Classical April 2024

If there’s one thing both an elf and a dwarf could agree on, it’s that a little aesthetic brilliance goes a long way. This is why we’re so thrilled to share that Mondo, in partnership with Amazon Studios and Sparks and Shadows, is releasing a gorgeous limited-edition version of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power‘s season one soundtrack. This 10 CD set is an expansion of Mondo’s previous two CD-version of the soundtrack. While the original soundtrack is also gorgeous, this new collector’s edition takes the epic sounds of The Rings of Power to a whole new level./quote]

Jeremiah Cymerman (b. 1980) is a New York City-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Apocalyptic electroacoustic chamber music. Low drones, earth tones, and birth stones.

After Igor Levit, Christian Thielemann, and the Vienna Philharmonic performed Brahms’ First Piano Concerto at Vienna’s famous Musikverein in April 2024 the Viennese newspaper The Standard wrote: “During these fifty minutes, an irresistible dose of emotion was conveyed – but at the same time the sophisticated structure of Brahms’ masterpiece remained crystal clear.” Four months earlier after their performance of the Second Piano Concerto, the Austrian newspaper Die Presse had declared that “Igor Levit sets a new gold standard for Brahms.”

New York-based composer and producer Kelly Moran’s intricate, experimental pieces transcend the piano’s more traditional and classically-imposed school of thought. On her forthcoming new album for Warp, Moran augments her pianistic abilities to superhuman levels in order to create a new strain of her singular experimental piano compositions. Hypnotic and emotive, the coming project solidifies Moran’s role as one of the leading contemporary composers for the piano, constantly pushing the instrument’s creative and sonic boundaries in the realms of classical and electronic music.

Formed in 2016, the Quatuor Agate derives its name from one of the most beautiful chamber music pieces, Johannes Brahms’s Second Sextet, dedicated to his second love, Agathe von Siebold. Seven years later, this fascination with Brahms materialized with the release of their debut album in February 2024, featuring the complete String Quartets under Appassionato, le label.

“And the violin dances Furiant, carried away by an irresistible ardour”. Beyond the intrinsic character of gypsy music, which constantly moves back and forth between melancholy and joy, dance is the obvious thread running through this album. It creates a bond through its intensity and infinite rhythmic contrasts, revealing a wide range of emotions. One dance can contain an entire life, with its laughter, its tears, its perpetual movement, its ruptures, its unpredictability in the passage from one emotional state to another…