Flac Robert Williams

Raise the Roof is the second collaborative studio album by British singer-songwriter Robert Plant and American bluegrass-country singer Alison Krauss. The album is scheduled to be released on November 19, 2021, by Rounder Records and Concord Records. In 2007, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss released Raising Sand, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st Century, which reached #2 on the UK album chart, generated multi-platinum sales, and earned six Grammy Awards including Album and Record of the Year. It was an unlikely, mesmerizing pairing of one of rock's greatest frontmen with one of country music's finest and most honored artists. Now, after 14 years, they return with Raise the Roof, 12 songs from a range of traditions and styles that extend this remarkable collaboration in new and thrilling directions.

These works by Robert Saxton were written between 2013 and 2019 and represent his continuing journey of exploration in modal and harmonic structures; complex in structure but creating no jarring modernist difficulty for the listener. A mix of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, it features top performers including world-renowned baritone Roderick Williams and equally famous (and now film star) Clare Hammond. Robert Saxton received early guidance from Benjamin Britten and studied with Elisabeth Lutyens, Robin Holloway and Luciano Berio among others. He has received commissions from the BBC (TV, radio and Proms) and many prominent ensembles. Until retiring in 2021 Robert was Professor of Composition at Oxford University and is a Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.

This elegiac music seems very well-suited to the dark sound of the viola. Kashkashian plays it simply and very expressively, without slides or sentimentality; glowing and shimmering, her tone is pure, warm, inflected. The program has great variety. Britten's mournful Lachrymae (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland) comes to an agitated climax and ends with an old chorale. Vaughan Williams's Romance is a peaceful pastoral; Carter's Elegy is somber, gentle, and hardly dissonant; Glasunov's Elegy is very romantic. Liszt's Romance is very rhetorical–half recitation, half lamentation–but ends serenely.