Carmina Quartet

Containing six discs and 111 tracks, Deutsche Grammophon's 111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon is a sprawling collection of single items drawn largely from its enormous 55 CD 111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon The Collector's Edition…

Wadada Leo Smith´s latest album features "Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs,"another extended composition by Smith inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States. This new major work is composed for the iconic civil rights hero Rosa Parks (1913-2005) and performed by three vocalists, a double-quartet and a drummer with electronics. The album is released in February 2019 to celebrate Rosa Parks´ birthday on February 4.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.

A unique collector's edition is a "climbing on the history of music" for 20 centuries from ancient times (Greece) to the present day. "History of Music", the 20-disc collection. Starting with the ancient music, music of the Middle Ages continued, Renaissance and Baroque music and ending the era of romanticism and modernity.

The disc contains three groups of songs and is completed with the Sinfonietta for large string orchestra. This was a late work (Opus 163 composed in 1986 – the year of his death) but was his first piece for a string orchestra. Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, the conductor on this disc, states that Rubbra told him he wanted to compete in the tradition set by Elgar (Inroduction and Allegro & Serenade), Vaughan Williams (Tallis variations etc.), Holst (St Paul’s suite) and Britten (Frank Bridge variations, simple symphony etc…). The Sinfonietta was first performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra who had wished to commission a work and accepted this one in progress. The two sections, Andante con moto ma non flessibile and Lento run contiguously through a held bass line.

Say you start a group called the Society for New Music, commission composer-stars-in-the-making and do it for thirty years straight, you might expect your scrapbooks to be quite interesting. What you might not realize is that your efforts now constitute a major segment of the backbone of contemporary American concert music and you have premiered a boatload of chamber works by composers who have gone on to distinguished careers. Such is the case with Syracuse’s Society for New Music founded by Neva Pilgrim, who opened their treasure chest of commissioned works from 1972 – 2002 and has put them together as the 5-CD set entitled “American Masters for the 21st Century.”

Listeners might quibble over whether the 100 pieces collected here constitute precisely THE most relaxing classical music in the whole universe, but it can't be denied that this music is in fact mellow and relaxing, except for perhaps the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which might get the blood pumping at its climax. The pieces are all instrumental and the tracks are weighted toward orchestral music of the Baroque, Romantic, and post-Romantic periods, although the Classical and Modern periods aren't entirely neglected, and there is some chamber music and keyboard music.