Music And Mirror

To commemorate the 30th-anniversary of her breakthrough album, Mask And The Mirror, Loreena McKennitt presents this live album recorded in San Francisco on May 19, 1994. Featuring staples from the McKennitt canon, including “The Mystic's Dream,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Marrakesh Night Market” and “The Two Trees.”

To commemorate the 30th-anniversary of her breakthrough album, Mask And The Mirror, Loreena McKennitt presents this live album recorded in San Francisco on May 19, 1994. Featuring staples from the McKennitt canon, including “The Mystic's Dream,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Marrakesh Night Market” and “The Two Trees.”

Press play and enter the world of Loreena McKennitt, where walls dissolve into thick, billowing mists as the ground beneath your feet turns to compacted earth and the sky above opens up to reveal a black cloak dotted with shimmering stars draped beneath silk-like clouds. Were McKennitt's composing and songwriting abilities lacking of any luster (as they most certainly are not), her voice would still possess the strength to hold her fifth album, The Mask and Mirror, up on its own. But the combination of this talented woman's vocal prowess and songwriting ability makes her all the more similar to her work – ethereal and almost unbelievable in its level of quality.

On the album "Bach Mirror" the French pianist Thomas Enhco and marimba player Vassilena Serafimova give well-known and less well-known works by Johann Sebastian Bach an innovative sound. Pieces such as the Prelude No. 2 from the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Air from the orchestral suite No. 3 sound new and fresh in the unusual instrumentation of piano and marimba. With their sound painting arrangements, Thomas Enhco and Vassilena Serafimova expose Bach's harmonic-melodic work structures and enable the audience to gain new perspectives on the architecture of his unique compositions.

This six-disc boxed set offers a broad survey of a hundred years of Finnish chamber music, featuring more than sixty performers and twenty composers – between the late Romanticism of Toivo Kuula’s Piano Trio (1908) and the postmodernism of Veli-Matti Puumala’s String Quartet (1994). Highlights include songs by Aare Merikanto sung by Soile Isokoski, Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rilke song cycle, sung by Marcus Ullman, and Joonas Kokkonen’s third string quartet, performed by the Sibelius Quartet.

Aram Khachaturian conquered the world with the boundless delight he took in composing. His Sabre Dance found its place in advertising, his Adagio from the ballet Spartacus accompanied a cult series, and prominent ice skating pairs danced their way into the hearts of their spectators to the Waltz from his stage music to Lermontov's Masquerade. On the other side, his symphonic music and concertante works even today continue to attract the greatest conductors and soloists. A unique, often imitated, but never reproduced synthesis consisting of fascinating instrumental virtuosity, exotic melodies, highly imaginative harmonies, and irresistible rhythmic spirit distinguishes the three concertos and three concert rhapsodies written by Aram Khachaturian during 1936-46 and 1961-67, and this double trilogy begins its cpo journey with the earliest and latest of these works.