Siesta Ensemble & Ovidio Gimenez Bassoon Delights

Gustav Mahler's death left his Tenth Symphony unfinished, consisting only of an unfinished score and several sketches. Ensemble Mini, a radical collective of soloists from Germany's finest orchestras, presents Michelle Castelletti's fascinating recreation of the work - one of the most powerful sound creations ever written - in a version for chamber ensemble. Ensemble Mini is a radical collective of super-sonic-soloists from Germany's top orchestras that repackages super symphonic music for new audiences. Addressing the need to make classical music cool for the 21st century, its mission is to revolutionize the symphonic concert experience through new style, sound and setting whilst never dumbing down.

Nonesuch Records releases the first recording of Steve Reich’s Reich/Richter, performed by Ensemble intercontemporain and conducted by George Jackson, on June 10, 2022, with the vinyl due August 5. The composition was originally written to be performed with German visual artist Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz’s film Moving Picture (946-3).

Tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson has his own view of the biblical figure of Judas, who has imprinted himself in the collective memory of Christianity as the arch-villain. He wants to see him not only as the explicitly negative figure responsible for Jesus' death, but as someone who played his part in the inevitable path of sacrificing the Messiah and thus in the core of Christian doctrine. Kristjánsson also has his own view of Johann Sebastian Bach. For his picture of Judas, he has chosen arias and recitatives from his oeuvre.

Nearly a century has passed since the release of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Russian: Бронено́сец «Потёмкин», Bronenosets Potyomkin).

Fearlessly searching for new conceptions of sound and not caring where he found them, Garbarek joined hands with the classical early-music movement, improvising around the four male voices of the Hilliard Ensemble. Now here was a radical idea guaranteed to infuriate both hardcore jazz buffs and the even more pristine more-authentic-than-thou folk in early music circles. Yet this unlikely fusion works stunningly well - and even more hearteningly, went over the heads of the purists and became a hit album at a time (1994) when Gregorian chants were a hot item. Chants, early polyphonic music, and Renaissance motets by composers like Morales and Dufay form the basic material, bringing forth a cool yet moving spirituality in Garbarek's work…

This early ECM New Series offering chronicles the music of Walter Frye, a 15th-century English composer whose biographical details are as elusive as his music is captivating. He is survived by a significant handful of vocal works, of which the Hilliard Ensemble gives us a thoughtful cross section. Of these, the Ave regina is the most well known, though the Missa Flos regalis forms the backbone of this altogether revelatory album. The mass itself - which, in true Hilliard fashion is divided among a selection of motets - is a brooding flow of delicate harmonies, seamless “hand-offs,” and intimate exchanges. Its inward-looking tone invites the listener into a prayerful space in which worldly cares are both the source of one’s burdens and the key to absolving them. Frye’s motets are also indicative of a great craftsman at work…

Shostakovich's introspective Piano Quintet is one of the composer's supreme achievements. Perhaps it was the subtle nod to Baroque forms as well as the Beethoven-like use of fugue that earned this piece a permanent place in the chamber repertoire. The Nash Ensemble, led by Marcia Crayford and Elizabeth Clayton, shines especially in the playful and colorful Scherzo.

These songs for one and two voices come from the first four of D’India’s five books of Musiche, a series containing masterpieces of astonishing originality in the style of monody (solo melody with accompaniment), which had eclipsed the polyphonic madrigal in popularity at the dawn of the 17th century. With a career based largely in Turin and Rome, Sigismondo D’India nevertheless demonstrates stylistic links to both Monteverdi and Gesualdo, and it is the latter’s influence which supports new scholarship claiming D’India grew up in Naples (not Sicily) in the shadow of the great madrigalist’s free thinking on harmony. That very harmonic freedom – to accentuate key emotions in the text with piquant chord changes – is the hallmark of D’India’s own, self-styled ‘true manner’ of composing monody, adopted from Gesualdo’s intense, chromatic polyphony to the solo song or duet, and it suggests a Neapolitan, rather than Roman–Florentine, musical background.

Founded and directed by the Franco-Hungarian conductor Bruno Kele-Baujard, the Ensemble Zene has made a specialty of daring and off-the-beaten path programs. Its evocative name - "zene" is the Hungarian word for "music" - inclines it towards the Magyar-speaking repertoire, and it is therefore quite natural that it devotes its second recording to the a cappella works of Bartók, Kodály and Ligeti, whose centenary is being celebrated in 2023.