Rembrandt Frerich

The three members of the Rembrandt Trio, after fifteen years of touring the world together, found themselves grounded in The Netherlands when the world came to a standstill in 2020. Known for their curiosity-driven approach to music, incorporating many different musical cultures into their work and collaborating with grandmasters from different countries and continents (most notably with Persian grandmasters Hossein Alizadeh and Kayhan Kalhor) – the trio was now forced to stay put, stop performing, travelling, and collaborating.

It is a magical listening experience: There are pieces in the rich, century-old jazz tradition that embrace you from the very first note — as if they’ve always been there.

Together with the Alma Quartet (all strings of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra), double bassist Dominic Seldis and his regular percussionist Vinsent Planjer, Frerichs took an entirely new and unexpected path. He brought the improvisational element back into classical music: a practice that was common in the time of Mozart and Beethoven. Composers then wrote out their orchestral parts and came up with their solo parts during the performance. Frerichs follows this pattern in his first two piano concertos.

"Everything seems to start almost normally on Pussyhorse with "Creep in the Cellar," even with the rather gone violin line – Haynes is intelligible, the piano part is quiet serene. Then again, Haynes is talking about the creep in question doing things like taking off his skin, so clearly all is still at least somewhat tweaked in Surferland. The rest of the album makes that pretty clear; if not quite as strong as Psychic…Powerless, Pussyhorse is still a strong slice of homegrown art/psychedelia gone to a murky hell. Gentler songs like "Sea Ferring" still have a distinct queasiness to them, its sea chanty feeling undercut by the nagging bassline and Haynes' yelps.

The Giulini set on DG, with Cappuccilli, Cotrubas and Domingo is exceptional: searching, humane, powerfully registered… It can also be said that neither Bonynge nor Sinopoli search out the score's prevailingly dark sonorities as surely as Giulini (in his insistence on the score's dark colours and his interest in its portrayal of primary human affections.

Lahav Shani and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra bring a superb recording of Bruckner's 5th Symphony.

Starless and Bible Black is even more powerful and daring than its predecessor, Larks' Tongues in Aspic, with jarring tempo shifts, explosive guitar riffs, and soaring, elegant, and delicate violin and Mellotron parts scattered throughout its 41 minutes, often all in the same songs. The album was on the outer fringes of accessible progressive rock, with enough musical ideas explored to make Starless and Bible Black more than background for tripping the way Emerson, Lake & Palmer's albums were.

In a historic first, critically acclaimed Guitarist Daniel Lippel brings these three beloved masterworks in their original keys to a classical guitar refretted in Baroque well temperament.