Âme Adam Hurst

Robert "Bob" Hurst's 2013 album Bob: A Palindrome follows up the bassist's 2010 studio album Bob Ya Head. Recorded in 2001, the album's release was delayed by 9/11, as well as Hurst's own busy career as a highly sought-after sideman and professor of music at the University of Michigan. Joining Hurst here are such longtime associates as saxophonist Branford Marsalis, drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, flutist and bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin, pianist Robert Glasper, and percussionist Adam Rudolph. With all the songs composed and arranged by Hurst, including the epic mid-album Duke Ellington-style three-part "Middle Passage Suite," Bob: A Palindrome is a superb showcase for Hurst's improvisational skill, songwriting ability, and talent for assembling an all-star band. This is urbane, highly creative, and straight-ahead modern jazz at its finest.

Bluebeard's Castle is a difficult opera to cast. Bluebeard himself must either be a bass who can get up to a high F or a baritone who can get down to low G. In the former category, to which Samuel Ramey belongs the usual risks are that he will sound unsuitably fatherly or will be uncomfortably tense in the upper register. Ramey avoids both hazards with ease: he combines gravity with believable youth, and has no problems with the upper reaches of the part. His is a slightly cool reserved, soft-grained Bluebeard, there is no swell of homage in the last scene when he hails his former wives as ''immortal, unforgotten'', but you may well prefer his sobriety to Fischer-Dieskau's meticulous but at times melodramatic expressive shading of every syllable.

George Hurst with the Bournemouth orchestra inspires richly expressive playing, full of subtle rubato which consistently sounds natural and idiomatic, never self-conscious. Like Elgar himself, he tends to press ahead rather than linger, as in the great climactic variation in Enigma", Nimrod, as well as in the finale and in the overture, In the South". The Coronation March also inspires an opulent, red-blooded performance, and the recording throughout is rich and sumptuous.

Far from the dark, tortured image often associated with his music, the works on this album testify to an astonishingly serene period in Schumann’s life. A fine subject for this first album by the Hanson Quartet for harmonia mundi, whose members are partnered by Adam Laloum for a thrilling reading of a masterpiece of the Romantic repertory: the Piano Quintet.

What’s behind THE RED DOOR? For pianist Orrin Evans, that question has come to symbolize the daring path his life and music have taken over the course of his three-decade career. On his latest album, he once again flings that door open, delighting in the collaborators, friends, inspiration, and history that he finds inside.

The violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) was a celebrated Kapellmeister at the court of Archbishop Max Gandolph of Salzburg. Present-day audiences tend to think of him first and foremost as the author of anthologies of spectacular violin music such as his Rosary Sonatas of around 1670 and his Sonatas for solo violin of 1681. But attitudes to these works were initially devastatingly dismissive. In 1927, the eighth – posthumous – edition of Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski’s seminal Die Violine und ihre Meister appeared with revisions by the author’s son, Waldemar, and assured its readers that only “some” of these pieces were of “lasting musical merit”.

Das Berner Ensemble Les Passions de l'Ame erhielt für alle seine Veröffentlichungen bei Deutsche Harmonia Mundi exzellente Besprechungen und wurde 2020 für das Album "Variety" mit einem OPUS KLASSIK ausgezeichnet.

Known for their onstage charisma and camaraderie, Ottawa’s Lara Deutsch (flute) and Adam Cicchillitti (guitar) began performing together in 2019 after discovering their mutual love for the music of Piazzolla. With an established discography as individual artists on the Analekta and Leaf Music labels, as well as numerous accolades in their respective fields, one of the primary focuses of the duo is to perform and promote the works of their Canadian friends and colleagues internationally.

Adam Faith was a contemporary of early British rock & rollers like Cliff Richard and Billy Fury, but Faith's sound was less Elvis Presley-derived and more aligned with teen idol pop such as that of Bobby Vee (who covered Faith's number one U.K. hit "What Do You Want?"). John Barry had a hand in Faith's early efforts, and the instrumental arrangements are truly remarkable, from the surprising hoedown-style fiddling on "Don't That Beat All" to the musical saw on "What Now." In fact, it is the arrangements that elevate this music above standard teen idol fare. Faith rocked occasionally, as on "Made You," had moderate success adapting to the changes wrought by the Beatles, and later worked with folk-pop material. The Very Best of Adam Faith tracks his evolution by collecting 26 U.K. chart hits from 1959-1966, four of which were recorded with the Roulettes. Faith had two minor hits in the U.S. in 1965 that aren't included, but The Very Best of Adam Faith is otherwise an exemplary and essential anthology of an early British pop star.