Avishia Cohen 2015

The seventh album from Israeli-born saxophonist and clarinetist Anat Cohen, 2015's Luminosa showcases the N.Y.C.-based artist's eclectic mix of acoustic post-bop and Brazilian choro-influenced jazz. The album follows up her similarly inclined 2012 effort, Claroscuro, and provides a further showcase for her adroit improvisational skills and layered, sophisticated arrangements. Joining Cohen here is a bevy of equally gifted musicians, including keyboardist Jason Linder, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Daniel Freedman. Luminosa also features a handful of guest artists including guitarist Romero Lubambo, percussionist Gilmar Gomes, and accordion player Vitor Goncalves. As with most of Cohen's recordings, Luminosa is a highly engaging, sophisticated, and romantic album.

Edouard Lalo - Tassis Christoyannis & Jeff Cohen - Complete Songs (2015) {Aparte-Harmonia Mundi AP110}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 594 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 336 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 226 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 Aparté / Harmonia Mundi | AP110
Classical / Vocal Music / Romantic / French Classical / Chamber Music

Composer Edouard Lalo's work encompassed the period of Romanticism that witnessed the evolution of the romance de salon genre into the melodie francaise or French art song. It is an injustice of posterity that only Faure, Duparc and Debussy acquired true fame in this genre. This collection from baritone Tassis Christoyannis and pianist Jeff Cohen featuring the two scenes de salon for voice and piano, the seven romances and the 23 melodies, shows that Lalo easily stands alongside his more well-known countrymen.

On Soli, Tamsin Waley-Cohen's 2015 release on Signum Classics, the violinist explores modernist repertoire composed between 1944 and 2005. Because these solo violin pieces by Béla Bartók, George Benjamin, Krzysztof Penderecki, Elliott Carter, and György Kurtág are challenging for both the player and the listener, one should approach this CD with some awareness that they reflect different phases of the avant-garde movement that dominated music in the last half of the 20th century.

The solo violin pieces of the Baroque period are not just limited to the sonatas and partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach, although these certainly represented its highpoint. Other violinist/composers in Germany sought to translate their polyphonic tradition to this four-stringed instrument, exceeding the instrument’s apparent limitations.

Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon, Hob. 1/105, is among his most recorded works, and among his most utterly joyful. But it has rarely reached the heights of ebullience achieved in this historical-instrument reading by the small British ensemble Arcangelo and its conductor, Jonathan Cohen. The list of things to be enthusiastic about is long, but it begins with the differentiation of the instruments in the solo passages, with the period oboe and bassoon of Alfredo Bernardini and Peter Whelan, respectively, having the depth of texture to stand up to the brilliant Stradivarius violin and Guarneri cello of Ilya Gringolts (a renowned soloist in his own right) and Nicolas Altstaedt.

The program on this release by baritone Matthew Rose is innovative and useful in a couple of different ways. First, although performers have sometimes tried to bring 18th century opera to life by programming arias written for specific singers, this has usually been applied to countertenors. They were generally the stars, it's true, but they weren't the only ones. The Italian comic baritone Francesco Benucci was one of the leads of Joseph II's Italian opera company, the original Figaro, and the original Leporello in Don Giovanni in the Vienna premiere (the second production).

What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.