by Steven Miller
Wayne Alpern’s Modern Music presents itself as twenty miniatures for solo piano (Steven Beck, the interpreter), and on its surface, one hears a blend of Baroque, Romantic lyricism, jazz-inflected harmonies, and classical dance forms. Upon listening more closely, one can hear how Alpern’s modernism lives in the structuring of rhythm, in the choice of intervallic motion, and in the way he scaffolds tradition to support stylistic inclusion without dissolving coherence.
In other words: Alpern is a polystylist at work; he is a craftsperson of interval and pulse, placing himself in a lineage of classical form but [...]
by Steven Miller
There is a special feeling when a quartet listens as intently as Quartetto Noûs. Their new release, Ravel & Fauré: String Quartets, reflects these as they present two pillars of French chamber music. The eight pieces reveal them as a quartet that lets the music breathe through harmonic color, rhythmic interplay, and an ear for sonic balance.
Ravel’s 1903 String Quartet in F major is the youthful voice of a composer still in dialogue with Debussy and Fauré. Quartetto Noûs makes the music shimmer by leaning into the harmonic transparency of Ravel’s writing. The opening Allegro moderato floats, [...]
by Steven Miller
In Granada: Spanish Music for Violin and Piano, violinist Elsa Grether and pianist Ferenc Vizi offer a program of Spanish classical music. The compositions flow from folk roots to modernist aspirations with expressive convergence of heart and mind. What emerges is a curated conversation between eras, styles, and musical worlds. Grether and Vizi understand that this music sings from the soil, dances in salons, and meditates in moonlight.
Andaluza (Seguidida Española) by Joaquín Nin, Grether and Vizi establish their rhythmic sensitivity to the music’s folkloric [...]
by Steven Miller
Bella Schütz’s Chiaroscuro is a compelling new Evidence Classics label project focusing on two towering figures in keyboard music history: Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric Chopin. The repertoire spans Bach’s Baroque explorations of stylus phantasticus and contrapuntal elegance and Chopin’s Romantic innovations in lyricism and harmonic daring. While these composers are separated by nearly a century, Schütz highlights their shared artistic pursuit of freedom, fantasy, and improvisation, as seen in pieces like Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue and Chopin’s Fantaisie in F Minor.
Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue [...]
