Robert Fenwick Elliott

These quartets are Juilliard specialties, and anyone wanting to hear this music played with a near ideal combination of virtuosity and humanity need look no further. Carter's quartets are not for the musically faint of heart: they are uncompromisingly thorny, intricate pieces that require lots of intense, dedicated listening. Very few people doubt their seriousness–or even their claims to musical greatness–but just as few people enjoy listening to them. Perhaps this spectacular set will encourage the adventurous to give them a shot. They're worth the time.

This elegiac music seems very well-suited to the dark sound of the viola. Kashkashian plays it simply and very expressively, without slides or sentimentality; glowing and shimmering, her tone is pure, warm, inflected. The program has great variety. Britten's mournful Lachrymae (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland) comes to an agitated climax and ends with an old chorale. Vaughan Williams's Romance is a peaceful pastoral; Carter's Elegy is somber, gentle, and hardly dissonant; Glasunov's Elegy is very romantic. Liszt's Romance is very rhetorical–half recitation, half lamentation–but ends serenely.

…The King's Consort under the direction of Robert King perform the Overture-Suites from the Second and Third Productions of Telemann's anthology…I find the new issue delightful, both musically and from a performance standpoint. The players capture the spirit of the Overture-Suite in D major (Second Production) with pleasing tempos, crisp articulation, taut rhythms and fine ensemble. The trumpet has an important role in this Suite and here it is played with finesse by Crispian Steele-Perkins—resonant, authoritative but never overbearing. Oboes are kept busy, too, as indeed is the leader, Roy Goodman who gives a lively account of the several concertante passages for violin. His presence has contributed much to the ultimate success of this project.

Few others besides avant-garde composer/instrumentalist Elliott Sharp could record a collection of blues songs and make them sound like a new genre altogether, a sort of blues/folk/jazz/new age sound with droning keyboards, slinky reverbed vocals, sinuous guitar parts, and angstful horns. The album is by turns haunting, sexy, volatile, and soothing

Inevitably, there's some symbolism implied when an artist, after years of lurking behind a semi-obscure pseudonym– head down, eyes averted, shoulders squeezed and high– puts out a record under his common name. Former Third Eye Foundation principal Matt Elliott has spent most of his recording career as a modish UK hipster in a dark disguise: thus, the leap from "Third Eye Foundation" to "Matt Elliott" should involve a nice dose of lurid confessionalism, some newfound honesty, a running-around-naked-in-daylight reinvention of self. Right? Hey, turn this car around! Someone left the personal catharsis at home! The Mess We Made, Matt Elliott's proper debut as Matt Elliott is, at least atmospherically, just as shadowed and sinister as his late, orchestral Third Eye work.