John Rose is a founding member of Spacecraft and an e-music veteran with over 25 years in the genre. Cosmogenesis, his solo debut, is packed with atmospheres, sequences, bravado and triumph. John's goal has long been to create music to get inside. The double meaning is clear. As listeners get deeper into the music, it gets deeper into the listeners. John compliments his signature electronics with an acoustic piano and dulcimers. Those acoustics take the music over the edge of the lightness of being. John, as Spacecraft fans know, is not about to explore the dark side of the psyche. He is more interested in celebrating the gentler and softer aspects of the being. His pastoral textures create the perfect vehicle for such celebration. This CD is great for lazy afternoons and for relaxing rest stops on the highway of life.
Excellent album steeped in the Southern California country-rock sound of the '70s, with all the usual suspects – Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Kenny Edwards, and Russ Kunkel, producer Peter Asher – all Ronstadt veterans, plus Glenn Frey and Don Henley from the Eagles) in place on such songs as "Faithless Love," "Simple Man, Simple Dream," and "Silver Blue".
John Corigliano is a difficult composer to pin down stylistically. The generally tonal orientation of his music and the cinematic quality that made his score for The Red Violin such a success have brought him a beloved status rare among contemporary composers. Yet, it would be wrong to call him neo-Romantic; his music has deep rigor and sometimes, as in the Symphony No. 2 on offer here, a quite grim quality. This 2022 release from the Boston Modern Orchestra does not include his most famous works – The Red Violin in either its film score or violin concertos forms, The Ghosts of Versailles, or the Symphony No. 1 – but it offers an excellent window into the richness of Corigliano's music, in which a great variety of elements collide in unexpected ways. One of those elements is quotation, on display in the opening work, To Music; it is based on Schubert's song An die Musik, which is assembled with great subtlety over five and a half minutes.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose present the world premiere recording of The Lord of Cries, a breathtaking opera by John Corigliano and Mark Adamo. Telling the story of Euripides’s The Bacchae with the characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the piece explores the power of sexual desire and humans’ need to blame and attack others for what they can neither resist nor accept in themselves. Corigliano returns to opera for the first time since his The Ghosts of Versailles, introduced by the Metropolitan Opera, made an international sensation in 1992. The brilliant cast—most of whom introduced their parts in the world premiere in 2021—is led by star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role.
John Baldwin was a lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1575 and became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1598. The so-called ‘Baldwin Partbooks’, held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation – a very personal collection, representing his individual tastes and interests from a wealth of English and Continental polyphony and consort music.
As in their previous collaboration, an exploration of the similarly conceived partbooks of Robert Dow, the Marian Consort and Rose Consort of Viols have kept faith with Baldwin’s own intentions, bringing to light some of the rarer gems preserved by this great advocate and music-lover and providing the listener with ‘such sweete musicke: as dothe much delite yeelde’.