrated version of Candombe for harpsichord with rhythms based on a national dance of Uruguay with African origins. 3 Estudios Australes, for piano "...is a contemporary distillation of the piano works of Liszt and Ravel without any of the acidities of contemporary piano music and without sounding like a dry exercise...a language that is direct and full of virtuosity." -El Pais, Montevideo, Uruguay YUM!, chamber opera in one act for three voices and chamber ensemble with an original libretto by Elizabeth Esris described as a culinary comedy. Plexus, for orchestra is "...the evening's great find...gives further evidence of Cervetti's unusually discerning ear, his strong sense of both fantasy and order...a range of sonorities that are truly novel and genuinely intriguing." -Washington Post.

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  Etched in Twilight

  Etched in Twilight (a trio for horn, violin, and piano) is dedicated to Neesha Joseph, whom I met at Stanford during the summer of 02', and who was the catalyst for the piece. Neesha translates, roughly, to twilight. The piece blends together microtonal, Neo- classical, and serial treatment of pitch, synthesizing abstraction with affectation. The work's drones and microtonal inflections allude to Neesha's Indian heritage, it's clave rhythms to her passion for Latin culture, and it's open lyricism to her tenderness. The Well-tuned Synthesizer was written for a synthesizer whose tuning can be adjusted in real time, so that a lot more notes can be used then the usual twelve per octave. This work uses integer ratios tuned to the nearest cent, creating pure, beatless sonorities not possible in conventional tuning. Intervals alien to classical Western music such as frequency ratios of 8:7 and 7:6 are prevalent. Each inflection is finely carved down to the minutest detail. The work's slow, sub-chromatic descents move through a large variety of shades whose differences are obscured in standard tuning. Étude and Meditation for Marimba was actually an exercise in which I was instructed to write a composition using transformations of a single five-note cell of my choosing. The freely composed first movement develops the motive of parallel fifths moving down a minor third, but the cell from the second movement is foreshadowed at several key moments. Shades of White is a theatrical production that intertwines spoken word, spectacle, incidental music and musical settings of textual collages drawing from a multitude of sources. Orlando mixes sections of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, and Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode and Aeolian Harp, Statue Plays is performed by a statue of a violinist that becomes animated when a quarter is dropped in it's moneybox, and Dance is a dance scene involving spirits that takes place at a café. Duluth 99' is a duet for flute and percussion consisting of three movements, each inspired by a different personal experience in Duluth. Gnossienne starts off calm, moody, and introspective, much like a Satie Gnossienne, but as the theme is developed, it shifts away from Satie, towards my own more elaborate idiom. Joshua Musikantow is a Chicago born poet and composer with a special interest in microtones. He graduated with honors from Lawrence University and Conservatory with a BA in English and a BM in theory/ comp from the studio of Joanne Metcalf. He is currently pursing his masters in composition at the University of Buffalo. Offbeatjm@aol.com.

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  Glory in the Highest

  The majestic sounds of Bach, Beethoven and Franck inspire, their music encourages us to travel beyond our everyday world to try and connect with something much higher than ourselves. Music can create heavenly worlds using heavenly words! The Toccata, Adagio & Fugue must have sounded glorious when first performed by Bach on the organ, more than a century later the Italian virtuoso pianist, Feruccio Busoni, transcribed Bach's composition for the piano, filling in all the sonorities and spaces with bravura passagework at the keyboard. The American composer, Samuel Barber was a master at writing beautiful melodies and his poignant and very personal nocturne pays homage to the earliest nocturnes written by John Field and serves as a wonderful transition between the music of Bach and Franck- like a cool sorbet served to cleanse the palette during a rich meal. Like JS Bach, Franck was also an organist and whatever he wrote for the piano, always sounded as if he were imitating the organ's full sonorities. His Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, inspired by Bach, is a very personal and romantic statement written during a period of intense inner turmoil for the composer. And what can compare to the glories of Beethoven's music. This man never wrote for the piano, but always went beyond the instrument. It's as if the piano was not large enough to accommodate his grand vision. With wonderful rhythmic energy, the Waldstein opens, and we are propelled forward by it's sheer momentum and virtuosity. WIth the second movement, we can catch our breath but plunge deep down for some true soul-searching. Beethoven links this Adagio to the finale. Any trace of the storm (Inner or outer) subsides and we are left basking in the warmth of sunshine with this delightful Rondo. A brilliant coda concludes this beloved work. Several musical miniatures conclude Barbara's recital program- a romantic and sentimental piece by Granados that can tear at our heartstrings and make us weep, two of Ginastera's early Argentine dances, full of uncomplicated joy and passion and to close the recital, the popular Clair de Lune- just heavenly music to experience, enjoy and feel! "The inner glow that is a feature of all of Nissman's playing warms Franck's neogothic textures to create a magical world of affectionate splendor." 'For my money, she's one of the great pianists of my time, and probably other times as well."

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  Quality of Life

  * The Quality of Life CD includes a 34-page booklet of lyrics, stunning photography, and liner notes! Oria's musical influences in songwriting and composition span a wide range, including elements of Celtic, Classical, Choral, Gregorian Chant, Pop/Rock, Eastern, World, Musical and British Folk-Rock styles, with a hint of Blues. Her primary goal and focus as musician, singer, composer and arranger is to present a complete music/lyrics package that is uniquely rich and emotionally evocative, while drawing the listener into a complete, and even transformative and elevating, music-listening experience. Many layers of textured harmonies are featured in Oria Blue's eclectic, wide vocal range of rich sonorities, along with a wide range of unique key signatures, instrumental layers, and philosophical 'stream-of-consciousness' lyrics, these are encased inside mindfully crafted musical forms, while also featuring multiple layers of instruments, which serve to surround and elevate Oria's powerful, passionate vocals. Although Oria's music may seem reminiscent of other artists/styles (including Enya, Yes, Loreena McKennitt, Sandy Denny, Gregorian Chant, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Classical Choral music, Tori Amos), there is a signature style that is very difficult to pin down as adhering to any specific genre. Rather than meandering, Oria's musical forms adhere to specific, consciously crafted musical structures, while her voice shares and conveys philosophically deep musical and lyrical concepts.

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  Selections

  The music on this CD has travelled a long way, from the ideas of the composer at his desk, to the final result of actual, audible sounds. When we began to study and rehearse the pieces we faced a lot of choices and options, probably more so than most musical ensembles normally do. Partly, this had to do with our instruments: percussions consist of an incredibly wide array of sonorities, as a result of all the various instruments and mallets at our disposal. In addition, there are many different playing techniques, adding up to a colorful palette of means of articulation. But above all, it is our choice of repertoir that forces us to make decisions.

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  Madrigalia : Live at Christmas

  What? Another Madrigalia Christmas recording? Our first holiday recording in 1996 featured music by American composers. The second, in 2000, focused on music for harp and voice. This year, in the process of deciding on a new CD, we discovered that over the past several years we have performed a lot of wonderful Christmas music that is rarely heard live or on recordings. So, we put together in a CD the best "live" recorded performances of our Christmas concerts - carol arrangements, motets, folk and popular tunes and even a P. D. Q. Bach piece thrown in! The music of this recording features a variety of sonorities as well as Madrigalia's signature a cappella style. Several pieces are arranged for piano four-hands as well as solo piano. There are also pieces that use harp and bell choir accompaniments. All selections on this CD were recorded live at St. Anne Church in Rochester, New York. Madrigalia hopes that it will be a festive holiday collection for families everywhere.

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