The Australian Voices, known globally for vibrant performances that reflect on contemporary themes, present their tenth album: Reverie. Reverie is a collection of twelve works that bring together themes both banal and transcendent, juxtaposing music that is by turns deeply lyrical and ecstatically ludicrous. A highlight of the album is a setting by the group’s conductor, Gordon Hamilton, of the Elegy – In memoriam Rupert Brooke, written by Australian soldier Frederick Septimus Kelly on the battlefields of Gallipoli and set here to words by Kelly’s close friend Rupert Brooke.
Johann Sebastian Bach trained his many sons to be the finest organists of their time, yet hardly any organ music survives from them. Through transcription, improvisation, and other acts of imaginative re-creation this recording reunites Bach and his boys for a program that recaptures the virtuosic panache, commanding counterpoint, impressive poise, and exuberant excess of this first family on the organ. Played by award-winning Bach scholar and organist David Yearsley on Cornell University's reconstruction of a Berlin organ from 1706, known to at least one of the Bach sons, this program explores new dimensions not only of Johann Sebastian's towering achievement but also of the kinds of now-lost contributions the next Bach generation might have made to their family instrument's long and glorious history.
Delivering a political album is always risky, with the possibility that it will get locked in its historical era usually a direct consequence. On their 18th album, prog rockers Marillion don't seem to care, and they have nothing to lose and no one to account to but themselves. FEAR is an acronym for "Fuck Everybody and Run." Two of its three lengthy, multi-part suites ("El Dorado" and "The New Kings") are overtly political statements that look at England and the calamitous state of the world not only observationally but experientially. Topical songs have been part of the band's catalog as far back as 1984's "Fugazi," and have shown up as recently as the multi-part "Gaza," from 2012's Sounds That Can't Be Made (the latter was perhaps an impetus for this record)…