Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen

Newgrass guitarist Tony Rice's work for Rounder Records is showcased on the mesmerizing Devlin. Pulling the best new acoustic tracks from his 1980 album, Mar West, and 1981's Still Inside, this compilation highlights Rice's fluid playing and progressive composition as he is backed by players like Sam Bush, Mike Marshall, Todd Phillips, John Reischman, and others. Alternately warm and crisp, comforting and energizing, his startlingly clean playing twirls and waltzes with the other instruments one stepping out while another comes to the spotlight, often culminating in tightly locked passages with interwoven harmonies. These 15 instrumentals are lyrical without words, poetic without stanzas, and a brilliant glimpse into the soul of one of progressive bluegrass' most inventive players.

Luciano Berios Coro has been described as the work that exemplifies all the qualities that made him one of the leading composers of our time. The works full title is Coro for voices and instruments, and the 40 voices and 44 instrumentalists do indeed make up a single choir instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each singer paired with a particular player, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects. Composed in 1976, Coro is also a strikingly global work: Berios use of texts (mainly translations of folk poetry) attributed to peoples Peruvian, Croatian, Sioux turns the work into a chorus of cultures. The texts are laid out in 31 separate sections of varying length, but the overall effect is cumulative, not episodic. Under its artistic director Grete Pedersen the Norwegian Soloists Choir has made acclaimed recordings of music ranging from Norwegian folk songs and Hildegard of Bingen to Bach, Brahms and Xenakis. Joined by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra it now takes on one of the major choral works of the past 50 years. The disc closes with Berios smaller scale Cries of London, performed by members of the choir.