Jacob Pavek Illume

An amazing display of expressivity achieved through daring 'prolations' and 'colorations'! There are at least half a dozen parody masses based on the chanson Fortuna Desperata, but Obrecht's is by far the most likely to keep the most secular audiences riveted to the music.

Composer Anthony Cheung releases All Roads, a follow up to FCR215 Cycles and Arrows. Featuring performances by the Escher Quartet, violinist Miranda Cuckson, soprano Paulina Swierczek, and pianists Jacob Greenberg, Gilles Vonsattel, and Cheung himself, All Roads encapsulates Cheung's penchant for drawing on broad sources of inspiration and filtering them through an incisive and discriminating compositional process to produce substantial, structurally airtight works.

A leading vihuela specialist, the Argentinian virtuoso Ariel Abramovich has already devoted two albums to the favourite instrument of the Iberian Renaissance, the first on Arcana (Esteban Daça, El Parnasso, A316, 2002) and the second on Carpe Diem (Diego Pisador, Si me llaman, 2009). For this third instalment he is joined by one of the world’s most respected and innovative solo lutenists, Jacob Heringman, for a vihuela duo project which is the result of years of research and performing. While there is a significant number of publications for two lutes from the sixteenth century, only one of the seven collections for vihuela de mano includes duets, and it is precisely that collection that was the main source of inspiration for this project. The performers, both highly experienced with intabulations of sixteenth-century music, decided to recreate an ‘imaginary’ book of vihuela duets, following the taste and practice of the ancient masters, who through a notation system of ‘numbers’ used to arrange works by the composers they listened to and played. Cifras Imaginarias is the poetic name they have given to an imaginary music collection of vihuela duos of the kind that might have been published in the mid-sixteenth century.

Beautifully melancholic: musical expeditions, graceful, flowing and deeply emotionally moving, are bundled by Jacob Karlzon on his new album "Wanderlust". The beauties of his piano melodies and harmonies are like psalms, like vocal lines that draw from rich compositional history, yet turn entirely to the now. "Wanderlust" breathes hope and adventure, the music opens spaces for love and discourse, for spontaneity and structure - contemporary and timeless at the same time.

Jacob Obrecht was one of the primary composers responsible for significant changes in musical style during the late fifteenth century. He was especially important to the development of larger forms, as the first composer to systematically demonstrate unified formal structure and long-range cadential planning over the course of extended works. Obrecht's approach to unity and development went beyond the simple employment of a cantus firmus or unifying gesture. He consequently personifies today's mass-as-symphony ideal most decisively.