Yolanda Kondonassis has released her new album, Five Minutes for Earth. The project celebrates our planet and illuminates our challenge to preserve it. The composers featured were tasked with creating works or soundscapes of five minutes or less in length that express a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres. Earth at Heart is a non-profit organization with the mission of increasing earth conservation awareness through the portal of the arts. Climate change, air quality, water pollution, man-made disasters, and diminishing resources are all inconvenient topics that have become increasingly [...]
Eydís Evensen is a classical and new-age pianist who finds inspiration from Iceland’s stunning nature and climate. Her mesmerizing debut album Bylur was a calming contemporary classical diary of her life to date – “So many ups and downs. All of my joy, darkness, happiness, heartbreak, and melancholia,” is how she described it – a more literal journey inspires new EP Frost; through one of her homeland’s winters. “It’s such a hard thing to go through, this darkness,” she explains, “but the rising of the sun earlier and earlier as spring nears is hugely important for Icelanders.”
Opening the EP is [...]
Markus Burger is a German-born concert pianist, composer, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Burger is a full-time music professor at Fullerton College and a lecturer for the graduate jazz piano and composition program at San Diego State University. In August 2019, Burger spent two afternoons in Vienna, the music capital of Europe, recording in the Bösendorfer piano showroom, courtesy of Ferdinand Bräu. Burger is releasing The Vienna Sessions, a sixteen-track album from the session via Challenge Records. Burger says, “I have been a fan of Bösendorfer pianos since studying at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, [...]
Arabella Steinbacher is a multiple award-winning violinists that has recorded Mozart’s violin concertos starting in 2014 with the Festival Strings Lucerne and its leader Daniel Dodds. With the release of Mozart: Violin Concertos, they complete the cycle by presenting Mozart’s enchanting Violin Concertos 1 and 2 plus his Adagio in E Major and Rondos in C Major and B-flat Major. Also noted is that Steinbacher plays the cadenzas by Wolfgang Schneiderhan, who co-founded the Festival Strings Lucerne in 1956. Another exciting aspect of this album is that she plays on the “Ex Benno Walter” Strad from 1718. This [...]
