For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms. She has even toured the US with Kanye West and appeared in the hit HBO series Mozart in the Jungle . . . Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigour.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel , a dialogue between the voice of the cello and the piano.
Swedish act Råg I Ryggen released one of those nearly-forgotten seventies heavy prog albums whose somewhat mythical reputation causes the original vinyl to fetch too high prices today. As with most albums of this sort, there’s no need to spend that kind of money since it was reissued on CD a few years ago. The band lasted only two years, and you won’t find a whole lot of information about them from most internet or written sources. No matter, they’ve included pretty much their entire biography in the liner notes of the album, which along with the bonus concert tracks makes this CD release something of an anthology as well. Being young and new, it isn’t surprising the band shows evidence of many influences in their music…
I Fagiolini’s re-discovery and recording of Striggio’s longlost Mass in 40/60 Parts was ground-breaking when it was released in 2011. The premiere recording won awards around the world including the Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année in France and remains a trailblazing account of this Renaissance epic. It is complemented on this album by Tallis’s Spem in alium which it is said to have inspired. The Gramophone citation particularly mentioned the new lustre brought to the piece by instrumental involvement and the clarity brought to the detail by the use of viols, cornetts, sackbuts, dulcians and more. Eight further works by Striggio are also included, each of them premiere recordings in 2011.