Breakthrough Steven Finkel

As a famous music authority and critic once wrote, the life story of the Austrian composer Franz Schreker and the reception history of his oeuvre would have offered fine material for a magnificent novel with a musician as its protagonist – if not for the fact that everything had actually occurred in real life: his childhood spent in poverty; the difficult initial path to local prominence in Vienna; the breakthrough to superstar status in German-language opera houses; his appointment as director of the Berlin College of Music; his failure to resist the seductive powers of flatterers; the gradual loss of favor among audiences and critics that many seeming friends followed with malicious spite; and then the final blow, when the new »master race« turned the world upside down – all of this was fact, not fiction.

Sergey Prokofiev's output for violin and piano was quite small, and it would have been limited to the Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor had he not also arranged his Five Songs Without Words and the Flute Sonata in D major, the latter at the request of David Oistrakh. One experiences a degree of discomfort in the Violin Sonata No. 1, which is one of Prokofiev's more unsettling pieces, due in part to its sinister tone and harsh dissonances, but also to its conflicting expressions.

Welcome To My World, Grammy Award-winning bass-baritone Mark Steven Doss’s debut recording for Cedille Records, is a solo vocal recital showcasing Doss’s extraordinary career and artistic versatility. The recording provides a rich and varied musical experience, reflecting Doss’s range as a performer.

What the world needs more of is intelligently planned, stupendously played, and brilliantly recorded collections like this one. These two discs contain all the piano works of Michael Tippett, works that come from every period of the composer's very long life except his very last. It includes the youthful, tuneful Piano Sonata No. 1 written between 1936 and 1938 and revised in 1941, the massive Fantasia on a Theme of Handel from 1941, the exuberant Piano Concerto from 1955, the experimental Piano Sonata No. 2, the gnomic almost Beethovenian Piano Sonata No. 3 from 1973, and the gnarly post-Beethovenian Piano Sonata No. 4. It features a bravura performance by pianist Steven Osborne that makes the best case for all the music, no matter how outré or recherché its harmonic proclivities or rhythmic audacities.

Steven Wilson’s new album The Future Bites is an exploration of how the human brain has evolved in the Internet era. As well as being Wilson’s phenomenal sixth album, The Future Bites is also an online portal to a world of high concept design custom built for the ultra-modern consumer. Where 2017’s To The Bone confronted the emerging global issues of post truth and fake news, The Future Bites places the listener in a world of 21st century addictions. It’s a place where on-going, very public experiments constantly take place into the affects of nascent technology on our lives. From out of control retail therapy, manipulative social media and the loss of individuality, The Future Bites is less a bleak vision of an approaching dystopia, more a curious reading of the here and now.