Music Connection May 2021

Don Ellis' Connection, issued in 1972, was a brazen attempt at swinging for the chart fences. Most of the tunes selected come right from the pop vernacular of the day. They range from a barnburning read of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's theme for "Jesus Christ Superstar" and a dirty funk approach to Carole King's "I Feel the Earth Move" to a provocative and spacy cover of Procol Harum's "Conquistador" that feels like the horn chart for Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" wedded to Mason Williams' "Classical Gas" trumped by Stan Kenton in the mid-'50s. While the description may read atrociously, sonically and aesthetically the set comes off far better. Ellis incorporated inventive, in-your-face, swaggering arrangements into his hearing and execution of pop's possibilities in the jazz world of the early '70s…

Flemish composer Adrian Willaert – who served as maestro di capella at the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice from 1527 until his death in 1562 – contributed so much to the Italian renaissance; while he wasn't the first to develop the Venetian polychoral style, its propagation in the mid-sixteenth century may well be laid at his feet. Willaert helped introduce the forms of canzona and ricercare, which greatly aided the growth of instrumental music in the years to come. The nearly overarching interest in chromaticism among Italian composers in the late renaissance can be traced to Willaert's door. Nevertheless, toss a dart into a crowd of music scholars and chances are you won't manage to hit one that has much of an opinion about Willaert's work or his music – it is seldom recorded and CDs devoted to Willaert alone are rare. On their own, these aspects make Oehms Classics' Adrian Willaert: Musica Nova – featuring the talents of expert vocal ensemble Singer Pur – special, valuable, and significant for purposes of study and filling a major hole in the renaissance repertoire. But beyond that, it is a fine listening experience as well.

Joseph Martin Kraus has made one of the most impressive comebacks of any composer belonging to an age as distant as his is to the twenty-first century. Though two centuries would pass between his death in 1792 and the eventual revival of his music, within the space of roughly a decade Kraus' 200 or so surviving compositions have practically all been recorded. Carus Verlag in Stuttgart is publishing a critical edition of Kraus' chamber music that does not involve the piano, and in connection with that publication, the newly minted Salagon Quartett has recorded five of Kraus' 10 string quartets for Carus Verlag's in-house label. Six of Kraus' quartets appeared in an early print as his Opus 1 and four others exist in manuscript; in 1992, the Joseph Martin Kraus String Quartet was founded out of the ranks of Concerto Köln to record them all for Cavalli Records.