Group For Contemporary Music

As both previous volumes in this series have shown, Luxembourg has a wealth of composers writing vibrant new orchestral scores. Featured on this third volume, Luc Grethen's Upswing is a crescendo of energy, while Ernie Hammes' Concertino No. I fuses jazz modes with classical patterns, and his West End Avenue evokes the atmosphere of an afternoon in New York. Catherine Kontz explores feminist ideas in The Waves, while Gast Waltzing allows his music to 'speak for itself'. Volume 1 (8.579059) was acclaimed as 'an outstanding disc by Fanfare, and Volume 2 (8.579116) showcases the music of Marco Pütz.

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.”

Drone Mass is a profoundly atmospheric work, at times reminiscent of the meditative minimalism of composers such as Pärt or Górecki, and represents what Jóhannsson called “a distillation of a lot of influences and obsessions”. One of these was, as the title suggests, his fascination with the musical device of the drone. Here, his drones have a motivic-like role, shifting and shimmering with hypnotic effect, conjuring different moods, from unsettling to uplifting, as the work progresses.

Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched.