Adam Certamen Bownik

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.

The Sons Of Adam—a lean, mean rock’n’roll machine from the Hollywood rock scene of the mid-1960s—quite literally blew the competition off the stage. Led by influential lead guitarist Randy Holden (Other Half / Blue Cheer), the Sons boasted an affable frontman in Jac Ttanna (Genesis) and an incomparable rhythm section in Mike Port and Michael Stuart-Ware (Love). Schooled in surf, emboldened by the British Invasion, the band had a fearsome reputation as a live act. In this unprecedented anthology, Saturday’s Sons features a previously unreleased 1966 full concert performance from San Francisco’s famed Avalon Ballroom, a recording so powerfully dynamic that few listeners will doubt the band’s masterful live presence. The quartet enjoyed a brief but incandescent three-year career which is fully documented on this compilation with rare 45s, studio outtakes and demo recordings, including fiery surf material from their early incarnation The Fender IV, and the legendary single “Feathered Fish”, donated to the band by Love’s Arthur Lee.

For his second album for Chandos, the flute virtuoso Adam Walker explores the music of British composers with pianist Huw Watkins. Vaughan Williams’s Suite de ballet was commissioned by the French flute virtuoso Louis Fleury (who had given the première of Debussy’s Syrinx). The work uses eighteenth-century French dance forms, a common practice in ‘neo-classical’ composition. Bax’s Four Pieces rescue music from an abandoned ballet originally conceived for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina was originally written for treble recorder; James Galway’s championship of the piece made it a staple of the flute repertoire. Howard Fergusson’s Three Sketches were composed intermittently over a period of twenty years. The theme of the third piece is a Hindu melody, ‘Koyalinya bole ambuvan’ (Cuckoos sing in the mango tree). Sonatas by York Bowen and William Alwyn complete this varied and engaging programme.

Brahms was 43 years old when, after a long period of maturation, his First Symphony was published. Felix Weingartner commented on it ‘taking hold like the claw of a lion’ and its urgency marked a new phase in Brahms’ musical development. The Second Symphony is traditionally seen as the pastoral element in the cycle, while the Third, with its melodic beauty, has the courage to end quietly, an act of astonishing serenity. The compelling Passacaglia finale of the Fourth Symphony represents a fitting summation to one of the greatest symphonic cycles in the classical canon.

This 2006 production from the Zurich Opera is a traditional one by Nicolas Joël in veteran Ezio Frigerio's wonderfully evocative, highly coloured sets. Then Adám Fischer in the pit leads a remarkably strong yet subtle account of the score, which – when played and sung like this – is once more revealed as one of Verdi's greatest masterpieces. Four of the principals easily surpass their DVD rivals. Stemme offers a deeply considered, expressive and superbly sung Aida, one for whom the work's vocal perils do not seem to exist. Add to that acting that goes to the heart of the matter, and one is left breathless in admiration after so many sopranos not truly fitted to the part. Licitra has done nothing better than his Radames here. At last fulfilling his potential, he sings the role with an open-hearted sincerity and a heroic voice up to the part's exigent demands.

Second Life' is the first-ever album featuring both acoustic guitar and string orchestra on each track. Acoustic guitarist Adam Palma is accompanied by one of the greatest European orchestras, The Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio AMADEUS, led by famous conductor, Agnieszka Duczmal. This album is a very personal record, an intimate look at music and life from the perspective of a man who "regained" his life after waking from a long coma. Recovering gave Adam time to reflect, to review his own musical roots, and to view his life deeply from a new perspective. We hear the songs that the soloist grew up listening to: folk melodies, a scout song, a song belonging to the patriotic trend of music, known film themes, Chopin's compositions (never before performed on the guitar), and Adam's own compositions that show what he himself describes as his Polish soul. All the arrangements have been written by Adam Palma and orchestrated by the outstanding Polish film score composer Krzesimir Debski. On this album, classical music and jazz are intertwined. All this against a background of the characteristic harmony of Polish songs, combining the sound of acoustic guitar and string orchestra!

Adolphe Adam composed more than 70 operas, of which a small handful still enjoy some currency on the French stage; most have been little seen outside of their native land and are seldom recorded, and some have never been revived since their first productions, if they were so given. This may lead some to believe these works must either be hopelessly dated or "too French" to travel. The video company Kultur, however, is helping expand that narrow view of French theater through its L'Opera Français series, which by 2008 was up to eight titles. This series really fills a major void in the operatic repertoire and makes accessible to international audiences the distinctively French form of opéra-comique, a frothy, deliberately silly type of entertainment that is about as close to "popular" culture as high culture ever gets.