Steven John Isserlis is one of the leading internationally ranked cellists. He plays a wide range of repertory and is noted for using gut strings and a great deal of vibrato. He is the grandson of Russian composer and pianist Julius Isserlis and can trace his family tree back to connections with both Karl Marx and Felix Mendelssohn. He spent most of his teenage years (1969-1976) at the International Cello Centre as a pupil of Jane Cowan,who required her students to read Goethe's Faust in order to understand Beethoven better and memorize Racine to know the sound of the language when playing French music.
John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have set up a musically rewarding partnership in these brilliantly inventive works, furthermore adding to their programme the two lovely sonatas for violin and continuo long attributed to Bach, and justly so. In both of them they are joined by Susan Sheppard (continuo cello). For these sonatas Moroney has preferred a chamber organ to a harpsichord.
When Sarah McKenzie released her debut album Don’t Tempt Me in 2011, she showed talent and promise. Five years later, she has delivered on that promise and excelled in her musical craft. Paris in the Rain, her second outing on the Impulse Jazz Label sees her embarking on adventurous new harmonic territory and expanding her skills as a pianist, singer and songwriter.
Not overwhelmed with the song now playing on this album? Be patient, the next track may be something more to your liking. This album is a musical smogarsboard of songs cutting across a variety of vocal genre. The play list runs from the traditional "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child," through Hoagy Carmichael's ultimate standard "Stardust" through John Coltrane's poem-song "A Love Supreme" with a little of 1960s popsters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller thrown in. It would be unkind to say that the singer is simply trying out everything until she finds something she does well. Not so with Karen Krog, one of the finer and more inventive jazz singers of the last three decades. One on One is a compilation of three different recording sessions Krog made as part of a duo performances…