Absolvere Signs of The Swarm

“Video” is the third chapter of the Swedish act Fans Of The Dark, an exciting new band formed in 2020 by Freddie Allen, drummer and main songwriter and lead vocalist Alex Falk, when they reconnected few year after the high school, where they went together, with a vision to create a band which would mix the melodies and approach of classic and melodic rock. Their musical output continue over the path of their first two albums and “Video” is one of the most exciting things you'll hear emerging from the fruitful melodic rock in Sweden, showcasing a tight, inventive musical approach with outstanding vocals. Get ready for a fantastic ride!

This is a St Matthew Passion which should please many readers. Bruggen’s interpretation is eloquent, thoughtful in matters of style and expressive content, and it benefits from a textural clarity which few competitors can rival. All aspects of Bach’s miraculous score are taken into account.

“My enthusiasm for Brahms goes back to my youth, and the piano concertos are largely responsible for it,” writes Sir András Schiff in a liner note for this remarkable new recording. It finds the great pianist reassessing interpretive approaches to Brahms in the inspired company of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. To fully bring out the characteristics of Brahms’s music Schiff’s choice of instrument is a Blüthner piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which the D minor concerto was premiered.

After a fine Handel recital CD, not to mention taking part in a dozen other major recordings, countertenor David Daniels has hit the jackpot. This fascinating, handsomely recorded CD offers us arias from Mitridate and Ascanio in Alba, and a concert aria by Mozart (the only one he composed for male alto), as well as some Handel and Gluck arias. With them, Daniels takes us through every quality a classically trained singer should have and comes through with flying colors. The arias are about vengeance, sorrow, love–the usual–but within baroque strictures that means that some require lush, limpid singing, others ferocious coloratura and exclamatory heft, and some all of these.

For the past decade, Spirit of the beehive have honed an aesthetic like no other. They’ve chopped up samples, chewed them up, spit them back out again, baby birded it. Across four albums and a smattering of EPs, Zack Schwartz, Corey Wichlin, and Rivka Ravede have fully solidified their stance as some of rock’s weirdest and best deconstructionists. 2018’s Hypnic Jerks was a study in noise punk sampledelia. It was a breakthrough for the band. Frank Ocean became a fan, spinning “fell asleep with a vision,” on Blonded Radio. 2021’s Entertainment Death, was nasty dream pop by way of K-Mart realism and hitting the channel search setting on an old TV set.

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.