New Order Low Life

Hyperion’s record of the month for July celebrates the (probable) 500th anniversary of the birth of England’s first superstar composer, Thomas Tallis, and welcomes the signing to the label of The Cardinall’s Musick and Andrew Carwood. In a fifteen-year history The Cardinall’s Musick has progressively built an enviable reputation for excellence. Some twenty recordings on the ASV Gaudeamus label have seen accolades from around the world, including a Gramophone Award and a Diapason d’Or, while in the concert hall and workshop the group has consistently displayed innovation and a freshness of approach, whether tackling contemporary works (many of them commissions) or sharing the fruits of years of research into the music of the English Renaissance.

Although she was born and raised in suburban New Jersey, Sharon Van Etten's folk music evokes the open landscapes and lonely expanses of Middle America. A dedicated choir student during her childhood, she began writing songs on her guitar as a high-school student and, upon moving to New York, started playing them in concert. Van Etten signed with the Chicago-based indie label Drag City and issued her intimate, official debut, Because I Was in Love, in spring 2009, followed by the lush, more band-oriented Epic in 2010. Van Etten signed to Jagjaguwar in late 2010 and began working with the National's Aaron Dessner as producer for her third album, Tramp; it was released in early 2012.

The Brabant Ensemble continue their investigation into unknown jewels of the Low Countries Renaissance, researched by their director Stephen Rice and recorded with equal amounts of passion and erudition by the young singers of the group. Cipriano de Rore was and is principally known as a madrigal composer, and, as Stephen Rice writes, ‘blended the contrapuntal complexity of Low Countries polyphonic style with Italian poetic texts to create a newly expressive vernacular genre’. This recording represents something of a new departure in presenting some of the least well-known aspects of the output of a composer who is justly famous in other fields.

Devo was among the most thought-provoking bands to emerge in the aftermath of punk, but before hits like “Whip It,” Devo worked in the basements and garages of Akron, Ohio, to make raw, unfiltered music that the group called “Hardcore Devo.” In the summer of 2014, Devo did 10 shows performing these seminal pre-fame songs, created between 1974 and 1977 and rarely played since then. Shot at the Fox Theater in Oakland, California, this exciting concert film captures these groundbreaking artists performing the songs that started it all, interwoven with interviews revealing the history of the band.

The hunting horn evolved in the seventeenth century as an accessory to a popular leisure activity for the aristocracy—the hunt. Its purpose during the chase was to signal unfolding events to people walking behind the mounted huntsmen; it was designed to be loud enough to project over considerable distance and over the barking of hunting hounds. From this rustic beginning, the horn underwent a remarkable process of taming and refinement over a few decades to become capable of being the featured musical instrument of chamber works in the eighteenth century, such as those recorded here. The music may still retain occasional references to its outdoor heritage in brief fanfares and hunting rhythms, but horn players achieved an ability to blend and balance with small groups of string instruments, harpsichord and woodwinds, with an emphasis on sweetness of tone, phrasing and articulation that would have been unanticipated a generation or so earlier.

The career of the young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov has taken off since he won the Honens Prize in 2012. He issued a live recording and then a fine album of Tchaikovsky pieces that, while pleasures all, are not really everyday items. With this set of 24 of Chopin's 58 mazurkas, he makes what might be regarded as his debut in mainstream repertory. Twisting and turning the slightly tense rhythm of the Polish folk dance in a dozen different directions, they're an excellent pick for Kolesnikov's deliberate yet playful style. Kolesnikov observes all of Chopin's repeats, daring the listener to find them tedious and delivering with readings that diverge in small but telling details from the first time through. It's in the small details that Kolesnikov excels. The temperature of the entire recording is low, and Hyperion's engineers set just the right level at their favorite venue for this kind of recital, the Wyastone Estate concert hall. But the listener is drawn into Kolesnikov's unique handling of the unusual technical devices in which these pieces abound.