Denny Zeitlin Trio As Long As There's Music

Lovers of rare 20th-century chamber music should find something to enjoy on this new CD from CPO, which includes two early works from the 1940s, the Clarinet Sonata, Op. 28, and 12 Miniatures for Flute and Piano, Op. 29, plus two works from the 1980s, the solo Bassoon Sonata, Op. 133 (1981), and the Trio for Flute, Viola, and Harp, Op. 127 (1980). To my ear, the Trio sounds atonal, but since I'm not a musician I can neither affirm nor refute this. The recorded sound is first-class.

Ted Wilks @ amazon.com

"Double-tracked with a ghostly haze of background fuzz, Hedvig’s lightning-rod guitar blazes a trail that comes in the wake of the heaviest guitar giants – there’s Hendrix, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Led Zep’s Jimmy Page swirling around the cauldron, but also the exploratory, disciplined freeplay of Pete Cosey, John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana buzzing out of her fingertips. Born in the Norwegian town of Ålesund in the early 80s, Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen has been steeped in the guitar since fooling around with her mother’s nylon-strung acoustic at the age of ten."

No sooner had Sibelius moved to the town of Järvenpää in 1904 than he was commissioned by the Swedish Theatre to write incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. At the time it was his most ambitious undertaking in the genre of incidental music and his setting included ten scenes, only one of which was cut when he adapted the piece as a concert suite. Dating from the same year, Musik zu einer Szene was originally intended to accompany a tableau and is full of striking contrasts. The two waltzes of 1921 are transcriptions of piano pieces, and reveal the potent influence of Tchaikovsky.

Nonesuch Records releases the first recordings of Steve Reich’s Runner (2016) and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018), performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by Susanna Mälkki.