Gertruda Stein

With the release of Lifeline, John Stein celebrates a musical career as one of the most diverse jazz guitarists of his generation. Selected highlights from Stein’s varied discography capture his eclectic spirit with his honey-toned guitar effortlessly guiding listeners across several decades of brilliance. After retiring from a longtime career at Berklee College of Music where he held a professorship since 1999, and upon recently contracting a rare autoimmune disease, the esteemed jazz veteran decided to synthesize his remarkable body of recorded work. The recorded output surveyed on this compilation spans more than twenty years, from Stein’s 1999’s Green Street to the most recent recording, 2021’s Serendipity. Throughout this assortment of releases, Stein has been consistently regaled for his expansiveness, turning heads with his emotive, subtle, grooving, and precise stylistic excursions. With dazzling guitar playing, notable contributions from the side musicians, creative arrangements, and compositions that are at once sophisticated and memorable, the full scope of John Stein’s instrumental and compositional prowess is on display on this prodigious, varied, and musically rewarding retrospective.

Things are looking up for Bergen-based Stein Urheim, a musician who, on the basis of Stein Urheim—his second release on Hubro after the vinyl/download-only Kosmolodi (2012) and third as a leader following his 2009 debut, Three Sets of Music—seems interested in just about anything with strings…and a few without…

For anyone who is a devotee of Otto Klemperer’s readings of the Beethoven Symphonies, they will not be disappointed with much of what is on offer here. In the main, these are weighty and highly-charged performances, with a certain grandeur…Horst gives us monumental, full-blooded and noble readings of these symphonies.

Like many serious musicians, John Stein was trying to find a way to reach his audience following the Covid-19 breakout. He had just released Watershed, a career- defining recording to mark his planned retirement from Berklee College of Music, where he was an acclaimed educator. Of course, as with live music in general, the tour in support of Watershed was scrapped. Prior to the pandemic, Whaling City Sound’s Neal Weiss had asked Stein to bring a trio for an outdoor September show he had booked in New Bedford. But when hell broke loose, Neal moved the show inside, to the New Bedford Art Museum, and made plans to broadcast it virtually, as well as record the audio and video. “Thanks to Neal’s ability to see other possibilities,” recalls Stein, “it would be the only public concert I played the entire year.”

This 1971 film version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Magic Flute is based on a production at Hamburg State Opera staged by the multi-talented stage, television and film author, director and actor Sir Peter Ustinov, with decor and costumes by Jens-Denis Malclès. The cast brought together by Rolf Liebermann for this film version of the Magic Flute consists of stars with established international careers but also of singers who were just on the point of breaking through to international fame at the time.

Experience illuminates the path to clarity, and nowhere is this more evident than in No Goodbyes by guitarist John Stein. As his 18th recording and 13th for the renowned Whaling City Sound label, Stein, along with his exceptional trio partners Ed Lucie on bass guitar and Mike Connors on drums, showcases a transcendent musical experience. Building upon their previous collaboration on 2021’s Serendipity, the trio creates an enchanting collection of interactive, conversational, and expressive melodies.

Staged and directed by Richard Wagner's grandson Wolfgang at the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1984, this production of Wagner's only comedy dispenses with the common cliches to reveal the humanity of each character. Here, Beckmesser is no longer a foolish caricature but a cultivated intellectual; Stolzing emerges as a thoughtful individual rather than aggressive aristocret; and Hans Sachs sheds his solemn patriarchal veneer to become a likeable middle-aged man. “Hermann Prey´s interpretation of Beckmesser as a cultivated intellectual is a triumph of dramatic and vocal artistry: a stunning performance . . . Brilliant . . . Bernd Weikl as Sachs – an almost unique combination of musical refinement and expressive power.” (Abendzeitung, Munich)

Stein-Erik Olsen is back! His newest recording “The fifties and Now” displays an impressive side of one of Europe’s most important working guitarists. This record blends classical compositions from the 1950´s from Leo Brouwer and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, with a far more modern composition from Norway’s own Ketil Hvoslef written in 2019.