Ravishing Beauty

She was a ravishing beauty from Boston, with a mysterious past and a fiery spirit. Drawn to the powerful duke, undeterred by his presumptuous airs, Caroline was determined to win his lasting love. But Bradford would bend to no woman — until a deadly intrigue drew them enticingly close. Now, united against a common enemy, they would discover the power of the magnificent attraction that brought them together…a desire born in danger, but destined to flame into love!

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine’s lifelong love of the blues, combined with her determination to uncover and commission works by black composers, has led to this album of pieces soaked in the blues tradition of the 19th-century Deep South. From the riotous opening “Blues (Deliver My Soul)” by David Baker to Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s bold Blue/s Forms for Solo Violin and Errollyn Wallen’s modernist “Woogie Boogie,” plus music by Billy Childs, William Grant Still, and more, it’s a dazzling, sophisticated collection. Barton Pine has this music in her blood, and she relishes the blues’ rich vein with playing of rhythmic freedom and ravishing beauty—and an incredible sense of fun.

Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi describes his album Nightbook in this way: "A night-time landscape. A garden faintly visible under the dull glow of the night sky. A few stars dotting the darkness above, shadows of the trees all around. Light shining from a window behind me. What I can see is familiar, but it seems alien at the same time. It's like a dream – anything may happen." Although such language may sound like it has little if anything to do with music, it communicates the mood of this album as well as can be done with words.

The second volume of this series (Volume 1 is on 8.573995) visits 20th-century France, where the combination of trumpet and piano inspired music of ravishing beauty, intimacy and wit. Through the bluesy retrospection of Jean Hubeau's Sonata, the voluptuous rhapsody of Florent Schmitt's Suite and the avantgarde eclecticism of Antoine Tisné's Héraldiques, this album explores the quintessentially Gallic sonorities that came to redefine the instruments voice for the modern era.