Anthony Lazaro

Acclaimed Blues Rock guitarist Anthony Gomes released his 13th studio album entitled, "High Voltage Blues" on Friday September 23, 2022 via Rat Pak Records. Coming off the heels of his highly successful 2020 #1 Billboard charting release, "Containment Blues", High Voltage Blues is a compilation album that showcases three new studio tracks, along with eleven re-recorded fan favorites and features guest appearances by legendary bassist Billy Sheehan, KoRn drummer Ray Luzier, renown vocalist Bekka Bramlett and The Voice™ contestant Wendy Moten. "We had a lot of fun rocking these songs up" says Anthony.

The London Virtuosi use modern instruments, but their playing is fresh and refined and the digital recording is natural and beautifully balanced. The calibre of Anthony Camden’s solo contribution is readily shown in slow movements, matched by Georgiadis’s rapt, sensitive accompaniments. On the first disc Camden’s excellent colleague is Julia Girdwood, but for the two other collections Alison Alty takes over, and the partnership seems even more felicitous, with the two instruments blended quite perfectly. Also included is a Sinfonia arranged by Camden a Sinfonia concertante. This series can be strongly recommended on all counts.

Anthony McGill, New York Philharmonic principal clarinet and 2020 Avery Fisher Prize winner, and the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet present an album illuminating experiences that have shaped America through works by Richard Danielpour, James Lee III, Ben Shirley (all three world-premiere recordings), and Valerie Coleman. McGill describes it as a project driven by the desire to “expand the capacity for art and music to change the world.”

Ha! compagnons takes the listener back to a time when the voice and the lute were the true companions in the quest for poetic and musical expression. In exploring this fruitful partnership, Canadian soprano Elodie Bouchard and American lutenist Anthony Harvey offer vivid and colourful interpretations of air de cour, ayres and monodies by 17th-century composers Giulio Caccini, Thomas Campion, Sigismondo d’India, Claudio Monteverdi and Etienne Moulinié.

Naxos’ exciting and important American Classics series now includes music of the present day, in this case three recent works by Philip Glass. The Violin Concerto, a work that (surprisingly) adheres to classical conventions, lures us in with beautiful, seductive harmonies. Glass relies both on his trademark arpeggiated technique (sounding in the first movement somewhat like Vivaldi’s “Winter” concerto) and on his favorite harmonic progressions to suggest a sustained melodic line. In the first two movements Glass’ carefully timed harmonic and rhythmic shifts keep you in a happy daze. He breaks the mood in the finale, however, leaving the soloist to practice arpeggios at length until the quiet, serene coda steals in. Adele Anthony, who plays with the kind of skill and grace we would expect in a Mozart concerto, brings off Glass’ work with consummate, convincing musicianship. Company (music for Becket’s prose) for string orchestra is in four movements, characterized by stimulating changes in time signature and rhythm.

Britain-to-Scotland transplant Sally Beamish wasn't just self-taught as an orchestral composer: you might say she learned by doing. According to her notes on this BIS release, one of a group covering her orchestral output, she had never written an orchestral piece or even studied orchestration when the city of Reykjavik, Iceland, commissioned her Symphony No. 1 in 1994. The result was a work full of unusual sonorities, rather loosely woven but constantly surprising, that drew on various features (formal and textural, not tonal) of the music of Scotland.

Performance (Quartet) 1979 is a live album by American composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton recorded in Switzerland in 1979 and released on the hatART label. The album has also been issued as Performance 9/1/79 and Performance for Quartet.

Hyperion is pleased to present a thirteenth volume of the Romantic Violin Concerto. Although frequently featuring virtuoso showpieces by the composer–violinists of the nineteenth century, this series also includes works of great musical interest which for one reason or another have not entered the repertoire. The performance history of all three pieces recorded here is indissolubly linked with the turmoil of Schumann’s last years.

Hyperion has brought together two fetching, large-scale pieces by Charles Villiers Stanford for its “The Romantic Violin” series. Both are mature works, written in 1888 and 1899 during Stanford’s “high noon”, when the Cambridge-based Irishman was winning acclaim at home and abroad as a leading British composer. The earlier Suite was written for his mentor, the great German violinist Joseph Joachim. It’s a piece of considerable beauty, both an homage to past musical styles and a tune-filled example of highbrow populism that repays multiple hearings. It begins with a nod to Bach’s solo violin music, and the titles of some movements (as well as their music)–such as Allemande and Tambourine–continue the Baroque-style tribute. Though longish (just shy of half-an-hour), it never overstays its welcome.