Jennifer Van Sijl

American violinist Jennifer Koh’s new recording, Alone Together is based on her online performance series of the same name, created in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the financial hardship it has placed on so many in the arts community. The New York Times called Alone Together “a marvel for a time of crisis” and the lineup of composers “more inclusive than anything in mainstream classical music.”

Jenifer Nettles should be familiar to you all. The frontwoman of Sugarland, responsible for 30 million records sold, Jennifer has been a country radio staple for over 20 years. She is also an actress having been cast in HBO's The Righteous Gemstones and the 2019 Focus Features film release of the Harriet Tubman Biopic. Jennifer also debuted on Broadway in 2015 as Roxy Hart in the Tony Award winning and record-breaking musical Chicago and she is currently a judge on the TBS reality talent competition Go Big. With multiple Grammys to her credit as well as ACM and CMA awards, she is a music industry institution but what this particular release will prove is her musical proclivities and skills are far wider and more diverse then perhaps previously thought. Jennifer is in fact a brilliant interpreter of songs.

This ten-track compilation appeared at a time when Jennifer Warnes had released only two albums on Arista, resulting in five pop singles chart entries, including the Top Ten hit "Right Time of the Night" and the Top 40 hit "I Know a Heartache When I See One." This album contained four of the five, plus "Could It Be Love" and "Come to Me," which subsequently charted, a third newly recorded song, "Run to Her," two LP tracks composed by Warnes, and "It Goes Like It Goes," the theme from the movie Norma Rae, which had won an Academy Award. It is easy for consumers to pick it up assuming it contains later Warnes hits like "Up Where We Belong" and "(I've Had) The Time of My Life." In fact, since Warnes has been on many labels and several of her hits are one-off movie themes, there is no reliable compilation of her work; this works more as an overview of part of her career, not the whole thing.

Jennifer Pike writes: ‘This recording project of Polish music is one that is particularly close to my heart. The idea for the series arose from an awareness of the sound world associated with Polish music, of the country’s long-held fascination with the violin, and of my own Polish heritage on my mother’s side. As a successor to the first volume, released in 2019, this album continues to explore a breadth of repertoire that includes some rarely heard gems. The Violin Sonata, one of Szymanowski’s earlier compositions, is a work brimming with late-romantic intensity.