The music industry sees artists come and go on a regular basis. Plans change, life gets in the way and bands fade away. Occasionally we’re lucky enough to see an important band return from their silence: enter At The Drive In. While At The Drive In was quiet, the members (Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Tony Hajjar and Paul Hinojos) were incredibly busy, selling millions of albums, winning Grammys and putting out a lot of quality music with their other projects (The Mars Volta, Antemasque, Gone Is Gone and many more). After a 15 year break, the band returned to the studio to create the follow-up to 2000’s Relationship of Command.
If only for his melodic genius, Handel would have been forever acknowledged as one of history's greatest composers. These delightful sonatas for recorder provide abundant evidence to support that claim, and Marion Verbruggen's warm, resonant recorder and brilliant flute prove the perfect partners for bringing these rarely heard pieces to life.
It's hard to believe this CD was done with only a violin, viola da gama and harpsichord. This is polyphonic music at its finest. It does tribute to Buxtehude, who preceded Bach. The ensemble is perfect - the instruments complement each other. When they go from slow to fast, it is remarkable to hear the contrast. These are expert musicians with a complete mastery of their instruments. They use loud-soft as easily as any masters of the Baroque. The result is joyous, lively and entertaining.
The Baroques were an American psychedelic rock band formed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1966. The band reached regional success for their transition from garage rock to the psychedelic rock genre, and the controversary aroused from their single, "Mary Jane". The band released one studio album before its disbandment in 1968.
The Electric Kings are without any doubt a true Belgian Blues legend. These gentlemen measure their activities carefully into doses and after all these years, there is no surfeit at all. Their rare performances are top of the notch, and so it will be again next Friday, April 20 in CC Luchtbal ‘Hof Ter Lo’ in Antwerp at the 12th Belgian Roots Night. The music from Big Dave (harmonica, vocals), Luke Alexander (guitar), Willy Maze (drums) Mark T. (guitar) and RC Stock (bass) is immortalized on three excellent albums: ‘Not For Sale’, ‘Electronic’ and the swingin’ ‘Live @ BRBF 2005′. However, nothing is better then seeing them in real. If you like authentic blues, you shouldn’t miss this. Other bands at the XII Belgian Roots Night are Cuban Heels, Durango and a “after-party” with the Antwerp Gipsy-Ska Orkestra.
In 1998, the Rotterdam Arts Foundation commissioned 24 Dutch composers to write short works, or "capriccios", for solo violin, clearly with the idea of being a modern counterpart to the 24 caprices of Paganini. The one main rule was to compose acoustically, i.e. no use of electronics/remixing, overdubbing, or other outside means of sound besides the violin on its own and the violinist on her/his own. The Dutch music publishing house Donemus published these works in a single collected volume in 1999. All of these works received their premieres that same year at the International Gaudeamus Interpreters' Competition, which centered on the violin that year.
The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.
Dietrich Buxtehude is probably most familiar to modern classical music audiences as the man who inspired the young Johann Sebastian Bach to make a lengthy pilgrimage to Lubeck, Buxtehude's place of employment and residence for most of his life, just to hear Buxtehude play the organ. But Buxtehude was a major figure among German Baroque composers in his own right.