Maxime Raine

Beauty blooms in adversity. It’s one of the undying clichés of art. Sometimes, it’s a damaging one. It can lead unsuspecting audiences to believe that performers and the emotions they embody are one and the same, and that torment is a necessity for creation; it can lead performers to disregard their own health, believing that their discomfort supposedly serves and ennobles their art; and it glosses over the fact that creativity emerging out of adversity or hardship is generally the exception rather than the rule.

Little Raine Band has been jamming in venues and across radio waves in Birmingham and beyond for over a decade now, and the band is entering a new realm of music goodness with today’s release of “Beyond The Cave”! The band will celebrate the release of their latest masterpiece at Saturn Friday evening, and the guys are ready to get back to playing in front of their hometown. The current collective of Davis Little (guitar/vocals), Daniel Raine (keyboard/vocals), Isaiah Smith (bass), and Charles Gray (drums) feels like they’ve put out their best work yet with this new album, and the Saturn show will be a celebration of this return to groovin music.

This guitar, bass, drums trio is headed up by French guitarist Maxime Fougères and features Antoine Paganotti and Yoni Zelnik. 2012 saw the release of Fougères’ first album, “Guitar Reflections”, a tribute to Duke Ellington. “Guitar Reflections Vol 2” includes 10 tracks which are a combination of original compositions and the music of Wayne Shorter, arranged and adapted by Fougères for the trio…

The Song of the Earth is Gustav Mahler's most personal composition, as the composer himself revealed. It takes on all it's twilight hues with Stéphane Degout's vocal performance. Ardently conducted by Maxime Pascal, Le Balcon delivers a performance which sets the standard, using Arnold Schönberg's pared-down transcription in the royal acoustic setting of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Le Balcon and the Saint-Denis Festival have a long history, which began in 2014 with a recital by the soprano Julie Fuchs in the Music Pavilion of the Maison Education de la Légion d'honneur. Since then, all Le Balcon's concerts given in the Basilica of Saint-Denis have left their mark on our respective histories: whether it be Monteverdi's Vespers in 2015 (with a sound system and an electric guitar in the orchestra, a historic first for this repertoire), the final scene of Stockhausen's Samstag aus Licht in 2016 (impressively rigorous, it literally transfixed the audience) or Mahler's seventh symphony in 2017. Freedom, innovation, creativity but total respect for the works and composers are the words that immediately come to mind when thinking of Le Balcon, whose collective ad-venture is the basis of a faultless career.

Known for her spirited and luminous sound, Baroque flute player Alexa Raine-Wright shares her eloquent interpretations with audiences across North America in solo, chamber and orchestral performances. This debut solo recording brings to light a collection of rarely heard works by Giovanni Benedetto Platti (1697–1763), a composer with one foot planted firmly in the Baroque, and the other foot pointed toward the Classical style. Equally at ease on the Baroque flute and recorder, American/Canadian Alexa Raine-Wright has shared her passion and talent for early music with audiences across the United States and Canada in solo, chamber and orchestral performances. Winner of several national and international competitions, Alexa was awarded the $10,000 Devonna & Amos Gerber Grand Prize as well as the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra Prize at the 2016 Indianapolis International Baroque Competition. ?Alexa is a founding member of the ensemble Infusion Baroque, winner of the Grand Prize and Audience Prize in the 2014 Early Music America Baroque Performance Competition in Chicago. She is also a member of the celebrated recorder quartet Flûte Alors!, Canada’s only recorder quartet.