Downes Braid Association Live 2019

Instrumental album of Gypsy Jazz and vintage swing. Four tracks were recorded live at the Big Sky Gypsy Jazz Festival in Billings, MT, October 2018. Eight tracks were recorded live at our annual Django Reinhardt Birthday Celebration Concert, held at the Bozeman Public Library on January 2019. Our CD contains one original tune and eleven Gypsy Jazz standards.

Live In Los Angeles was a covermount CD for The Mail On Sunday newspaper in Britain and Ireland, on 17th January 2010. It had been recorded during Paul’s unannounced performance at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles on 27th June 2007: a free show, inside the mammoth Hollywood record store.

Rossini’s Eduardo e Cristina was a huge success in its day, but as perhaps the last ‘centone’ opera by a major composer, it became forgotten under the subsequent tide of Romantic idealism. Today we can put these prejudices aside and enjoy this masterful creation for what it is: a hugely entertaining parade of beautiful and spectacular musical ‘hits’ set to a familiar story of secret love, dramatic crisis and triumphant resolution. This 2017 Bad Wildbad revival was summed up as ‘an evening of pure bel canto pleasure!’ by Operagazet.

Let there be light! To open the new concert season, the Tonkunstler Orchestra and their Music Director Yutaka Sado are joined by the RIAS Chamber Choir and three excellent vocal soloists to tackle nothing less than «The Creation» itself. Premiered in 1798 in the Stadtpalais Schwarzenberg, which then stood on the Neue Markt square in Vienna, this German-language oratorio by Joseph Haydn takes the Book of Genesis as its subject matter. In the solo parts, archangels describe and comment on the six days of the Creation, with Adam and Eve also having their say. Meanwhile, the orchestra makes a painting in sound of the primordial chaos, the first sunrise and the appearance of creatures on earth.

Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was born in 1934. An early writer and guitarist, Cohen began to compose and release folk-rock and pop songs by the mid-1960s. One of his most famous compositions is "Hallelujah," a song released on 1984's Various Positions. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and he received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. Cohen died in 2016 at the age of 82. In 1968, Cohen recorded a live concert for radio broadcast that comprises this album. These well-preserved sessions from 1968 offer a fly-on-the-wall experience to witness a young Cohen singing practically the entire first album. The voice is fresh and deep, pushing the songs outside the Tin Pan Alley perimeter, and delving into poetry with a richness of words and subject. Today, they still have that raw appeal of a young artist at the peak of his powers.

Ivan Repušic, who made his debut as principal conductor of the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in theautumn of 2017 with Giuseppe Verdi’s “Luisa Miller”, now presents a lesser-known masterpiece by the famous Italian opera composer. The concert performance of Verdi's early stage work “I due Foscari” was recorded on November 25, 2018 at the Munich Prinzregententheater.

Opening with the unforgettable music from the ground-breaking 1977 movie ‘Star Wars’ by the greatest living composer of film music, John Williams, this selection includes a unique 14-minute concert suite of music from the film. Other Williams scores for Stephen Spielberg blockbusters include those for the unforgettable fantasy ‘E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial’ and the haunting science fiction ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.

Ola Kvernberg's Steamdome was for at least one listener the most sensationally visceral album to come his way during 2018. Part future-jazz, part EDM, part avant-rock, part contemporary-classical, wrap-around shamanistic. It was Kvernberg' follow-up to 2014's The Mechanical Fair, which has now been issued in an extensively recalibrated version recorded live at the Molde International Jazz Festival in 2016.

Nearly every music lover is acquainted with Der Freischutz, but the fewest are aware of Euryanthe. In the light of the musical quality of the opera, the disdain for it does not seem fitting. Euryanthe was Carl Maria von Webers most ambitious project, one that anything but backfired. The composition may certainly be termed ground-breaking and truly deserves more attention. A chain of glittering jewels from the beginning to the end. All witty and ingenious, (Robert Schumann in his critic about Euryanthe.) The presnt release features a live recording of the work, which was taken in December of 2018 and features the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and the Orf Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, as well as a group of brilliant soloists.