Daniel Hope America

This is exuberant music-making with real life to it. Whoever is responsible for the feeling of spontaneity, it embraces every performance, and the shifting colors from one selection to the next insures enough variety. First-rate side musicians come and go, and vocalist Joy Denalane embodies an iconic blues singer in Sam Cooke’s plaintive “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

Berlin-based violinist Daniel Hope’s latest album takes a deep dive into the rich repertoire of American music, exploring its roots and distinctive qualities. “We know a piece is from America the moment we hear it,” says Hope. “But what makes music sound American?” America provides some answers, presenting works by composers as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Sam Cooke, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Florence Price in outstanding new classical and jazz arrangements by Paul Bateman for solo violin in different combinations, with vocals, piano, jazz trio, string/chamber orchestra and percussion.

Violinist Daniel Hope spent his period of social distancing by performing chamber concerts from his living room in Berlin online and for Arte Concert with specially invited guests. Deutsche Grammophon is proud to present Hope@Home the album, a selection from this ground-breaking series of livestream events which attracted a combined audience of 2,5m viewers, to be released on 14th August. This album is a document of these extraordinary weeks. Everything you hear is live, one take only. Some pieces were rehearsed, others were not. In some cases Christoph Israel finished the arrangements literally minutes before we went live.

As a Chilean-born composer and pianist living in Australia, I have nurtured a penchant for bringing Latin American vernacular music into the classical concert hall. Both of these musical traditions are widespread and possess an immense canon fashioned by many an inspired composer. Just as significant, both have been greatly impacted by a myriad of interactions with vernacular music over several centuries. A brief survey of the Western tradition may identify composers such as Mozart and Beethoven engaging with Turkish music, Bartók with Eastern European folk music, or Bizet and Debussy with Spain.