Nine delightful Renaissance dances by Tielman Susato start this program with a bang. The ever-popular English Folksong Suite by Ralph Vaughan Williams in its original scoring continues the crowd-pleasing mood. Two important new works follow. David Del Tredici’s first composition for wind band, In Wartime, is based on the popular hymn “Abide With Me” and the Persian national anthem. Michael Daugherty is one of the most performed and commissioned American composers of his generation. Bells for Stokowski is a fantasy in which the composer imagines Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, hearing all the bells of the city resonate.
‘The blues come to Texas, loping like a mule,’ Blind Lemon Jefferson sang through a shower of surface noise as he made his recording debut in March 1926. He established the primacy of Texas blues musicians that continued unchallenged for the next 30 years, encompassing the likes of Henry ‘Ragtime’ Thomas, Texas Alexander, T-Bone Walker, Smokey Hogg, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Clarence Garlow, Lil’ Son Jackson, Lowell Fulson and Frankie Lee Sims. Other famous musicians recorded when they were passing through Texas, and that included Lonnie Johnson, Walter Davis, The Mississippi Sheiks, Robert Johnson, Roy Brown, Joe Turner, Honeyboy Edwards, Memphis Slim and Jimmy McCracklin.
Balmorhea’s new album The Wind comprises a dozen tracks inspired variously by meditations on the natural world and its fragility, an ancient tale about a saint who carried the wind to an airless French valley and thoughts of climate activist Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic. Balmorhea, pronounced “Bal-more-ray” and named for a small town in western Texas, began life in 2006 when Lowe and Muller met and made music at a summer camp in the remote Texas Hill Country. The group gradually evolved into a larger ensemble and toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Following an intense five-year period on the road, Balmorhea’s two founders took advantage of a break from touring to improvise and experiment together once more.