by Steven Miller

Wayne Alpern’s Varieties & Extravaganzas is a traditional contemporary classical release that plays like a mapped journey through musical style. The program moves through original compositions and inventive arrangements for brass quintet, traveling from Handel and Bartók to Broadway, swing, and third stream hybrids without ever feeling random. Alpern describes the project as a “musical matinee,” and that framing fits: each piece opens a different musical setting while the Times Square Brass Quintet acts as the connective thread tying the entire program together.

What makes the [...]

by Steven Miller

Steve Reich’s music has long depended on a clear premise: of steady pulse and layered harmonic materials.  This is used to develop his compositions over time. His sextet works focus on that by distributing rhythm and harmony across interlocking compositional theme. With groups moving in poly-tonal and poly-rhythmic patterns anchored by a grounding pedal. Anchoring them in a manner that provides context.

With Steve Reich: The Sextets, the Colin Currie Group presents these works as variations on Reich’s composition structural logic. The ensemble has a long-term relationship with [...]

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, [...]