Max Richter announces his ninth studio album ‘In a landscape’. The new album marks a significant evolution in Richter’s musical journey, as he delves deeper into the themes of optimism and human emotion accompanied by an innovative exploration of electronic sounds and field recordings. It is a record about reconciling polarities, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living – a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. He says: “the music on the record is about connecting or reconciling polarities. The electronics with the acoustic instruments, the natural world with the human world, and the big ideas of life with the personal and intimate”.
Max Richter announces his ninth studio album ‘In a landscape’. The new album marks a significant evolution in Richter’s musical journey, as he delves deeper into the themes of optimism and human emotion accompanied by an innovative exploration of electronic sounds and field recordings. It is a record about reconciling polarities, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living – a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. He says: “the music on the record is about connecting or reconciling polarities. The electronics with the acoustic instruments, the natural world with the human world, and the big ideas of life with the personal and intimate”.
Countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic has emerged as a new star of the specialty partly through fearless programming, and this collection of Arie Napoletane, Neapolitan arias or arias from Naples, is no exception. There really isn't a "Neapolitan school." Rather, Naples was on the musical cutting edge in the second quarter of the 18th century, and the arias here represent both a classic opera seria style, in the pieces by the massively prolific Alessandro Scarlatti, and music by the composers who pointed the way toward the melodically simpler future of Gluck and eventually Mozart, like Leonardo Leo and Leonardo Vinci. These latter are hardly household names, and Cencic, offering several recorded premieres, renders a valuable service simply by finding and choosing the deliberate and sensuous arias heard here. Moreover, the album's stylistic contrasts play to Cencic's strengths.