The 40-year friendship between two musical titans, John Williams & Yo-Yo Ma, reaches a new peak with “A Gathering of Friends.” The incredible warmth & brilliance of composer/conductor John Williams is felt throughout this album of both his concert music (a newly revised Cello Concerto) and his legendary film music, including a powerful new arrangement of the Theme from “Schindler’s List,” brought to life by Yo-Yo Ma and the world-renowned New York Philharmonic. Another highlight from the John Williams film music catalog is Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of “With Malice Toward None,” an inviting and uplifting melody from the movie “Lincoln,” inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
This recording marks ground zero of the Three Tenors phenomenon and reminds you of all that it was supposed to be. There's only one tenor here–Luciano Pavarotti–and because he's partnered by different voice types–soprano Joan Sutherland and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne– the possibilities of substantial artistic collaboration are much greater. Though this event was heavily hyped and would've driven audiences wild no matter what, the singers use the concert as an occasion to do things they'd never do on the opera stage, such as the Sutherland-Pavarotti duet from Otello". In their prime, they were one of the great operatic teams, as were Sutherland and Horne. And this concert gives ample evidence why. It's essential for fans of these singers.
It wasn’t until the end of the 1920s that professional duo-piano teams became a regular part of the concert scene with the emergence of Bartlett and Robertson, followed by Vronsky and Babin a bit later, and finally, in 1936, Luboshutz and Nemenoff.
Live archive release from the Pop music icon. Recorded live on The Great Lawn of New York City's Central Park on May 26, 1973. Produced by Lou Adler, Carole King Home Again is a previously unreleased concert recording and a stunning document of one of the greatest contributors to the American songbook.
The eleven pieces on this CD of piano music by Pulitzer Prize winner Tania León were composed across a span of almost fifty years, from student works (Rondó a la Criolla, Homenaje a Prokofiew, Preludes 1 and 2) written in the mid-1960s when León was doing post-graduate work at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory in the municipio of Marianao, La Habana, to going…gone, the brilliant reworking of Sondheim’s “Good Things Going” she crafted in 2012.
Nuna is a book of compositions for solo piano by Cuban-American pianist and composer David Virelles. A 2021 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Virelles has worked with musicians as distinct as Henry Threadgill, Andrew Cyrille, Ravi Coltrane, Mark Turner, Chris Potter, Tomasz Stanko, Steve Coleman, Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Tom Harrell and Milford Graves. His release Continuum (Pi 2012) was named the best jazz release of that year by The New York Times. After three esteemed releases on the ECM label, Virelles returned to Pi with Igbo Alakorin: The Singers Grove (2017), which was voted top Latin Jazz album in that year’s NPR Jazz Critics Poll.