Time Fades Away

One hundred and eleven musicians celebrating a large-scale symphony that sounds like Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, or Arnold Schoenberg. In fact, the composer of this symphony, Alfred Schnittke, had precisely these composers (and many others) in mind back in 1981. Whereas he initially mirrored certain styles from figures as Mahler, Mozart, Bach, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, he was soon also borrowing concepts from trivial music, folklore, jazz, tango, as well as many other styles. He himself described his compositional technique, but an aesthetic programme: a serious effort to break through the vicious circle of the self-satisfied and self-sufficient avant-garde music.

The dominance of rhythm in African and African-derived music is the pillar of this journey across piano pieces by Ernesto Lecuona and Louis Moreau Gottschalk, deriving from the combination of long melodic lines, often related to popular songs, with Caribbean and, in particular, Afro-Cuban rhythms. These are shown not only in the bass line, resembling drums and percussions, but in each rhythmic layer and in the melody itself. Each piece tells a story that evokes the spirit and energy of the composers’ native lands, Cuba and Louisiana, reflecting their historical and cultural landscape characterised by multifaceted influences. A vivid portrait of the Caribbean culture, in which dance has been used as form of expression since ancestral times, is rendered through this music, with those typical rhythmic patterns, such as tresillo, cinquillo and habanera, captivating and appealing to an European audience and loved by the American and Caribbean ones, unaccustomed to seeing their soul depicted in a music score.

Joris Feiertag is a Dutch producer and drummer from the historic and culturally rich city of Utrecht. Having signed to Sonar Kollektiv in 2018, and released his debut long-playing record Time To Recover, and its subsequent remixes, two years later, he now brings us another side to his sound in the shape of the Dive album…

Swept along by the spirit of the day, Romantic chamber music came to be defined by an increasingly important role of the piano within the ensemble: the reign of the string quartet was eventually brought to an end, making way in particular for the piano trio with violin and cello. Throughout the Romantic repertoire, many works bear witness to the richness of this genre. The Second Piano Trio, Op.26 by Felix Mendelssohn and the Third Trio, Op.26 by Edouard Lalo are of course only two examples of the genre, but undeniably splendid specimens, brought to light in this recording.

Partisans of the one-voice-per-part approach don't like to talk about it, but many early performances of Haydn's oratorios, and of the Handel performances in England that inspired him, included hundreds of musicians. They could be performed by smaller groups, but clearly when Haydn wanted all cylinders firing, this is what he had in mind. Historical performances that observe this precedent for The Creation exist, but this seems to be the first such performance of Haydn's second oratorio, The Seasons.

When Swedish producer/DJ Avicii, a.k.a. Tim Bergling, died by suicide in 2018, he left behind more than just unanswered questions—there were also somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 unreleased tracks and demos. By the accounts of his friends and collaborators, not only was Bergling in good spirits near the end of his life, but he was well into the production of what would become his third full-length album. Within weeks of his passing, his family asked his management to begin the process of combing through all his devices for the music he’d been working on. "He kept titled folders like 'These are the [tracks] that I want to release' or 'These are the ones that I'm unsure of,’” Christopher Thordson, a member of Avicii's management team, tells Apple Music.