Whether you get it or you don’t, Magma’s music is still growing stronger and stronger each day to blow those doors down with a giant battering ram ready to burst through. Sung in the styles of the Kobaïan language created by founder Christian Vander, they created forms of Jazz, Opera, Classical, Soul, Avant-Rock, and Progressive music for fifty-two years. This year Magma have released their 19th release from AKT series which covers their archival and musical live recordings. This 2-CD set consists of performances they did for their aborted French tour in Bourdeaux, Toulouse, and Perpignan on March 6, 7, and 8th before everything shut down due to the pandemic and COVID-19.
J.S. Bach’s genius is universally revered by music lovers, and a significant part of his output was in transcriptions of his own work, a tradition kept alive in Eleonor Bindman’s piano versions of the Six Suites for Solo Cello. Bindman has avoided embellishing these iconic pieces, preserving the intriguing ambiguities in Bach’s implied harmonies and savouring their expressive qualities through the baritone register of a marvellous Bösendorfer piano. These admirably accurate transcriptions reveal the mysterious mathematical grace and flexibility of structure that makes Bach’s art so organic and eternal.
Red velvet curtains draw back to reveal a cosmic wheel of fortune, floating in the deep black star-studded theater of infinite space. A whirl of timbres, personalities, and stories. The Turning Wheel, the third full-length by the Bay Area artist SPELLLING (Chrystia Cabral), revolves around themes of human unity, the future, divine love and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called life.
On October 6, 1802, in Heiligenstadt, a village near Vienna where he had sought peace and quiet in order to treat the hearing loss that had caused him psychological pain for several years, Beethoven signed a letter intended for his two brothers in which he voiced his despair. Never sent and secretly kept in a desk drawer, the “Heiligenstadt Testament” is one of the first manifestoes in music history on the subject of romantic interiority. It shares the depression of a man cut off from the outside world and powerless in front of his own tragic destiny. It is an even doubly tragic destiny, since Beethoven wrote that he was “ born with an ardent and lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society “, but he had to lead a life of solitude to remain hidden and misunderstood by his contemporaries, because it was impossible for him to reveal his deafness.
Guillaume de Machaut was one of the great composers of a pivotal period at the intersection between the late medieval times and the Renaissance. His works include sacred compositions, such as his Messe de Nostre Dame, which took polyphonic music to new summits, as well as popular dances and songs that reveal the influence of the trouvères.
Yet this disc actually contains little music by Machaut. Only the last two pieces are by him. This leads to a bit of confusion: is Calliope trying to use Machaut’s name to sell a compilation of medieval music? This barely seems necessary, yet there is clearly some ambiguity.
Girolamo Frescobaldi is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of music for harpsichord and organ, and had an enormous influence on other composers up until Bach. His brilliant toccatas reveal an inner world that fascinates today's listener. Frescobaldi's inspiration was born at the court of Ferrara and reached maturity in Rome, where the composer found himself among the major artists of the time who were actively creating a new artistic language. The 7-CD box set includes the four collections by Frescobaldi which, due to their exceptional innovative strength, have left the greatest mark on the history of music for the keyboard.